Nick Benke: Waffle

While creating this i just wanted to experiment with a waffle structure. My inspiration for this sculpture was 3d generated sound waves. I really enjoyed the drastic organic feel of them, and i wanted to try and recreate that feeling in my waffle.  I stated with two curves in Rhino, then used those curves to create a nurbs surface to get my cuts from. from there i was able to use the cut my ribs scrip in Rhino to get my intersection cuts. The aesthetic goal to recreate sound waves in a waffle structure allowed me to get a very interesting, organic, implied shape by the end. 

  

:D

Shelandy Ting: Slots

While I try to play with some slotted  bricks to make an interesting shape, I found out several concerns in having a good design of slotted bricks:

• do not make a long hole in a narrow area, it will bend and can not hold the weight
• use flexible material unless both the laser cutting  and the dimension of the raw board can be controlled in high precision
• better to have several slots in different places and angles, instead of having interesting shape but having less choice of slots in different places and angles

For the material, I choose the foam board.  I think it has enough balance between the overall rigidity and flexibility on the edge of slots.

To take care both artist and engineering concern, I choose not to make too fancy shape in designing the shape of the bricks, but put a shallow engraving on the surfaces to inspire the kids to use the bricks to create interesting shape.  How can I get a iconic expression to inspire people to make something come true?  I first thought of the "wishbone."  Later I realized maybe the fish bone will be a better metaphor to remind people that you can build the interesting creature using those bricks as the skeleton, just as fish bone to a fish.  For achieving  this goal, I make the curve of a whole fish bone, but also dissect it into two parts and spread them on the brick surface to remind people to assembly them in a appropriate way to make the fish body.

I use Gimp and Inksacpe to convert the bitmap of fish bone into vector file, then import to Rhino.
    

The final result with some creative mind of using them to compose some thing fun

      
   

David Chiu - Week 3: Slots

I've been a fan of concentric designs, as they express a mysterious quality behind them in that you feel like you are gazing into an abstract space. For this project, I did a series of Offset commands that varied on their origins, whether it be the exterior cuts or the interior cuts for variety.

And for the final result, I decided to make a hammer. Used up almost every single piece.

Bill Watts: Slots

For my slots project, I strove to optimize my layout to produce a wide variety of pieces on a single board. My intention was to develop enough varied forms to build a multitude of compositions. I ended up using two unit forms in an attempt to improve the variety. I found 1/8th inch woodboard at Home Depot for a reasonable price and had them cut it for me at the store. 

These pieces were developed to push a single board for a level of variety allowing for the organic growth of varied forms.

I hope to explore the capabilities of the laser cutter with some of my tight fitting and noisy line work.

Here is my reduced cut sheet.

Coleman Eubanks: Slots

 

Here are my screens for the slots project.  I decided to work with a horizontally symmetric form instead of radial or vertical symmetry.  I decided my base form would be a pentagon.  This does create some issues especially when tiling, but I've used the gaps between the individual modules to create smaller connectors and pieces.  I'm using 1/8 inch tempered woodboard for my laser cut.

For the creation of the modules, I used basic curve creation and booleans to form the different pieces.  I decided to maintain a geometric pattern with my engraving to ensure continuity throughout the modules.  Each of the modules are variations upon a theme.  They all have similar elements, but they all bring something new to the table.

Below is a composition using the cut slots:

Mary Effler: Slots

I've always enjoyed studying world religions, and seeing how the beliefs of all these systems differ while still having so many of the same core tenants. I also really like studying how they interact, and I wanted to express that in project form.
I had the idea of combining all the slot shapes into the form of an umbrella, as that's sort of how I see a lot of people as viewing religion - a tool that helps protect them from the bad of the world and provide them safety and security. So I quickly drew up some ideas in my sketchbook, and chose some of the major religious symbols to use:

 

The handle of the umbrella is made up of peace symbols, as I believe that to be the true core of religions all over the world - the search for peace. The rectangles that serve to hold those pieces together have various words for peace engraved into them in many languages. I eventually chose not to use the unitarian symbol, and kept the paganism and atheism symbols from having wedges, for structural integrity, and because there are already enough holes in their design, it should be easy to connect those pieces to others without the wedges.

I then got a friend to take me to Hobby Lobby, and chose to use mat board for this project. Part of it was a price concern, but also the mat board seemed less likely to fray easily at the edges as foam board. Also, if I wanted to paint it later, it would take paint pretty easily. 

