INSPIRATION
Isamu Noguchi is a Japanese-American sculptor known for his blend of Western and Eastern traditions. His sculptures and landscape works are quite minimal, as he uses natural materials and explores the relationship between art and environment. I drew inspiration for a few of his pieces, which can be seen at this website. I was also able to visit the Noguchi Museum when I was in New York City.
The lamps are also quite minimal and interesting as a shape to explore:
WORK PROCESS
I first started experimenting with just the cube that was already in the empty project file. Since Noguchi created a lot of ring like sculptures and curved shapes, I looked into adding a torus to my project.
Since the cube already existed in the project, the only thing I changed was the material of it. As for the torus, I tried to use different values for the radius, segments, and tube. I also liked how the wireframe looked, as opposed to the solid white color.
I felt like this was too simple, so I started experimenting with other shapes. I took inspiration from one of the lamps that is part of Noguchi’s lamp collection called the Akari Light Sculptures. At first, I tried to put the spheres in a for loop, but since the sizing is very specific I ended up just creating 3 different spheres. I kept trying different sizes and positions until I finally got this look:
Then I tried wireframe instead, since you can see the movement of the spheres better. I also added the torus back, but I made it really big because I wanted to create a space like effect. I was also thinking of adding another torus to go in the opposite direction, but I felt like then there would be too much going on.
I added the cube back, but I put it above the spheres:
I tried to do the for loop again to create a stack of cubes this time.
for (let i = 1; i < 5; i++) { const cube = getBox(); cube.scale.x = (100 * i) / 2; cube.scale.y = (100 * i) / 2; cube.scale.z = (100 * i) / 2; cube.position.set(1, 700 - (i * 300), 0); cubes.push(cube); }
At first I forgot to push the cube into the array, which explained why it wasn’t showing up. I changed the scale of each cube, making the bottom ones larger than the top one. I did this to match the sphere size. I also still liked how there was a single cube outside of the spheres, so instead of having only 3 inside I created 4. I also set the iteration at 1 instead of 0 because I realized that the first cube wouldn’t show up because the size is going to be 0.
As for the rotation, I tested out Math.random() but it ended up being a little too crazy:
So I removed the randomness. I did experiment with lighting and tried different materials, but I decided to stick with MeshNormalMaterial. The basic material looked too flat and I tried to add a spot light, but it didn’t really work.
This is how the final product looks like:
REFLECTIONS
Experimenting with simple shapes reminds me of the first creative coding assignment back in freshman year. Since I am constrained to only using basic shapes, it allows for more creativity and experimentation. I feel like when I know too much, it’s hard to figure out what exactly I want to make because there are so many options. But since this assignment is just dealing with primitive geometry, I wasn’t really wasting time on coming up with ideas and I just went for it.