Mary Effler: Project 3 - Violin Serial Cutting

For this model, I went with Professor Scott's line that this should be thought of as a tower. So thinking in that shape, I thought of what might be fun to adapt to that. I play the violin in my free time, so I thought it would be cool to design a violin into a pillar. I started from the idea of Ionic pillars from Greek/Roman architecture:

I kept the base pretty much standard, and the curled top reminded me of a violin's scroll

And then combined that with a standard violin:

And for some reason, though I'm honestly not sure where it came from, I got the idea that it should be conical. I just thought that would look cool, like maybe the model could be 3D printed into a bookend or something.

So I modeled it up in Blender, actually, given I was on a Linux box and that's what I had at the time. It's still made from polys, so it's very similar to what I would've done in Maya. I stared with the cone, removing the base and extruding it out to get the ionic columnar shape I wanted, then I deleted the top part of the cone and extruded and rotated that around a bunch to get the scroll shape. I then added some edge loops to make the bridge at the bottom, then added poly cylinders to get the strings and pegs.

The Maya wireframe on shaded view

Shaded view from Rhino

And it would pass for 3D printing!

From multiple viewpoints

I wanted to go ahead and make sure that this could be done both as serial cutting as prescribed for class, but also for standard 3D printing as well, since I might do that just for fun. So I set the layers for keyshot rendering to have the body pieces, then the strings and pegs be their own materials:

Ready for Keyshot!

But of course it also needs to be ready for serial cutting. So I took the curves of all the bits. As you can see, several of them would be their own floating pieces, due to the shape of the scroll. So in the actual slicing I did, I removed the floating bits, so the head scroll will look a little different than the printed model would be.

Floating pieces!

the curves extruded with floating pieces left intact.

With the floating pieces removed and the rods added in.

The serial cutting layout - plenty of room left over!

I'm still having that issue in Keyshot, where all my hard work separating out the pieces is for naught. I have it a little bit better now at the end of the semester since I'm more familiar with Keyshot. I went with a classic cherry wood design, since it is still a violin after all.

I would need to check its walls though before printing it - Shapeways says some are thin in the strings, but maybe submitting a larger sized model would help that. As you can tell by the quoted price, the size I sent them was tiny.

 

I've submitted the model to be print out of cardboard, as a serial slice, but due to the backlog (and the fact that I lost my Rhino serial slice file for a while there), it's not done yet. I'll post pictures once it's printed and pieced together.