Tessellating Shuriken

prusaprinters

This didn't start out to be a shuriken - I was actually aiming for a hexagonally symmetric triangular fractal pattern, and this is what popped out. But when put together, the pattern looks like 3D cubes. The tiles print relatively quickly (~8 min each), as you can set the print speeds fairly high. Almost any print settings will work. Print a bunch of each in 3 colors.How the Tessellation Was GeneratedI started off with a hexagonal tile shown in the figure. Along one edge, I started adding material in the form of a series of triangles shown in green. This created an arm extending from one edge. Then because the adjacent tile above would have a similar arm extending down from above, I cut out from the original tile a similar set of triangles shown in red. The added arm was then replicated at 120 deg. intervals, as was the arm cut-out, so I ended up with three arms and three arm cutouts. Note that the triangles for the arm cut-out are restricted to a 1/3rd sector of the tile so that when the cut-outs were duplicated at 120 deg., they wouldn't overlap. The original hexagonal tile shape, plus the three added arms, plus the three arm cut-outs, yielded the final tile shape (after also rounding the corners and subtracting off a little material to create some clearance between the tiles). I really had no idea what it would look like when assembled, but I did know that it would tessellate properly.