The Daisy Vase Project - Project Description

The daisy vase project is a personal project somewhere in the triangle of art, science, and commerce. It provides a random generator for vases. The random vases should be printable with a 3D printer but it is up to the user to decide whether this is possible. However, the main decision is whether the vase is nice or ugly, which means whether you like it.

The Mission

The daisy vase project's goal is to provide a user interface where users can generate their personal vases without being experts in design and 3D editing. It is a fight against the stereotypes of mass production and for the return of the uniqueness of all objects.

The Name

As 3D printers are still very slow most vases were printed in small sizes (2-inch height) so the vases are only good for daisies. This is where the project's name comes from.

another vase picture
A printed daisy vase with daisies

Current State of Project

At the moment the daisy vase project focuses only on the form of the vase. It does not consider material, color, or paintings (textures).
The presented solution is a dirty hack and far from being perfect and there is a lot of space for improvements. It is only a snapshot of a developing project. However, it is already a proof-of-concept.

Future Plans

There is still a lot to do:

Bigger design space
more functions, further parameters
Improved random creation
making the creation algorithm configurable
Better meshes
mesh generation has challenges
Finding sponsors

Visions

There are many ideas to improve the user interface.

Editing
Give the user the possibility to edit the vase, for example, make it slimmer or wider.
Breeding designs
Let the user choose several designs and generate further designs which are similar.
Machine learning for filters
A neuronal network could be trained with the voting on beauty and in consequence, the generator will only present beautiful designs.

Project History

The origin of the project is the idea of random art. A previous project, called YARA (Yet Another Random Art), generated random bitmaps and started in 2005.

A further previous project, called PicMix, distorts bitmaps on a random basis and was first published on the internet in 2010.

The first appearance of the Daisy Vase Project on the internet was in 2014.

Technological Basis

The project deals with many different technologies - C++, MFC, openGL, HTML, JavaScript, WebGL, PHP, mySQL.

A screenshot of the generator program