Bouncy Coffee Table RELOADED

It's COME BACK for another startlingly action-packed tour of duty, it's back from its months-long hiatus, and it's back more keenly socially perceptive than ever. . . IT'S THE PERPETUALLY LOPSIDED COFFEE TABLE that's not actually a coffee table but just a set millions of arbitrary magnetic orientations on my hard-disk representing bits of data representing the locations in three-space of each vertex in a mesh but which for your comprehension has now been rendered by a photonic simulator into a similarly digital image represented by a matrix of colored dots on the glowing rectangle through which you channel your consciousness all day--all just to trick you into seeing a picture of something that doesn't really exist!

Now that you've been reminded/enlightened of the unreality of your socio-cultural universe, break through that pale facsimile of the real by deconstructing it to the perpetual exclusion of the real, exposing the simulation as the construct it truly is! If you read all the way to the end of this intolerably inside joke, let me know by clicking "Interesting" below. . .

Wireframe:

CO2 Dragster Evoloution

A mind-bogglingly improbable infinite planar surface that reflects only blue and has only red specular highlights is the perfect backdrop for a chrome-painted balsa-block CO2 car and a highly refined, aerodynamically conscious CO2 dragster, a true speed-demon painted in metallic gold with a mysterious wireframe overlay of the same physically improbable material. Both come standard with physically impossible CO2 cartridges that roughly resemble miniaturized garbage cans used in ecologically RESPONSIBLE societies that put the R in Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle. . . [SELF RIGHTEOUS NECK-TWITCH]

Bouncy Coffee Table

Behold, the most unconventional table shape possible!


First, the geometry of the glass surface was created by extruding a regular 100-gon upward (in the positive z direction) three times, scaling the utmost iteration down to .98 original size to achieve the angled bevel effect, and then scaling and rotating two pseudorandomly selected sets of diametrically opposed points with quadratically proportional fall-off to achieve meta-symmetrical curvature. I was then confronted a problem: the faces composing the top and bottom of the glass plate were non-manifold and overlapping because I had changed the geometry from a convex to a concave hull polytope (i.e. straight lines from points along the edges were designed to converge on a central point in the original geometry of the regular n-gon but ended up intersecting each other when the edges were no longer regular) and I had to retopify (a neologism for recalculating topography) from tris to quads.


Second, the base was created by type-casting a Bézier curve to the mesh object type and solidifying the mesh using multi-resolution editing and Catmull-Clark surface subdivision to achieve the desired shape.


Wireframe:

Why We Have Paper Weights

Just add wind, and all the term papers, business cards, parking passes, and other paper-y stuff you keep on your desk and dashboard look like the above image, which is a rendering all of the points of a 32x32 grid extruded and rotated about the z-axis 16 times, warped with quadratic fall-off with respect to scale locking the global x- and y-axes and then with linear fall-off rotated about the corners after all edges and faces have been removed from its geometry. It's that easy!

Waggle Dance

This honeycomb motif is getting ridiculous, but here's one that actually has to do with bees.

Honeybees perform a nifty figure-eight dance called a waggle dance to communicate the direction and distance to food.

TECHNICAL MINUTIA:
I first created a three-dimensional honeycomb sub-unit of two joined hexagons extruded and beveled (if you can't visualize that, they individually look like figure-eights or lemniscates). I then duplicated those figure-eight sub-units along the curves of three levels of mutually warping associative arrays to set a world record for the figure-eight with the most dimensions, a key breakthrough

I'm on the phone with Guinness now. . .

Hyper-Hive

To unnecessarily prolong the epic honeycomb motif, I give you yet another hyperdimensional array of awesomeness.

For technical specifications, see the web of life. Just add manic exploration of three-space, whatever that means. Remember, if at first you don't get it, try try modeling it yourself.

Web of Life

This begs to be your wallpaper.

Technical details
I created two 14x11 arrays of bi-hexagonal subunits and intertwined them on multiple dimensions by rotating each of the units relative to its own center point to interlock with surrounding sub-units of both arrays in both local and global x, y, and z axes. It is meant to connote a honeycomb pattern when viewed as a whole, DNA strands when following interaction patterns from top-left to bottom-center, and rays of sunlight radiating axially from the upper-right corner. I then rendered using ambient occlusion, low-intensity edge enhancement, and toon diffuse/specular shaders.

Uninterruptible

In this work (joke, actually) I tried to abstract the disorientingly chaotic and breakneck nature of urban sprawl and recode those characteristics into geometry and color. The intense, distracting colors represent the attention-grabbing designs and advertisements of competing corporate office buildings, which for all their differences have generally aligned motives (and thus have aligned base vectors).

Just kidding. Assign your own meaning.