"Dodecahedron,"
2004

This piece was a technical exercise in Cinema 4D. It makes use of a number of the interesting shaders included with Cinema's Release 8.5 specifically the "Spline Shader" and the "Ripple Shader".

The Spline Shader is used in the faces of the dodecahedron within the alpha channel of the material and that is how the lattice work effect was achieved. Potentially the spline shader is animatable. The spline was "vectorized" from the bitmap below:




This design is based on a diagram from Robert Lawlor's, "Sacred Geometry".

I think it might have been easier to have just used a bitmap to get this effect, however, the splines are slightly animatable giving a sort of "arabesque" like effect. I haven't done that animation yet. Primarily this was an experiment that - turned out nicely - and so I put it here and on my business card (that is perhaps how you got to this website).

The effect of the Ripple shader can be seen in the surface on which the dodecahedron sits. The ripple shader works to create ripples in the bump path of a surface in response to particles hitting that surface. Its very neat to play with.