Learning – Voronoi

Something that I saw a while ago on Thingiverse that immediately caught my eye was a style called Voronoi…

In mathematics, a Voronoi diagram is a partition of a plane into regions close to each of a given set of objects. In the simplest case, these objects are just finitely many points in the plane (called seeds, sites, or generators). Pronunciation : American/English speakers pronounce “Voronoi” as “Vo – ro – noi” with a short “o” sound, like the “o” in “or”, for the first two syllables. The third syllable is pronounced like the “noi” as in “noise”. The stress is on the third syllable.

The style is just incredibly neat and allows far more creativity in things. One of the things I experimented with last night was a simple sphere that I wanted to use for a light cover. Nothing all that exciting about a sphere right? Apply this style to it and it takes on a whole new life.

Using the native Windows 3D Builder I modeled the sphere and made it hollow, lopped off the bottom so it would sit flush on a base. Then I went into the free Autodesk Meshmixer program for some fun. I’ll link to the video on this process when I get home from work tonight if I remember. Just YouTube it and look for a video from AdaFruit.

Anyhow, after following the instructions from the video in Meshmixer I was able to create exactly what I was after.

Pretty frickin’ cool if you ask me !!! Now the plan for this will be to 3D print it and then make a nice base for it to sit on and cover a light fixture. The light that shows through should create some really neat shadows and the globe itself should have a nice glow to it.

So far I’ve managed to create two voronoi models that I’m pleased with. I’ve noticed that the more complex the curves, the longer it takes to do the process and the more interesting the results however.

But yeah, that’s what I did last night and I will definitely be making more things with this style and improving my results. One other benefit to this style is that when done right and printed it doesn’t need support material at all which also helps to produce a nice clean and almost ready to use print.

UPDATE 5/13/20: So in addition to the original video I found and learned from, I also found some more… and there’s more than one way to voronoi a cat it seems !!! Starting off with the original method I learned here:

Then there’s this method which I went through and followed and it seems faster for some things… both of these require Autodesk Meshmixer which is free and I will link it below as well.

And another one which claims to teach you how to voronoi anything:

So there you go, get you some 3D models and get to making weird alien looking sculptures and stuff with them !!!

Here’s the link to the Autodesk Meshmixer site: http://www.meshmixer.com/