Michael Bradley: Independent Study - Guitar

Design:  the design of this project is sourced from several places.  I decided to make a semi-hollow body, or chambered, electric guitar.  The original sketches were made by my younger brother, and I brought those to life using references such as a Fender Stratocaster electric guitar, and a Gibson Arch-top Semi-hollow body electric guitar.  The finish was supposed to be a red and black sunburst, as is common on many guitars, however the end result is somewhat of a rustic rose color with more of a natural fade to black, instead of a well defined line between the two colors.  The sound holes on the top of the guitar are made using the shape of the guitar itself as a reference, splicing together curves from each side of the guitar. A lot of research was done into constructing and finishing electric guitars.

Reference 1 - Strat

Reference 2 - Archtop

Reference 3 - Sunburst Finish

Techniques: The design was created entirely using curves.  Some specific dimensions were found online and translated to rhino, but for the most part, the shape was created using rounded curves.  After deciding on the final exterior shape, I created a large interior chamber, leaving room for all of the electronics, and the bridge.  Then, I created a chamber for the electronics themselves.  I created a third closed chamber to decrease weight, and add treble resonance to the body.  I "fishboned" the chambers, or rather, made them encroach in between the pickups to increase any possible resonance from the strings.  I left space for the future addition of strap pegs at the bottom, and top left of the body.  After creating my shapes, I decided on a thickness, and then duplicated the curves on vertically until I had as many layers as I wanted, each with the correct combination of curves.  I only extruded the curves to see what the shape would look like.

Techniques 1 - Basic Curves

Techniques 2 - Final curve layers

Techniques 3 - Extruded model

Techniques 4 - Cutsheet Layout

Construction: After cutting out all of the slices, the interior slices out of regular birch plywood, and the top/back out of nicer Baltic Birch plywood I glued them in the correct order, one at a time, with clamps placed around the edges. Once glued, I test fitted the neck and found the approximate location of the bridge to drill mounting holes. 
     Next I tested some dyes on scrap wood, and after deciding what to do, I sanded the entire guitar to 400 grit, which was especially difficult on the sides which had not glued perfectly even.  After sanding, I rubbed in black dye, let it dry, and then sanded the whole thing evenly back to 400, because water based dyes raise the grain of the wood back up.  I sanded more in the middle of the top than the sides, so that I could add red later.  After 5 or so repetitions of this process, and getting the wood as dark as I wanted, I added 5, which took another 5 or so coats. As a side note, this took a whole afternoon of dying and sanding, etc, and then when I got home I still wasn't happy with the red, so I did another 3 or so coats till I was somewhat happy.
     After the final sanding, I put about 3 cans of Lacquer onto each side of the guitar, with a day waiting in-between sides.  The lacquer takes about a month to cure, but since I didn't have that long, I waited about 1 week before polishing it up.  It was already pretty shiny, but the lacquer drys with an orange peel effect, so I again sanded the whole thing to 400 grit, this time wet, then all the way up to 1,500 grit, and then polished it with both a rubbing compound and polishing compound until it was nice and shiny, and flat.  Finally, I added all the electronics, assembled the neck, put strings on it, and did some final adjustments. 

Construction 1 - laser cut

Construction 2 - Glued, front

Construction 3 - Glued, back

Construction 4 - Test fit neck

Construction 5 - Lacquer, front

Construction 6 - Lacquer, back

Construction 7 - Wet sanding before polish

Materials: I used the following materials for constructing the body, not including the additional hardware like pickups, strings, etc.

Lots of sandpaper (100, 220, 400, 1000, 1500 grit)
Lots of titebond glue
6 cans of Deft High gloss Lacquer
1 sheet of baltic birch plywood (From wood world)
2 sheets of regular birch plywood (From home depot)
1 bottle black fabric dye
1 bottle red fabric dye
1 old tshirt, cut up for rubbing dye and cleaning
Rubbing compound
Polish paste
a couple screws for the access panel on the back. 

