Shutter

#007

Near to where I live there are these old houses that have these beautiful ornate hexagonal windows, these were my point of inspiration for this piece as I wanted to figure out a way that I could transition from a flat hexagon into a window frame without breaking the geometric structure of the form (i.e. not scaling or clipping additional meshes). I also knew I wanted to add this new transition to a three-dimensional form and felt a truncated icosahedron (soccer ball platonic) would be a good fit however I would need to adapt my window set up for pentagons as well for this to work effectively – this one was one of the hardest Mesmerics I’ve done so far.

Before I attached my window set up to the hexagons and pentagons, I needed to find a way to unfold the shape – which again (like my Misdirection piece) would only be possible optically. Every time I unfolded a polygonal face of the shape, I had to either move the points from a hexagon to a pentagon structure or vice versa – with an added challenge of doing it slow and purposefully, not hiding things in motion blur or quick cuts. Lastly, I knew that I wanted to create 2 layers – the outer of windows would unfold, and the inner layer would fold inwards as new layer unfolded on top. For this I needed to subtly scale the whole object down over the unfolding process so that when I created the next unfolding layer it would be at the same level as the first one. Allowing the continuous unfolding and folding.

The window frame set up is made up from three different states, the first is just the outer frame with a glass centre pane. For the second state I took the centre pane of glass subdivided it with a triangular fan pattern and then bevelled the resulting edges to create the dividing polygons for my inner window frame. Lastly the window to shutter transformation was created by taking each triangular windowpane segment from the second state and slicing them horizontally and spinning them on their horizontal axis. During this spinning motion I was able to blend between the glass shader of the windowpane to the white wood of the shutter slat.

© 2024 Mark Lindner