Animating Islamic Tiles Turned Out To Be Easier Than I Thought

I had assumed animating Islamic tiles would be a big complicated endeavor but it only took a few hours of messing around in Flash to figure it out. I just made a half-equilateral-triangle mask and tiled it, then made a fairly simple animation underneath:

Single tile from the animation above. Red indicates mask.

Obviously all kinds of variations can be made from here. If only I had tried this earlier!

The reason this is a Big Deal for me, is I didn’t know how easy it would be to tile squares with hexagons. I thought if I made a hex-based system like this I’d just get hexagons and equilateral triangles, not squares. But look – there are squares all over the place!

see the squares?
more squares
Squares! Squares! Everywheres!
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Author: Nina Paley

Animator. Director. Artist. Scapegoat.

6 thoughts on “Animating Islamic Tiles Turned Out To Be Easier Than I Thought”

  1. Generous as usual in your sharing what your hard work (“easy” for you perhaps) learns….I just shared on Face book specifically targeted to another artist. Thank you.

  2. I’ve done some distantly-analogous things with triangle tilings on the hyperbolic plane. Never occurred to me to try animating them!

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