“Kumiko is a traditional Japanese technique, made of many wooden bars crossed and laid to form various designs and expressions. No nails or metal pieces are used, and the wooden parts are put together by adjusting grooves and angles.”
I find these very intriguing and decided to recreate several variants in Houdini. My goal was also to create each single triangular variant as one fully connected mesh and not just attaching several pieces together. And I wanted to use an input picture where each color range is represented by one variant.
An additional challenge was to convert the amount of squared pixels into an equivalent triangle distribution.
Triangle patterns
I created 6 triangle patterns which all consists of a single piece mesh only.
Triangle Grid
For the triangle grid I created an HDA to easily adjust it to my needs.
It has two flags: One to exclude the half triangles around the border and another to just create the points without geometry.
For this case, I only use the points.
Result
The rotation is applied via a wrangle on the points of the triangle grid.
Examples
As I only have 6 patterns at the moment, the color palette is also restricted to 6 colors, if I don’t want to reuse patterns for different colors. Pictures which already have only few colors, like vector images, yielding a better result than photos.
The input pictures are selected from google imagesearch and desktop wallpapers.
