Alex wrote: > In message , PM 2Ring > writes > >Alex wrote: > > >> Currently unemployed, I decided to have another crack at doing Penrose > >> tiles, the hard way. After a week I gave up and did them the easy way :) What's the hard way? Placing them "by hand". I've done a few like that... > >They can be tricky! :) What technique did you use? Here's one I posted back > >in April: > > > See other post. I'm afraid I must have missed your post, I've been > subscribed to the group for some time but skipped some posts recently in > order to catch up. I shall attempt to request it with my newsreader! And I missed this post (and the one from Thomas), but I just use the Web interface. If you want to see my earlier pic, the Web interface may be the easiest way, because from here, links like the one above are live. > >I first started using Penrose macros from Boxer by John VanSickle, but I > >ended up making up my own macros. I can post the sources if anyone's > >interested. > > > I remember seeing some of those animations. Some interesting patterns & > objects. Can't say I can remember any Penrose tiles, I may go look > later. I never actually saw the Boxer animations. I found it through Google, searching for "Penrose tiling". From the source code, the Boxer anim uses a simple flat Penrose tiling for the floor. > >> I also wanted to create some more Geomag models. Geomag consist of 27mm > >> long magnetic rods, and half inch diameter steel ball bearings. I > >> originally modelled it 2 or 3 years ago, based on a set I bought as a > >> present for my sister. Since then I've bought a load for myself, which > >> has a new rod design, and different colours. The shapes here are very > >> simple, I have built shapes with up to 540 rods and weighing over 3Kg > >> (As soon as I'm earning again I must go buy some more...). > > > >They lok like fun, but a bit pricey for what you get. > > Yes it's expensive, but very very good. Once you have some you want to > go out and buy some more, to make bigger things! There are some cheap > copycat sets about (I have some), but they are pathetic. I thought they might be addictive... :) > >FWIW, you can get very > >powerful magnets out of dead hard drives. > > > I've taken 2 apart before. I have several other dead ones I could > dismantle. The magnets are very brittle, though. Very brittle, indeed. And they can attract each other with enough force to fracture them, so I have lots of small pieces of them. These magnets are *not* toys! Keep out of reach of children! Skin pinched between supermagnets is painful! :) > >>JPEG compression has done strange things to the > >> magenta piece. > > > >I normally try to use JPEG quality of 90% for pics I post here, and a little > >smoothing to hide artifacts, but sometimes using .png is the only way to > >show the true quality of an image. > > > The .png version was 851KB, I couldn't find any guidelines for > attachment sizes, but I thought it a little big. The size limit for all attachements is 700KB, stills, anims & other binaries. Did you try PNGCrush? It *might* bring tthe filesize down, but probably not enough to get under the 700KB limit. Also, a tiny bit of image smoothing can often help to improve file compression. It can also help to prevent or disguise JPEG artifacts. I prefer a little bit of global smoothing in an image to the fringes created by localised JPEG artifacts. > >Anyway, here's a close-up of an earlier Penrose tiling I did. We seem to > >have chosen similar colour schemes. > > > I chose my colours so they averaged to 50% grey, that was the first pair > I found that didn't look awful. :) Things start getting awfully muddy down at that greylevel. >I thought it might help the appearance > of the blurred reflections of distant tiles. That makes sense. Still, the floor is a little too dark for my tastes. > > I notice you've divided your tiles up to show both the rhomb and the > kites/darts tiling together, that's pretty smart. Thanks! But if you're talking about the image I posted in this thread, credit must go to whoever John VanSickle borrowed his macros from. :) My earlier image paints a pentagonal Penrose tiling onto the triangles. Now, *that* one did require a bit of heavy thinking. :) > And you've done proper > curved edges, I just did a flat bevel by intersection of planes. > -- > Alex Those curved edges... They were a bit trickier than I thought they were going to be. I ended up making one macro for rounded isoceles triangle tiles, and another one for rounded polygonal prisms. I suppose I should tidy them up a bit and post them. Here's a Penrose tiling, using rounded pentagonal prisms, in standard stone textures. The tiles were placed by simple #while loops, not recursive macros.