Concept: The first few ideas I had for possible
slot pieces were not as successful as I had hoped. I began with the idea of
branches and leafs for a natural look, but the designs I created didn't work
very well together. I then pulled inspiration from one of my favorite themes,
steampunk. What better idea for modular slots than gears, which are designed to
work together!
Modeling: I was able to use the Picture Frame
tool to bring in reference images for different gears that I liked. I knew I
wanted a few different types of gears that I would be able to incorporate into
my design, since generally when you think of gears there are many different
styles and sizes of gears all working together. After I used the circle tool to
create the main bodies of the gears, I was then able to use the scale tool to
get achieve the different sizes of gears I wanted. Then I used the polar array
tool to create an array of rectangles that were .25 inches wide. I used the
curve tool and the circle tool to create the different designs within each
gear. After that I used the curve boolean tool to essentially cut out each slot
from the gears.
Materials: For my material I decided to go with a 2-ply cardboard, as I wanted the gears to have a somewhat heavy appearance, and was concerned MDF would be too heavy for me to assemble the gears the way that I envisioned. Also, the material was light enough for me to get the height that I had intended with my original design. I really liked how you can see the corrugations on the edges of the gears since I used the 2-ply cardboard, I think it gives each gear more character. I would like to spray paint the gears in brass and copper tones to match with my steam punk theme before I glue all the gears together into their final form.
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