I then set about to putting them into Illustrator (I have it installed at home and have way more experience there than in Rhino). I looked up some advice on Google, and found a site with advice for acrylic interlocking work (http://support.ponoko.com/entries/498833-How-to-make-interlocking-acrylic-designs). From there, it had the interesting idea of adding little rounded bits to the wedges for the slots, so help add structural support and keep them from fraying. Since I'm still using a material that is at least somewhat prone to it, I thought those would be a good idea to add.

To make the shapes, I essentially just used a circle as the base for most of them, but I did want a couple of the shapes to be non-circular, to give more choices for putting them together later. Most of the symbols have small pieces that will be cut out and can be used in models later, but I chose not to give them slots. The idea for this is from a philosophical idea I have in regards to religion - Most people tend to gloss over the small, inner details of religions, including their own, when really, it's these small pieces together that make up the core of a faith, and I think those should be shown more openly. So instead, I chose to include many slots along the outer edges of the main pieces, so that they can not only connect to each other, but have plenty of extra openings to add these small pieces, so that they are more on the outside. It also plays with the idea that the smaller blocks can be shared across religions, and attached to different religious symbols. If I were to paint this project later, I might paint each religious symbol and it's pieces their own colour, so that when they get swapped between faiths, it's easier to see where some similarities are between the faith. It's an idea, at least.

So when I was done, I had these slots:

If you look carefully, you can see the small circular nodes on the slot wedges.

 

And here's the full thing laid out. My mat board is only 32"x40", so the canvas is sized for that. (Edit: This has since been changed to 24"x40" to fit the cutters dimensions).

The pieces all cut out look like this:  

And here's some of the workflow in piecing them together. I had some locktite glue for a while, but then I ran out and had to switch to some normal superglue. The process worked pretty well though, constructing the two different pieces for putting them together later. I would work some on the umbrella bit, put that aside for the locktite to set, then work a bit on the handle portion while that Loctite was setting, and just keep switching back and forth. 

 As I was putting it together though, it resembled less and less of an umbrella, and looked more like a tree to me. The part I originally intended to be the handle was now the trunk, and the other pieces formed the leaves. There's plenty of tree imagery in tons of world religions though (tree of life, tree of the knowledge of good and evil, naturalism, etc), so I thought it would make an interesting take on the idea of the Tree of Life:

I'm also still a fan of Ed calling it the Peace Cannon

Eventually, I plan to take spray paint and paint it the approriate colours. I wound up using the smaller cutouts from some of the pieces to act as "fruit" hanging off the tree branches. All in all, I'm fond of how this turned out, but it would need a stand to be upright. Also, since I used matboard, it's not very good at standing up. I'd use a thin plywood or something if I'd gone with a tree idea from the beginning.

Kendall Corless - Slots

While thinking about making these slots I decided that they reminded of snowflakes and their uniformity and symmetry. Snow flakes are very modular and some pretty interesting patterns can be created from them. So I based my design off of snow flakes and I'm interested in what I can come up with when constructing these pieces. For this process I used Rhino to create my slot pattern.

Edgar Cortez - Slots

For this project, I wanted to start with this triangle highlighter as the basic shape. I find triangles interesting and I feel like you can make them even more interesting when you start to add lines within the triangle itself.

Reference Image

For my root module I started with a triangle as my base. I then created a smaller triangle with in the base template and proceeded to "cut" into the new triangle by adding rectangles, triangles and a circle.

I knew I wanted to have a piece with arrow shaped ends at the corner so I added a horizontal line at each of the ends of the triangle to make sure I had that arrow shape when I CurveBoolean.

I also added several layers of engravings  of the outline of each triangle to get a repetition and incremented by .5 each time.

Most of the lines come from the center of the root triangle to provide the necessary divisions I made.
Root Module and Variations

I then added rods for connecting piece that match the notch width

48" X 24" Sheet

Blake Philley: Slots

My slot project was based on a lot of concentric shapes. I was looking through images of shapes and I liked and was inspired by shapes like these:

I was also inspired by the Star of David,

I like these kinds of shapes and decided to work with them.

I came up with these shapes:
The unit forms -

And here they are layed out -

I used a lot of curve boolean in this project to create my shapes out of simpler shapes like circles and rectangles. I also built some custom shapes to use for the curve boolean tool to re-shape things properly.

Update:

My slots did not go as planned, I somehow ended up printing them with slots that were about 2.5x larger than they needed to be, and trying to do anything with that was kind of a nightmare. I used some gorilla glue as well as some Loctite to try and get them to work with me, but those can only go so far. But also, I don't think the actual shapes worked out very well. I didn't anywhere near enough pieces to use as connectors for the alrger parts, and my original plan with a terraced sort of object just wouldn't work without a lot of those. All in all, I kind of screwed this project up.