Playing with Patterns-OBDF 210-2D Surface Design

Something Fishy- My 2D Surface Design Study

For my surface design pattern I may have gotten carried away with multiple patterns within the overall but I wanted to include elements from a number of the patters I found on my 'scavenge hunt'. Below are some of the patters I encountered and that caught my eye.

I choose this pattern because of the intersection
between the natural and the man-made pattern.

This pattern too represents a naturally occurring
shape, a flower, that is recreated on a lace-like fabric.

The zebra striped patterns on this mug
caught y eye. The stripes go dark brown
when hot tea is poured in so the stand out more.

This design is on my new favorite mug,
the fish are the inspiration for my 2D pattern and
I adapted another pattern to create the scales.

Nordic style design, super simple and
on a very cozy wool blanket.

As you can tell I went to David's tea and
found lots of patterns there. I really liked
the simplicity and the energy of these bubbles
so I tried to incorporate them into the center
of my 2D design.

This is one of my mom's carpets, a souvenir
from one of her trips. 

Another naturally inspired pattern that is on one
of my tea-towels

  

A couple more objects from
my mom's souvenir collection. 

And yet ANOTHER carpet from my mom's
place, this one is from our trip to India.

This is a card that was recently given to me,
I adapted the repeating arc pattern for the scales
of the fish and used the gold and blue colour
scheme throughout my surface design. 

And yet another one of my mom's souvenirs.
And a couple details from this carpet.

OK so now onto my pattern design! I tried to combine the fish outline from my mug with a circular repeating geometry while including other patterning elements. Some of these elements suggested themselves from the interlocking of the fish and some were inclusions of other patterns like the bubbles from the David's tea packaging.

The first step was to design the fish.

Next I tried out some different patterns for multiple fish but was having trouble figuring out an arrangement that didn't make them look like part of an old school health-ed class video on human reproduction. So I stopped trying to radiate them out from a central circle and tried to bend a vertical repetition around a circle. Below are some images of my attempts.

For this attempt I used polar array for the central fish, and array along curve for the exterior fish.

For these layouts used copy, mirror, and some dimensioning/scaling in order to get it so the fish could interlock. 

I ended up using this layout for my final pattern, but went back and recreated it after I had added in the hatching for the scales on the fish. I used the mirror tool and polar array to get the layout. 

This is the first step in my attempt to get the vertical array of fish to bend around a circle. I arrayed them vertically then rotated the angled array vertically and bent it around a circle. I still don't really understand how the bend tool works, it took some trial and error but I got it to bend 360 degrees in the end. Below is the results and some scaling to create other rings. 

The problem with bending the fish as opposed to finding a way to array them that would allow for an offset is that my fish got distorted along the bend path, you can see below how the inner rings get squished compared to the outer rings.

Once I stopped trying to bend my fish, I decided to keep working with a polar array as the base for my pattern and started to create some details. Below are the scales for the fish. I tried a few times to get them to array horizontally and vertically but I think I am missing a step because even with a box around the shape I couldn't get the offset right. So I ended up copying the shapes into rows and then copying the rows.

I'll say it right now, HATCHING SUCKS! I don't know if there is a way to trim hatching in Rhino but I couldn't find one so I ended up having to re-hatch many of my shapes that fell partially outside of the fish outline. 

...Maybe it would be better to create surfaces rather than use solid hatching, because at least with a surface you can trim it away...

In the end I simplified my fish scales because with the scale I was working with (no pun intended!) and the multiples of the fish, it became hard to see the pattern at all when I applied the scale pattern to the over all shape. Below is the scale pattern I ended up with and I think it works better than the small scales anyway.  

I tried to bend the fish again to see if there was a way to have less distortion but found out that hatching doesn't move with the bend...and if you try to explode the hatching so it behaves more like a surface it seems to disappear, but now that I am writing this I wonder if it didn't turn into a surface but I couldn't see it because I was in wire frame view.

 (OK so I just tried it and there does seem to be an object in shaded view but then my Rhino crashed so I'm giving up on it for now)

For the central part of the pattern I arrayed three fish, with an opposite colour scheme to the rest of the fish, around the center the added in some shadows by copying, scaling, and moving the fish outline and hatching it with a darker colour. I couldn't figure out how to determine which layers were supposed to sit on top so I ended up moving the shadows down in the z axis a fraction to get them to sit below the fish geometry in a top view. 

Next I added in the bubbles. I attempted to approximate the David's tea packaging in colour and spacing. Through a combination of mirror, rotate, scaling, and copying I attempted to make the pattern seem consistent but random-ish. 

To create the geometry between the fish I offset the outlines and trimmed the excess and created shapes where necessary. I then offset the resulting geometry and hatched the spaces. 

I created rings to separate the different patterns and offset/hatched them to create a bold line. 

 For the center I again hatched and lowered the hatch in the z-axis so you can see all the layers.

 A detail of the central fish, bubbles, and shadows.

And lastly the final image, my fishy pattern! It took a lot of experimenting to figure out what would work both for the patters and how to accomplish them. I guess the next challenge will be to recreate the design so I don't have curves...I do enjoy linear geometry and a challenge! :)