Snap Floater Shape Guide & Pricing

How the parameters work. Width and height may be set independently from 2 to 36 inches. Different values stretch the complete catalogue independently in width and height. For example, a hexagon panel may remain inside a rectangular, elliptical, triangular, or other selected floater; combinations are no longer removed. Normalising by panel size turns three numbers into one: the floater size and its offset depend only on the ratio reveal / panel. Each pair therefore ships as three small curves rather than a fixed answer, and the browser interpolates them, then measures the real geometry and steps the size up a notch if it comes in short - so interpolation error can never reach the output.
Tiled designs. A tiling belongs to the shape it subdivides, so six triangles are offered in a hexagon floater and nowhere else. The pieces partition the panel envelope: every shared cut pulls back half a gap so neighbours end up a full reveal apart, while edges on the envelope stay put. Piece-to-piece and piece-to-opening gaps are therefore both exactly the reveal you set.
True minimum-gap fitting for the geometry-fitted layouts. Every rosette, cluster and lattice layout is now solved the same way. The arrangement is written as a panel size plus one spacing allowance; for each trial size the solver finds the smallest allowance that gives every neighbouring pair exactly the reveal you asked for, then grows the whole cluster until it reaches the panel envelope. Pieces are allowed to touch the envelope, because the opening already sits one reveal outside it - holding them a further full gap inside was doubling the reveal on top of shrinking the pieces. Hexagon rosettes are built on the honeycomb neighbour directions rather than the vertex directions, which is what previously made those layouts unsolvable at any positive panel size. The circle of hexagons is a full two-ring honeycomb of nineteen; seventeen has no symmetric arrangement. Overlap between two pieces is decided by a separating-axis test rather than by vertex containment, because two rotated squares can cross in a plus-sign with no vertex of either inside the other.
New designs. Three straight-line collage systems now extend to the panel envelope in every active floater shape; all internal dividers are straight. Seven additional supplied rectangle collage layouts use straight dividers only and extend fully to the rectangle floater edges. Rectangle grids now include 5 x 5 and 6 x 6 smaller-panel layouts; the triangle includes the existing four-triangle partition plus three embedded straight-line meshes containing exactly 9, 19, and 25 panels. The Maple Leaf river-stone partition is restored. Three uploaded circle-floater patterns are also included: a graded hexagon spiral, a rotated oval scatter, and a paisley-style bean scatter. Five squares in a pentagon, one aimed at each side so a full face lies parallel to it; five circles in a pentagon, aimed at the corners instead since a circle has no orientation to match. Added with them: seven circles in a hexagon (the closed hexagonal packing), five circles in a square as a quincunx, six circles in a triangle as the 1-2-3 triangular pack, and nine squares in an octagon on a plain 3 x 3 grid, which lands on the octagon's largest inscribed square.
Partitions. A partition design tiles the envelope outright rather than packing pieces into it, so it fills 86 to 94 per cent of the opening where a packed rosette manages 40 to 70. Which edges are shared is worked out from the geometry, not declared per design: an edge whose midpoint lands on the envelope outline keeps its full length, every other edge pulls back half a reveal. Added from the supplied drawings: centre hexagon with six trapezoids, centre pentagon with five trapezoids, turned inner hexagon or pentagon with corner triangles, centre diamond with four corner triangles, the four-bar pinwheel, the 4 x 4 and 3 x 2 grids. Also added as packings: one plus six circles, nineteen circles, one large centre disc with twelve around it, and dense fitted circle packs of 4, 6, 8, 10, and 12 circles in a heart.
Ovals. There is no separate oval catalogue and none is needed - set the width and height differently and every round design becomes its elliptical twin, solved and re-measured as a true ellipse rather than a squashed picture.
The triangle is now equilateral. Every other regular polygon in the shipped shape table is a true regular polygon on a circumradius of 0.5, but the triangle had been normalised to a 1 x 1 bounding box, which stretches it: measured on the supplied outline its interior angles were 53.22 / 63.32 / 63.46 degrees and its three sides 1.0903 / 0.9762 / 1.0890. It is rebuilt here as a true equilateral, corners filleted at the same fraction of nominal size, normalised so the finished width is 1 - so a 4 inch triangle is 4 inches across the base and 3.54 inches tall, matching the product. That invalidates every tabulated triangle pair, so those are solved live instead: convex frames get a closed-form fit (the smallest workable scale at a given offset is a max of linear functions, so the true minimum is exact rather than interpolated) and the round and leaf frames are bracketed and bisected against the real outline. The same search also picked up leaf8organic, which is a leaf frame for sizing but was absent from the leaf key list, so it had been sized off the plain leaf8 table against a different outline - on the file as supplied that put five pairs short at 36 inch, two of them with the panel outside the opening.
Panel spread. Each card now states whether the panels in a design are equal, and if not, how far apart the largest and smallest are.