Final 1  (doesn't do the gloss justice)

More final images soon

Michael Bradley: Capstone - Arcade Cabnet

Design: The design of this project was inspired my numerous classic Arcade Cabinets.  The specific shape is mostly based on Centipede and Moon Patrol, taking small design elements from various other sources, however.  The dimensions of this project were almost entirely dictated by the lasercutting process using 2'x4' sheets of mdf, so the project stands about 6 feet tall, 2 feet wide, and 2 feet deep.  The artwork on the side is loosely inspired by the artwork found on the side of several UTD buses.  I also had the opportunity to help move several arcade cabinets several months ago, so many of my design choices were also based on my experiences physically handling these massive creations.

Reference 1 - Centipede

Reference 2 - Moon Patrol

Reference 3 - Concept Design

Reference 4 - UTD Bus

Techniques: For modeling this design, I pretty simply created the sides using curves, created square panel curves for each of the flat sections to connect the two sides, extruded all those curves to .22 inches, and then added tabs and subtracted tabs from each part, so that when they were cut out, everything would fit together perfectly.  To make the side art, I created it in Rhrino to the exact scale of the arcade, then converted those curves to Adobe Illustrator and colored them in preparation for printing.

Techniques 1 - Curves

Techniques 2 - Model Extrusion

Techniques 3 - Final Cutsheets

Techniques 4 - Side Art Curves

Techniques 5 - Side art color

Construction: To construct the Cabinet, I used wood glue and clamped the three layers together which made up the sides, and then all of the rest of the pieces fit in their designated slots.  These pieces were also glued, both before and after placement, to ensure rigidity.  To measure the hole for the tv, I traced it out on a large piece of paper, and then used some basic measurements to average the rough trace and find the approximate size of the hole.  This didn't help much, however.  I used cardboard to try out several test holes before cutting the final front bezel.

Construction 1 - Wiring

Construction 2 - Test Power

Construction 3 - Measuring the TV Bezel

Construction 4 - Printing Side Art

Construction 5 - Final Assembly

Materials: The materials used in this project are as follows.

Lots of .25 x 24 x 48 in MDF
Lots of paint
Lots of glue
Lots of tools
Peel and stick side art printed in the 3D studio
1 ~19inch CRT tv.
1 PC arcade usb kit
1 Steam controller
1 Gigabyte Brix PC running Windows 10
1 2 channel Amplifier
2 2 way Samsung speakers
1 Power Strip
2 Hinges
20 feet of orange t-molding
2 strong magnets (degaussing the tv is fun!)
2 sets of caster wheels
and a whole lotta' patience.

The only screws used in this project are to hold the tv and wheels in place.  Everything else is glued together in their predesigned slots.  This was to emphasize the precision of the digital fabrication process.

Final pictures coming soon.

Christopher Rickett - Serial Slice

Concept: For this serial slice project, I wanted to create a structure that, while structurally sound because of the rods and glue holding it together, appeared to be doing a balancing act. What I ended up with was a structure that resembled a rock stack.

Technique: The technique that I used to create this rock was creating 8 different curves and making 2 smaller duplicates of each one. I spread them out from top to bottom at different distances and then lofted them together. The total height came out to just over 10.5". I contoured the model at 1/4" intervals to get the slicing that I wanted.

Material: I chose to go with 1/4" cardboard for this project.  I Liked the dark brown color that it had, and it contrasts nicely with the light wooden base that I had put it on. Overall, I liked the way That it came out and I would like to see how it would would look if I had more slices and made it out of a dark wood and maybe the thickness of 1ply cardboard.

Ways To Work Between 3D Program and Pepakura Program

    Originally we build the 3D model and send it out to Pepakura program for flat down the 3D model so we can export out to Rhinoceros 5 for laser cutting process. But since we got a Plotter we can totally send it out directly from Pepakura to Plotter  for printout. Question is "How" we set up the UV properly and import the texture in to Pepakura.
    In Pepakura, we have ability to layout the UV, which is the same way we lay out the piece as we sliced them in to the table. But first thing is make sure the Table is "Square Size!" This is very important, neither way of the  size of table or the size of the 3D model, but the table must stay on square size. Also you may turn off the flaps so there are are more spaces you can use to fit in the table the way you can figure out that which piece is which
Ex:

Once its has been layout, File>>Export>>Texture Editing>>Map Image for Texture,
by this process you will be export out a .bmp file and the program will reset the default UV to what we have layout as on top of the image.

