Muhm, Elizabeth Grace Nemmert (2011-12). Collage Sculptures. Master's Thesis. Thesis uri icon

abstract

  • In this thesis, I develop a program to automatically assemble collage sculptures, sets of arbitrary, non-overlapping elements arranged to fill out a recognizable target shape according to a set of procedural rules. A user provides the target and element shapes and the program procedurally places the elements in spherical holes in the target space. A signed distance function defined over the target space keeps track of the remaining holes to fill. Elements are preprocessed to determine the size of their smallest enclosing bounding sphere. They are placed in holes based on the radius of their bounding sphere. After each placement, the signed distance function is efficiently updated to account for the newly added element. Elements are placed from largest to smallest, filling the space to a predefined threshold. To demonstrate this program, I generated a number of collage sculptures. In accordance with our procedural rules, the elements in the resulting collage sculptures recognizably represent the target shape, do not overlap, are not deformed from their original shape, and display variety in size, position, and orientation.

publication date

  • December 2011