Equal panels. Where a design has a free parameter, it is now solved so the FINISHED panels match, not the nominal ones. That distinction matters: the centre piece gives up half a reveal on every side while each surround piece keeps a full-length edge out on the envelope, so at the nominal equal-area ratio the centre lands about twenty per cent small. The ring radius is bisected against the cut geometry instead. The turned-inner-polygon designs are generalised the same way - at the medial radius the surround pieces are corner triangles and the centre is three quarters of the whole, seventy-one times a triangle, so the radius is pulled in until all the panels match and the surrounds become congruent pentagons. Grids are laid out at finished size rather than inset, because a corner cell has two free edges, an edge cell one and an interior cell none - insetting a 4 x 4 left the corners thirty-six per cent bigger than the middles. Thirty-six of the forty-three designs now have exactly equal panels; the rest are graded on purpose, a large centre disc with smaller ones around it. Each card states which it is.
Construction. The floater is four 1/4in Baltic birch plies, 1in overall, and the panel is three, 3/4in. The opening is cut through the front three plies only, so the back ply closes the tray and the recess is exactly the panel thickness - the panel finishes flush with the frame face rather than sunk below it. Both the SVG preview and the WebGL view are driven from the same three constants, so changing the ply count changes both. Design references now use permanent shape codes rather than catalogue numbers. For example, MF1-TF-TR always means a plain Triangle panel in a Trefoil floater, and MF1-TF-TFR06 always means the six-piece Trefoil river-stone layout. Adding or removing other designs does not change these references. The hyphens are removed only inside the product URL token.
From the reference images. The collage is a true shape-aware 10-panel partition. Ten relaxed Voronoi cells are generated inside the actual panel envelope, so every outside panel follows the selected circle, polygon, heart, pebble, or water-drop boundary instead of leaving a square collage floating inside it. Shared edges pull back by half the reveal while envelope edges remain on the boundary. The pebble designs are full-envelope Voronoi partitions rather than loose pebble packs. Every cell reaches its neighbours and the floater envelope, then shared edges pull back by half the requested reveal, eliminating the large unused spaces while preserving the exact panel-to-panel gap. Rounding is applied only to convex corners, since on a reflex corner the arc falls outside the outline and grows the piece. The pebble ring is a genuine scatter with the centre left open, matching its reference at around 40 per cent. The monogram outline is added as a new panel shape, Rosette - it has no entry in the shipped lookup tables, and that absence is now what marks a pair for the live solver, so further shapes can be added without regenerating anything.
Panel spacing check. The status line has always checked panel-to-opening clearance; it now also checks panel-to-panel, so a design squeezed below its workable size says so instead of reporting that everything meets spec.
The heart designs are filled, not scaled. Every heart layout used to be a fixed arrangement of three or four pieces with one free parameter, the scale of the whole group. A heart is narrow at the tip and wide across the lobes, so whichever piece reached the outline first stopped the growth for all the rest: the pieces bunched into the middle and the tip, the sides and the lobes stayed empty. Four circles covered 49 per cent of the opening and six covered 29. The count is now an output rather than an input - the solver fills the envelope with as many panels as the shape will take at the requested reveal, and no finished panel is ever under the 1 x 1in minimum, so where the count and the minimum conflict it is the count that gives way. Three fills are used. The graded pack places the largest piece first and then progressively smaller ones into what is left, each at the tightest position that will still take it rather than the roomiest, which is what makes a pack dense rather than scattered. The equal pack lays identical panels on a triangular lattice, stepping the pitch down and trying nine lattice phases at each pitch, because sliding the lattice half a cell is worth two or three extra panels in a shape this irregular. The honeycomb is a partition rather than a packing: lattice cells are cut to the envelope, so the inner panels are whole hexagons and the outer ones follow the heart itself, and it fills about 90 per cent where a packing of round pieces manages 50 to 70 - a packing has to leave the space between the pieces empty and a partition does not.
Where the reveal is taken. A partition used to be cut first and then have its shared edges pulled back half a reveal each. That assumes the only way two panels can come close is across an edge they share, and on a cut honeycomb it is false: a third cell can taper to nothing where it meets the outline, and the two panels either side then approach each other around its point, each still a correct half-reveal from every edge it owns. The reveal is now applied where the cell is made - each cell is cut by the bisector to every other site, moved half a reveal towards its own site - so a panel is half a reveal clear of every bisector line in the layout rather than only of the ones that became edges, and two panels finish a full reveal apart whether they are neighbours or not. That also fixed designs already in the catalogue: the collage and pebble partitions were holding 0.04 to 0.18in against a quarter inch asked for, and the twenty-one panel pebble pack had two panels touching outright.
Organic 8 Leaf. This additional floater has eight uneven, deeply curved lobes with intentionally varied spacing and no perfect rotational symmetry. Panel corners. Polygon panels use a fixed maximum 1/8-inch radius, including triangles. Shapes. Triangle corners are filleted at 1/16 of nominal size (a 1/4in radius on a 4in shape), held proportional so scaled floaters stay similar. The heart is smoothed until its tightest radius anywhere - bottom tip and both upper transitions - reaches the same value; no cusps remain. Leaf curves are randomly generated (seed 20260723) and rejected unless the concave radius between lobes clears reveal + face with margin.
SVG. True inches, 1 unit = 1 inch. frame-outer and frame-opening are cut paths; panel-guide holds one outline per panel piece - it is a reference, not a cut. Pick the colour convention your cutter expects above. Floaters sit on the shared vertical axis and are often deliberately off-centre in their own bounding box; that offset is baked into the coordinates.
Reveal shows min - max. Green is near-uniform and reads as a proper floater; red means the panel is swimming in the opening.