Box and Baskets

(3DSMax + Paint Shop Pro 6. Items for Furcadia!)

The ancient people of North Africa loved to make beautiful boxes and baskets. Their modern descendants do, too. The more 3D artists make furniture and artifacts, the more we learn about the technology behind them. Sometimes the insights are surprising. Once I was modelling a tipi when I realized the long spray of poles on top of a Blackfoot style lodge serve a function-- they counterweight the part that supports the thick durable heavy buffalo hide on the outside, and give each side resistance to being pushed in by wind.

The texture you see on the "Click Me" button is the bitmap used to produce the mesh effect in the 3D program. It's applied both as a color map and as a "bump" map. Essentially, the surface is embossed according to the light/dark of the bitmap. I make all my own bitmaps either by taking digital photos or by painting them in Paint Shop Pro.

This particular one was done by filling a little rectangle with a gradient fill from light to dark. I mirrored this to make a rectangle, then I repeated them like "bricks". This is a very common pattern for load-bearing basketry that uses ropes (or other tough chewy flexible elements) for the verticals. Consequently, the baskets tend to be tall and tapering on the bottom, which duplicates the natural parabola of a filled net. If the baskets were wider and not tapered this way, the lowest horizontals would be compressed and crack when the basket was filled.

A similar effect takes place in clay vessels. That's why amphoras have long cone-shaped bottoms, too.

The drawback to this style is that the containers are topheavy and easily tipped over. To make up for this, marketplaces and houses have little circular depressions in which baskets can rest. Ships had wooden platforms with neatly cut holes for shipping stuff like wine and olive oil.