Morph Ball!

thingiverse

My first Thingiverse design is a Metroid/Tron mashup for plotting on spheres! Want to see a 15:1 timelapse of the blue ball being made? Of course you do!http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UwzBYi5POJA Mostly copied from the video's description: The style worked very well for learning some new features in Inkscape! Most notably grid-snapping and tiled cloning (tessellations). :) Design and prototyping was done in one night, with most of the prototype balls only taking a minute or so to plot because they were done as outlines only. The final 2 balls took about 11 minutes each due to the large fills. The timelapse was taken at 1 photo per second, and played back at 15 fps. Unfortunately, this 15:1 time scale is basically as low as my phone can go while producing a decent movie. :P BONUS! If you look closely, you can see a small wake behind the pen where the ink is drying! BONUS! It's ridiculously tempting to even take the current design and plot it onto one of those motorized balls that randomly roll around! I can't seem to find a link to a simple version, but this pool-toy displays the basic idea:http://www.amazon.com/Swimways-Crazy-Chase-Dive-Ball/dp/B0036FTLXI BONUS! I'm friendly! Comments are super-welcome! :D Instructions Download a copy of Inkscape! (NOTE: This program is awesome, so even if you don't want to own one of the coolest morph balls in town, you should get it and level up your computer!)http://inkscape.org/download/ Double-check and make sure you have at least version 2.1.4 of the Egg-Bot Inkscape extension! This is very important, because without the tiled-clone bug fix that version includes, the bottom row of the design will wind up being plotted right on top of the top row.http://wiki.evilmadscience.com/Installing_software/ Find something that makes awesome stepper motor sounds while doing stuff to spheres! Don't have one of these awesome devices yet? An Egg-Bot is a good place to start!http://egg-bot.com/ Get your hands on something round and a fine-tip marker! So far I've luck with these products: White balls! http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001RFRZ46 Colored balls! http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004B7NWKI Sharpies! http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00006IFI7 Load one of the files, use the Egg-Bot extension, and then imitate your plotter for about 11 minutes! (Beeee! Errrrr! WREEEEE! Wran-wran-wran-wran.) NOTE! The current hatching density was chosen for a 40mm ping pong ball with an ultra-fine tip sharpie. When using a grapefruit and chocolate frosting, it may be necessary to change the hatch's pitch! NOTE! I found that if you inset a hatching path by a few pixels, you can get much sharper looking edges on your objects! Related, I unfortunately can't find a way to hatch a clone and keep the original as an outline. shrug NOTE! If you're new to using tiled cloning in Inkscape (I certainly was!), here's a handy tutorial that steps through cloning a group and using the "Enter Group" feature to make changes to the group while it's still mirrored. It's super effective!http://simarilius.wordpress.com/2006/08/26/mirror-mirror-on-the-wall/ NOTE! Have fun!