Polygonica helps artist realise his creations

Envy. Mexican Onyx, Stainless Steel. © 2008-2011 Barry X Ball. After Giusto Le Court (1627 - 1679)

May 20, 2014 -- Here at MachineWorks we don't often stray outside our core manufacturing market, and rarely into areas such as the Fine Arts. But when we were contacted by New York based sculptor, Barry X Ball, with a request for help, we jumped at the chance. We are proud of our Sheffield roots, and Yorkshire is considered the UK's sculpture capital, with the Henry Moore Institute, Barbara Hepworth Gallery, and the Yorkshire Sculpture Park on our doorstep.

Barry is well known in the contemporary art world for employing industrial manufacturing methods, such as CNC milling, to create some of his works. More recently Barry and his studio team have been combining Digital Sculpting - using software tools such as ZBrush from Pixologic Inc - and 3D printing to fabricate his creations.

Doug DeGaetano, Fabrication Manager for the studio, contacted MachineWorks to see if our Polygonica mesh processing software toolkit could help piece together the various parts of the polygon meshes that make up sculptures such as Sleeping Hermaphrodite. The challenge was to ensure that precious detail was not lost in the process. The individual mesh pieces - varying in size from 43K to 10M triangles - all required healing: closing open edges, removing self intersections and noise shells. The healed sections were then joined together by our powerful Boolean engine. The result was a healed, watertight mesh with 24M triangles, ready for processing by standard additive or subtractive manufacturing methods.

Sleeping Hermaphrodite healed, unioned and rendered in Polygonica (24M triangles). © 2014 MachineWorks Ltd.

"Polygonica was able to quickly and effectively handle our large meshes. It takes very robust software to heal and join meshes of that size and complexity. Polygonica made it easy," said Doug DeGaetano, Fabrication Manager for the Barry X Ball Studio.

"We are really pleased to be helping the Barry X Ball Studio with Polygonica. This shows how our powerful polygon mesh Boolean and Healing capabilities can be applied to very diverse and demanding requirements." Said Dr David Knight, Polygonica Sales Manager.

Sleeping Hermaphrodite.  2008 - 2010 Barry X Ball. Belgian black marble. Scanned, manipulated, and milled from original Hermaphrodite Endormi (Ermafrodito Borghese), Musee du Louvre, Paris (ex Collezione Borhese, Roma), Gian Lorenzo Bernini, 1620.

About Polygonica
Polygonica is a solid modelling software toolkit for processing polygon meshes.

Built on MachineWorks' core engines, Polygonica's unique polygonal modelling technology takes advantage of 20 years of development providing automatic, fast and robust Boolean operations. Other algorithms in Polygonica allow solid healing, simplification, slicing, sectioning and spun profile calculation.

Polygonica has a wide range of applications such as CFD/FEA meshing, CAD/CAM/CAE, additive manufacturing where there is a requirement to repair defective models with vast numbers of polygons, rapid prototyping, reverse engineering, 3D movies and gaming, geo-exploring, urban modelling and other 3D digital applications.

www.polygonica.com

About Barry X Ball
Barry X Ball is a sculptor. He was born in 1955 in Pasadena, CA and lives and works in New York. His work has been exhibited at  Ca' Rezzonico in conjunction with la Biennale di Venezia,  PS 1 Contemporary Art Center,  SITE Santa Fe,  Ballroom Marfa,  Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume,  Magasin 3 Stockholm Konsthall,  Le Printemps de Septembre, Domaine de Kerguéhennec,  Kunsthalle Krems,  Museo Cantonale d'Arte, Lugano,  me Collectors Room Berlin,  Modemuseum Hasselt,  Beijing Today Art Museum,  Museo di arte moderna e contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto,  Le Quartier, Centre d’art contemporain de Quimper, and many international contemporary galleries and art fairs. His work is in the collections of the  Hammer Museum,  San Francisco Museum of Modern Art,  The Norton Museum of Art,  The Maramotti Collection,  Le Fonds régional d’art contemporain Bretagne,  Magasin 3 Stockholm Konsthall,  Museo Cantonale d'Arte,  Museo di arte moderna e contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, The Berlingieri Collection, The Olbricht Collection, and The Panza Collection.