Technique · Fields
Cells and natural surfaces
Natural surfaces made of cells and cell-like parts: a honeycomb, a tortoise shell, soap foam, lily pads, a spider web with dew, the cut ends of logs with their rings, lichen on a rock, and blueberries.
Cells and natural surfaces is a field drawn for every pixel by the graphics chip. Every piece on Synapse Drip is made from a recipe that layers techniques like this one, and you can change any of it in the Studio.
Good to know
- The honeycomb conjecture, that a hexagonal grid divides a surface into equal cells with the least wall, was known to the Roman writer Varro and was proved only in 1999 by Thomas Hales; how the bees get there is still argued over: a 2013 study of comb found that the cells are built round and that warm wax flows into hexagons where they meet, while another study the same year found that the bees shape the hexagons themselves, warming the wax as they work.
- Bees are thought to eat six to eight times as much honey as the wax they make from it, and the wax is secreted as small flakes from glands under the abdomen; the comb is kept warm by the bees themselves.
The mathematics
- Of the regular polygons, only triangles, squares and hexagons fill a plane without gaps, and of the three the hexagon has the least perimeter for its area: a circle would be better still but leaves gaps; the proof that no other grid does better was found by Thomas Hales in 1999.
In art
- Close-up photographs of natural surfaces are a staple of nature photography because a hand's width of the thing holds a whole landscape of small forms.
- Patterns of touching cells have been borrowed by designers for floors, wallpaper and jewellery, as well as by the makers of video-game shields and force fields, because a set of cells reads at once as natural and as engineered.
More ways to use it
Related techniques
Nebula and stars · Liquid · Droplets · Network · Terrain and maps · Neuron · Order to chaos · Fractal tree