Mary Effler: Project 1 - Pair Drum

I made some massive revisions to the drum after viewing some stuff by an artist named Alfredo Jaar, and drawing some inspiration from that. I watched a bit of a PBS show from a DVD that Professor Scott lent me, and he talked about the importance of using art to make bridges between people, and how you have to identify with people to create solidarity (You can see some info on that show here: http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/alfredo-jaar).
In my experience, few things cause solidarity between people faster than making music together. I sing in a chorus, and it's remarkable how quickly you learn to pay attention to others and get attuned when you have to match pitch and timbre with the person next to you, and think about your place in the whole, contributing to the entire piece, but also not overtaking the show yourself. So I wanted to make a 3D piece that encouraged the audience to make music, but with this iteration of the model, I wanted it to explicitly invite people to interact with each other, not just the piece.
The drum is now meant to be played by 2 people at once. My original inspiration was to have people know to interact with the artwork and create music themselves, but there was no clear indicator of that. In this way, two people are invited to sit down and create music together, making that intent a bit more clear.

Wireframe on Shaded view from Maya

The different layers to add materials in Keyshot

This model was also done in Maya, as it was a fairly simple design, and I'm very comfortable doing extrusions in Maya. I would've done it in Blender, but it was throwing hissy fits that day and being more trouble than it was worth. I started with a Sphere, then removed the bottom portion so it could stand and so I could hollow out the insides. Then I added another smaller sphere, deleted a bit of the side so it could attach to the base, then deleted the top so I could extrude to make the shape of the playable pad of the drum. The indents on the sides arose from a problem I ran into when filling in the middle sections, but I liked the idea of using that problem to add more detail later, so I kept them in. After attaching the sides to the base, deleted half the model to see what I was doing better, extruded from the bottom up through the side to make the model hollow in the middle, then mirrored the halves so the drum would be symmetrical (and to save me work, of course).

Yay, no edges!

Multiple viewpoints

I plan to add a couple more details using my 3D pen after I get the drum printed at the tech store. The tech store had a nozzle clog last week, and so this model wasn't ready physically in time for the critique. They wanted to make sure all the flashlights were printed so that everyone would have something to show for the presentation. For the details I want to add, I have always liked the look of traditional drums, like this one:

A Djembe Drum

You can see where I was trying to model those ropes in the first model iteration below, but it was causing a lot of trouble with thin edges and the like. So I figure I'll go in with my 3Doodler and add those to the physical model. I also want to add some sort of symbol to the 4 sections of indents on the side of the playable areas, but I haven't decided what symbols would be appropriate yet. I want to be able to have the physical work in my hands before deciding that.

After some fiddling with the inner walls, it passed Shapeways verification. I hadn't taken it into Rhino to resize it yet, hence why it costs so much. That model is huge!

LOL that price, though.

For the Keyshot render, I wanted to keep the design still fairly simple, so as to keep the focus on the music, not so much the model itself. So the body itself is designed to be simple wood, standard drum tops, and then I'll use black plastic with the 3D pen to make the ropes later. However, I'm having the same issue with Keyshot here. You can see above the three distinct layers with the objects assigned, yet I can't get Keyshot to recognize them. So for now, it's just this view.

As for the physical print, it was from back when the Tech Store was still working out some kinks in the printing. There are mistakes on the corners, which is strange, because it passed the shapeways test and the model looked just fine. But other than that, the model came out allright:

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Previous Model Iteration

For now I've just gone ahead and worked a bit more on the drum, since I'm still thinking of how to make the Dalek look okay despite the weapons not being able to protrude as much as they should. I will probably work on that one more later tonight.
For the drum, I didn't add too much, just the idea of labeling the drum with the note that it would play. My idea is that with 3D printing, it would be easy to change the size/note of the drum (yes, drums don't have notes, but I'm thinking it might be possible to put the notes as an "equivalency" of sorts, so that people could have an idea of the type of sound it will make when they play it. Printing it in different materials would help to create different pitches of sound. I might change this to labeling the drums with a series of arrows, showing how high or low it's relative sound is), and create a set that could be played by people. I like the idea that art isn't complete until the audience internalizes it or participates in some way, so this would ideally create a set of different drums with different materials and sizes that the audience could use to create their own music with, playing with the different materials, etc, while they consider what about their favorite drums appeals to them - is it only the sound, or does the material/colour/size play a role, and how that relates to their overall perception of objects.
I've uploaded the model to shapeways, and for the plastics, the ropes come up as having thin walls, but in ceramic everything looks solid.