Concept: I've been thinking about pollen and other allergens a lot lately, since it's the season for it. I thought it would be an interesting idea to take something that makes my life so difficult and abstract it. Then, I could in turn make it into something beautiful that I would appreciate rather than hate. I tried to give my design the same vibrant feeling as some of the electron microscope images you see of pollen and other unimaginably tiny living things in the microcosmos.
All laid out on the ground plane and numbered after contouring/serial slicing.
Modeling: This was interesting trip. Modeling precise geometric forms like polyhedrons can get tricky, and you need to know exact interior angles to get it right. My design was a regular dodecahedron made up of all pentagons. I started it in Maya, since it seemed easier to get the angles and specific rotation around a point correct with Maya's universal manipulation tools. I then exported the .obj into Rhino and finished it up by added the irregular holes on each pentagonal face (using interpolate on surface curves, then curve extrusion and booleanDifference) and filleting the edges. I wanted this object to be interesting from every angle, so every side is different. To finish it up, I used "contour" command to get my serial slices (after placing my object and support structures on the inner and outer cut layers), and then snapped each group to the 24"x48" laser bed reference plane. I used ProjectToCPlane to make sure everything was on the ground plane. To make assembling it easy, I numbered each group on the text engrave layer.
Materials: For my renders, I did something mildly creepy. I wanted this object to feel very organic, so I applied a human skin texture to it, then changed up the top color and the "under the skin" color to get the mottled green appearance I was interested in emulating that I'd seen in electron microscope images of pollen. I tried a few different variations, and I think the last version works the best.
Fabrication! I really think this turned out well, so I'm going to post a lot of photos. The object definitely has interest from all angles, and I would argue that you have to see it in person and hold it to appreciate the detail and its form. I decided to spray paint it a really vibrant turquoise color, and then to add some interest and highlight the contours by gold-leafing the edges of the cardboard.
Early assemblage. Views from the top, and one angle from the side.
Spray painting in progress. Gold edges next. You really have to see this from several different angles to get an idea of its overall form. I can tell you it's a regular dodecahedron, but it's hard to picture the 3D version of a pentagon.
And some detail shots! The gold leaf treatment really makes the edges of the cardboard accent the holes. It has kind of a surreal terrain, other-worldly feel to it, like each cavern has secret details you have to look inside to discover.
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