2012 on Stuff

Buildings paper: Methods for Creating Curved Shell Structures From Sheet Materials

Fri, 19 Oct 2012 11:34:56 +0000

The MDPI Buildings journal has published my paper on Methods for Creating Curved Shell Structures From Sheet Materials, this is the technique used to fabricate the Lotus sculpture at this year’s Goodwood festival of Speed, here is the abstract:

This paper describes some methods for producing developable surfaces with practical applications for creating useful lightweight, rigid, jig-less and elegant structural forms from sheet materials. Multiple related techniques based on the same fundamental principle can be used to generate a variety of interesting singly curved and doubly curved shapes. The system requires a minimum of specialist software, and is described in simple steps that can be followed by the reader with access to basic 3D CAD tools.

Lotus Sculpture at Goodwood Festival of Speed

Sun, 01 Jul 2012 11:34:56 +0000

The Lotus sculpture at the Goodwood festival of Speed was in the form of a 28m high trefoil knot.

This was a whole new fabrication technique, the structure itself is a developable-surface thin shell monocoque constructed from decoiled 6mm steel plate.

I put some immersive panorama views on Google+.

3D Homography transform

Fri, 01 Jun 2012 11:34:56 +0000

A 2D homography is the well known ‘perspective transformation’, File::DXF contains a tool for performing a plane-preserving, collinear homography on 3D objects. This is distinct from the ‘taper’ tools you find in 3D modellers such as Blender.

The dxfhomography transformation is 100% reversable, passing the transformed object through the dxfhomography tool results in the original object.

This is experimental, somebody ought to add the same functionality to Blender.

ptomorph panorama stitching aid

Tue, 01 May 2012 11:34:56 +0000

The old PTStitcher tool contained a ‘morph-to-fit’ option that helps with stitching panoramas with parallax errors. This had various issues, ptomorph is a command-line tool to get better morphing with Hugin.

ptomorph is available with Panotools::Script 0.27. The morphing itself is done with ImageMagick.

What it does is read all the control points in an existing PTO project, and use these to generate a ‘morph’ distortion for each photo that results in all the control points lining up exactly.