    After reset the Model UV by export the bmp file, we can export the OBJ file from Pepakura
This obj file is going to drop in to Mudbox, which is what I use, for editing the texture from 3D surface. (At here I'm not going to teach how to work on Mudbox since so much totural video on YouTube.)
File>>Export>>Texture Editing>> 3D Model with UV Info

    As an ATEC student who have taking the Modeling class, Autodesk Mudbox is one of the suggest program to use for student. I only texture the upper body of the model so what happened to the texture is become like this

    The lower body is not texture so nothing is under the texture file.
The Pepakura3 do not have ability to import the texture over 1024px but the newer version Pepakura4 have ability to take the 4096px, so suggest to download Pepakura4 for the high quality resolution.
    The way to import the image to Pepakura is very basic, Setting>>Texture Setting>>Specific Texture Image>>select the image
Then go to Other>>Texture On/Off for turn on the texture.

Once done import the image, the 3D object should be colored on. Then you will need to re-placing the pieces since the Plotter's width is 3ft, which is totally different than what I have on above. So what I have done is to re-setting the table to 3ft width and test out the best way of placement and everything works out proper. At the end the quality is totally worth to do with.

Extra editing for plotter printing:
Padding

Also the place to change the size of padding is
Setting>>Other Setting>>Other>>Amount of Outline Padding

Devan Mitchell: Pepakura "Look away"

Concept: I wanted to make a gesture that showed apathy and disconnect. A bust is a representation of one of the most emotive parts of the human body the head, face, neck, and shoulders. Without having the ability to make a detailed face with the amount of polys I was limited to I decided to show all of the other emotive qualities this fraction of the human body has to offer. I also wanted to abstract the proportions of a standard human form by elongating the neck and head. I think in future projects I will exaggerate this more.

Modeling: I modeled this in maya. I used references for the head shape but not for the proportion of the head to the shoulders. Looking back on that I might have looked at a reference prior to distorting the form so that it was still in the context of proportionate until I distorted it.

Material: The material Black Glass in Keyshot would be ideal for the finished product but I will have to experiment on how to make this out of a more dense material such as two way glass. I like the finished form. I have a better understand as to how a 3D form on the computer will translate in real life. When I reproduce this again I'm going to make slight adjustments to the form. I also think that the model would be better if it was made out of card stock. The complex form gets slightly distorted when try to fit the thick flaps together in the form. There is also a slight distortion where ever there is torque in the form around areas such as the neck. I enjoy the look of this piece in all quads so I don't think making the neck into triangles will be how I solves this problem and perhaps it will be easier when I use card stock. 

Devan Mitchell: Week 10 Waffle Structure "Growth"

Concept: This piece was inspired by Crop circles. This particular image shows aspects that implement the golden ratio in which the scaling and size of the object can be traced down to the most natural elements in which our eye see something as appealing. I picked this particular image to go off of because of the lines of the crop field. The lines section off the design creating an interesting juxtaposition between the fluid and angular line quality.

Modeling: to make the primary onion shape started from a Sphere and the dragged the different vertexes to make the shape. For the legs on the bottom I used spheres and then used Boolean Union to attach them to the primary shape. I cut out a section in the Primary shape by creating another sphere and using Boolean difference. Then used the two scripts to make the waffle sections and then cleaned up any errors. 

Materials: I used bushed aluminium and wood for the materials in key shot. I wanted the solid version to have a abstract and reflective quality. The waffles structure would look best made in wood so I wanted to show that off prior to investing in that material. The physical product was made in 2 ply cardboard. I should have made the slots significantly larger because the product was made with the same intent as the modular piece which was hundredth smaller instead of a hundredth larger. I learned a lot from this piece. I did have modular pieces used in conjunction for the growing elements and those slot can be kept the same size.