Squircles: designing 3D printed shadow lamps
A bit of an update on my shadow lamp designer: a 3D printed lampshade with a pattern cut right through it, so a single bulb inside throws the design across the walls, floor and ceiling of the room.
Where it started
It began as a plug-in for Blender. The add-on built the lampshade around a pattern and lit a virtual room from the inside, so I could see where the shadows would land on the walls, ceiling and furniture.
Now a standalone app
It's now a standalone app that lets me draw patterns and see simulated shadows being cast in real time.
The lamp is split into sections, from a cap at the top, through a series of bands, to a cap at the bottom. Each one can use either equirectangular or anamorphic projection, and its own density grid, depending on how I want the shadows to behave and their relative size.
A fair bit of this is directly translatable knowledge from creating 360 degree videos and interior dome video projection mapping techniques: it's the same problem of wrapping a flat image around a sphere and knowing where every pixel will end up.
Ready to print (almost)
It also exports perfect 3D meshes that are generated directly from the same grid used to draw the details in the first place, rather than trying to convert vectors into polygons. The exported meshes are ready to go straight into 3D printing software.
I still need to break up the mesh into pieces first, but it's getting pretty close to 3D printing the first one.
Having said that, I might find the lamp needs to be huge, and in a huge room, to project this much detail in focus. Real life testing will tell.
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