Ideas for patterns with "very fine dots"

[Peter Lind]

Hi there pattern creators

I am looking for ideas and suggestions on how to create a pattern that is comprised of very tiny dots, to emulate fading from one color to another.

An example is the computer screen used on 3068bpx104 and 3039px35


Should I create a pattern with A LOT of tiny quads, or do any of you have a different idea as to how this can be created in a way that wont be to difficult to create and render?

Discuss!

/Peter

[Philippe Hurbain]

I don't find again the example parts, but I have used thin triangle patterns to get gradients with reasonably good results (and much lower elements count!). Here you could create a rectangular triangle pattern, then create the area that is to be gradient painted (just a few quads and triangles), and use slicerpro to project the triangle pattern.

[Tim Gould]

Hi Philo,

Not exactly sure what you mean. You replace the small quads by tris? Or 'degradient' the pattern?

In response to the original question, I've used perl to make similar patterns before.

Tim

[Philippe Hurbain]

See official parts 6069ps1 and 3070bps0. Here attached a raw gradation file that was used to create 3070bps0.

[Greg Teft]

I like the use of triangles - a neat effect. I have a sticker in my list of things to do that I was wondering how to tackle. I was considering using the custom color capability (#2rrggbb) and throwing some rects in with linear combinations of the colors on either side, for example green to red would be 100% green, then a band of 80% green & 20% red, 60% green and 40% red, and so on.

[Philippe Hurbain]

The true color gradient is indeed a possibility, but there is one drawback: it depends on background color. Triangle or dot patterns properly blend with background. Granted, parts that use gradation are generally issued is a single plastic color...

[Greg Teft]

Ahh, yes, in that case triangles win as the simple solution. I wonder if it would be realistic to write a program that given two color ids, and the space to cover that could create the dithering pattern of dots using increasing smaller squares to approximate them. using linear combinations to determine the area of the dot and the area of the surrounding fill - would result in a lot of faces to load though.

[Tim Gould]

It is possible and I once wrote one to generate some Star Wars printed part. It didn't look good so I went for decreasing amounts of identical sized squares instead.

But I think Philo's solution is much better as a compromise between accuracy and speed of rendering. I will use it if I ever have to do this again.

Tim

[Philippe Hurbain]

I have also used another style of gradation in part 4150p05 - Tile 2 x 2 Round with Black Exhaust Port Pattern. It uses variable width lines. Basic gradation was done by cutting a triangular array with a slanted line.