Posted: September 18, 2024

Eight Tubes

Thanks to the great success of "Three Tubes" created back in June of 2023, the client returned in December of the same year with a request for something "new and exciting".

They were still happy with "Three Tubes" but confessed it wasn't holding their attention as much as it used to, and they wanted me to "push the envelope" with another tube project.

After experimenting with various concepts I finally settled on an 8-tube configuration with partial intersections that would allow movement throughout the whole structure via interior passageways, in addition to the exterior openings.

Also, to (hopefully) keep the client engaged over a longer period of time, I decided that each tube should have its own themed environment.

This was accomplished by covering the exterior of each tube with images inspired by nature, (water, grass, stone, seeds, bark, etc.), and creating a unique visual and tactile experience within each of the interior spaces.

As with "Three Tubes", my first task was to procure the empty YBC Chip Star tubes that would serve as the primary construction materials.

Construction materials (Purchased from our local 7-11 Konbini)

Since the client was expecting the project to be completed by Christmas, there wasn't much time in the production schedule, so I fired-up my "go-to" software, Houdini.

First, a single cylinder was built with a radius of 3.34225 units and a length of 22.5 units. These numbers closely matched the dimensions of the actual Chip Star tube, in cm's.

The single tube was replicated 8 times and stacked into four levels with a Y offset of 5.55 units, creating an overlap of 1.1345 units between layers. Each level was also rotated 70 degrees from the previous level.

After a series of boolean operations to remove the intersecting segments, the tubes were "unrolled" (using UV texture co-ordinates) into flat sheets of 21 units x 22.5 units each.

The eight "sheets" were then rendered using various texture maps, and output at a resolution of 2100x2250.

The 8 rendered textured images (Karma XPU: 4 seconds per frame)

The rendered images were then transferred to an iMac workstation and printed on A4-sized plain paper with an image area of 21cm x 22.5cm.

After trimming, the sheets were glued to the outside of the 8 Chip Star tubes and the "holes" were cut out using an x-acto knife.

Two levels of tubes were temporarily held in place with strips of cello tape while the joints were bonded together using craft glue. After the glue dried, the next level was added.