Voronoi Remix to 3D

thingiverse

Honestly, I'm not sure if this constitutes a remix or a new design. I'm calling it a remix because there's no way I could have done this without the original code to follow. I tried to make minimal modifications to its structure so you could see the progression from 2D to 3D. I think it's really cool that OpenSCAD operators like minkowski() and intersection_for() work for 2D and 3D, so that was possible. This is a 3D extension of the approach of generating 2-dimensional Voronoi diagrams. The idea of shifting and rotating rectangles to find "the set of regions closer to each of the seeds than to any other" was extended to three dimensions by shifting and rotating cubes. The sphere() and cube() functions replace the circle(), and square() and there is another angle (elevation) for the rotate(). It also uses the original code's idea of shifting the boundaries slightly on the normal vector to give some space between the regions and then rounding them with minkowski(). The space between the regions can be seen by subtracting them from some other solid object. Like the original code, this uses an intersect_for() loop to generate the union of all regions that are closer to a given point than each of its neighbors. I found this a little difficult to visualize and debug (especially in 3D) unless I sent the number of points very low, like only 2 or 3. Have fun exploring this algorithm! Update: Fixed some problems with the way the random points were generated so the nuclei would display in the voronoi_sphere() module.