Hi All,
I have this project I’m working on for a festival next year and I’m looking for some good 3D Patterns or ideas for patterns. Unfortunately I know nothing about how to code for the Pixelblaze, so I’m using whatever patterns I can find.
Here’s the project: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tM4rQkZGhcQ
It’s 8 panels of 21 LEDs on each.
Thanks for any help you can offer! 
Hey Nick!
It’s fun to see the community’s 3D patterns on the thing, thanks for that. Beautiful build.
Looking at the piece itself, I had the thought about building patterns based on it’s symmetries. It looks symmetric about each of the three orthogonal cartesian axes. I had the thought, “What would it look like to start with each surface a different color from a given palette, but then different halves sections start rotating and shuffling themselves as if the thing were a alternate form of a Rubik’s cube…”
Applying desaturation (shifting a color towards white) or reducing value (making it dimmer) of whole sides based on the vector dot product between a distant point and the vector normal to the side might simulate light or shadow.
That’s what I got at first glance
I like those ideas… no idea how to do them lol
I’d love to help, but all my PB time is spoken for right now, and I think this is non-trivial for my skill level, sorry! For many other problems seen here on the forums, I’m donating under 30 minutes, but this sounds like a weekend to me. I do enjoy trying to actually learn all the vector calc that I didn’t retain. Maybe in a few weeks?
Lately, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about approaching closed, walled solid objects not as 3D, but as more of a u/v texture mapping problem. Since you’re only dealing with the outer surface, there’s not a lot of benefit to doing full on 3D math. And with the pixel mapper, you can use xyz coords to represent anything you want. Nothing says they have to be actual spatial positions.
In the case of the Rubic’s cube concept, I’d build a pixel map with x,y coordinates representing 2D pixels on each triangular face, and z representing an arbitrary face number. It then becomes pretty easy to use render3D() to do something different on each face, and nearly trivial to apply a color to each face, then swap them around over time. Symmetry and reflection between faces fall pretty neatly out of this too.
I can give advice and answer questions, but I don’t have a ton of spare programming time right now either – I’ve somehow managed to become un-retired. Didn’t think I’d ever want to, but hey, it’s fun to have something new to learn.
thanks guys,
I’m in no rush and definitely appreciate any help when you can. I haven’t the slightest clue about programming this stuff. I’m going to make an effort to figure it out, but I’m starting at the bottom