Wednesday, February 16, 2011

Inkscape Tiled Clones Flower of Life Challenge

Flower of Life:



Made in Inkscape 0.48, but colored and layered in Paint Shop Pro.
I tried making this with Inkscape Tiled Clones and just could not figure out how to get the circles to line up correctly.
I can get close.
Anybody out there know if this is possible to do in Inkscape with Tiled Clones?
Or an extension maybe?
I did find this one Python extension that I think is supposed to do Flower of Life but I don't know how to use it in Inkscape.

I did use Tiled Clones to study how the Flower of Life is made. But in the end, I resorted to lining up the circles with grid, guides, grouping and regrouping the circles until I created the Flower of Life.

Zoomed in view of circles crossing:


As far as Tiled Clones:
P1 Symmetry
Uncheck: "Use saved size and position of the tile" I'm not sure what that is, but it was giving me some strange results.
I know the center rotation (crosshair) on the circle must be moved down to the bottom of the circle.
I know the column shift is -50% on X.
It's the row parameters I could not figure out.
I got close with a Shift and Rotation with Alternate.

I can do a mini flower of life:


Center rotation (crosshair) on the circle must be moved down to the bottom edge of the circle
P1, 1 row, 10 col (Looks like I only needed 6 instead of 10?)
Shift X -100 Col
Shift Y -100 Row
Rotation 60 col

I can sometimes get something similar with spirograph too, although the pattern is imperfect.

I first saw the Flower of Life at mathworld.

Then after I had already make mine, I found the ones at wiki:
My fav.
The one like mine.
And carpet is pretty too.

2 comments:

JG said...

did you continue working with this?

Unknown said...

Hey, I'm the creator of that old abandoned sourceforge project your referred to. It used to actually work as an Inkscape extension long ago, but then shortly after I got it working, the XML library I was using became uncompatible. So I have started to move some of the graphics algorithms to Processing. You can see a more complicated version of the algorithm on one of my OpenProcessing applets here http://www.openprocessing.org/visuals/?visualID=7716. If you want a simpler version that will just make one FOL of a given # of circle layers and spits out an SVG file, message me, I just simplified it because I needed it for a new design I'm working on for my lanterns... which is how I found this post strangely enough, I didn't want to have to go dig it up so I searched for "Inkscape tile flower of life". Check out my blog if you will :)