Polygon Art

From Fmepedia

Table of contents

1 Polygon Art 2 Task 3 Some Maths 4 FME Workbench 5 Advanced Fun 6 Personal Remark 7 Mystery Output

Polygon Art

Polygon Art is a contribution by Michael Habarta.

Task

Start with a regular polygon.

Then draw all connections between the available corners ...

... and the result is a picture of increasing complexity depending on the number of corners.

8 corners

24 corners

32 corners

Some Maths

Wondering how many lines there are ?

If n is the number of corners, then x the number of connections can be calculated with:

         x= n*(n-1)/2

        corners        lines
             12   ...     66
             24   ...    506
             48   ...   1128
             64   ...   2016
            128   ...   8128

FME Workbench

Here's the workspace

The number of corners and the radius are published parameters.

Advanced Fun

The center area of a 64 corner drawing

A detail zoom into a 128 corner drawing

Personal Remark

This idea results from a drawing lesson from way back in my school times. In seventh grade we had to manually draw a 24 corner polygon with all connections.

I liked the result and took it further with 32 and 48 corners. Finally in university I remembered the exercise and tried a 64 corner polygon. It took me 4 days of drawing and all skills and tricks I had ...

With FME it took me a couple of hours to figure out and implement the workbench, and it now draws any polygons, up to memory limit ... :-)

Mystery Output

Couldn't resist playing with this to try unlock the mysteries of the universe. These kml files opened in Google Earth show primitive man must have possessed FME technology! - MAI

Google Earth Screenshot