About this project
Wave tile
A square tile with a flat bottom and a gently rippling top, defined by a single implicit function instead of meshed geometry. The top surface follows z = 2 + sin(x) cos(y), which gives a regular grid of soft hills and dimples. The tile covers exactly two periods in each direction, so the ripple pattern repeats evenly and the average thickness is 2.
It is about 12.6 x 12.6 x 3.0 mm, one watertight body of roughly 315 mm³, with a flat underside that sits directly on the print bed.
How it is built
The tile is one Function (F-Rep) node. Its field is the slab between z = 0 and the wave surface z = baseThickness + waveHeight · sin(k x) · cos(k y), clipped to a square and centred on the origin. Because it is an implicit solid, the mesh resolution is set by the edge length (0.1) rather than by any modelled faces.
Printing
Print flat side down. The ripples have a gentle slope, so no supports are needed. At this size the tile is very small, so scale it up (for example 5 to 10 times) for a coaster or wall tile; the repeating pattern also tiles seamlessly, so several can be placed side by side.
Parameters
- tileSize (6–40 mm, default 12.57): side length of the square tile.
- baseThickness (1–6 mm, default 2): average thickness the waves ripple around.
- waveHeight (0–3 mm, default 1): ripple amplitude. It must stay smaller than baseThickness or the tile splits.
- wavesPerSide (1–8, default 2): number of full wave periods across one side. Because the pattern is periodic over the tile, any value still tiles seamlessly.
The defaults reproduce the original tile exactly.