[Jewelry making - Article 00547] - Re: [Orchid] CAD/CAM to create 3D fractals

[Jesse]

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    Hi* The thing that makes fractals so fascinating, is the
    variation/repetition of complex patterns-within-patterns, best
    appreciated on a large scale. The canvas we work on in  jewelry
    design, is vastly smaller. If you scale down something as complex as
    a fractal, it will be unmanufactureable. Perhaps you can isolate a
    small section of detail and work with that? It's possible to create a
    fractal pattern in a fractal generating program, crop a section, save
    it a bitmap, and  import it into a CAD program. There's a free
    companion program to Rhino, called Zsurf, floating around on the
    Rhino newsgroup. It looks at an image and "heightfield maps" it as a
    surface, based on contrasting tonal values of a grayscale image. I
    tried it a few times, and it worked ok, but I've found that ArtCAM
    will do the same thing with much more precision, detail and
    predictability. ArtCAM with reduce the number of colors, allowing you
    to create vector outlines of colors and patterns, which can then be
    given shape and dimensionality. A while back, I tried a program
    called Reptile. It's supposed to be used to make wallpaper tiles for
    web sites. I experimented with it a bit and made some neat patterns.
    I brought one of them into Rhino... it looked just like reticulated
    metal. I made a heightfield surface and flowed it around a circle to
    make a ring. Reptile also makes great patterns that resemble ornate
    rugs. 

    Sorry for the longwinded-ness! 

Jesse


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