
The Discovery of Sharklet - mooreds
https://www.sharklet.com/our-technology/sharklet-discovery/
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portmanteaufu
'Sharklet' is a material used in the hulls of ships that inhibits bacterial
growth. It was inspired by shark's skin.

From their homepage:

> Sharklet is the world’s first technology to inhibit bacterial growth through
> pattern alone. The Sharklet surface is comprised of millions of microscopic
> features arranged in a distinct diamond pattern. The structure of the
> pattern alone inhibits bacteria from attaching, colonizing and forming
> biofilms. Sharklet contains no toxic additives or chemicals, and uses no
> antibiotics or antimicrobials.

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mooreds
Yes, it's a great example of the value of biomimicry.

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steve19
I wonder how durable it is.

"The primary Sharklet micropattern is very small – about 3 microns tall and 2
microns wide."

How long it lasts would be part of the cost vs benefit equation.

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br1
Any intuition that justifies the diamond shape? In sharks each diamond is a
scale, but maybe a regular rectangular pattern works just as well.

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nkoren
In 3D characters animation, everything needs to be decomposed into "quads".
Polygonal faces with more than 4 sides start behaving really weirdly under
deformation -- there's more than one solution for how the resulting surface
should be shaped -- whereas "quads" behave in a totally predictable fashion. I
suspect that similar issues are at play here. You want the skin to be part of
a deformable surface, and you want to minimize stresses during deformation.
Hence: use quads.

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Doxin
Except in 3d animation you use almost exclusively triangles when actually
rendering anything. A quad can be subdivided in two ways to form two triangles
leading to unpredictable behaviour.

That said, during modelling you almost exclusively create quads since those
lend themselves well to editing with edge loops. The render engine then
converts those to (unambiguous) triangles.

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nkoren
That's true, but typically, quad-based models are not decomposed directly into
triangles, but, rather, subdivision surfaces that _do_ have a predictable
resolution. In other words, a direct triangulation of a non-planar quad can be
resolved in two contradictory ways -- but smoothing it out produces a
hyperbolic paraboloid with just one consistent resolution.

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Doxin
That's only true for subdivision surface modelling which isn't the most common
way to do it at any rate.

