Chelsea Griffin : Week 8 - 3D Print

I knew before I even began my model, I wanted to create some sort of luminary. I looked at many different 3D printed lamps for inspiration before I stumbled across a particularly beautiful lamp that was a tree with a sphere of light in it's roots. I really love the look of spherical lamps. I also often find myself incorporating trees into my work no matter what the medium may be. This is why I was pretty stoked when I came across the Tree Stump starting point model in Mudbox. This was my first experience using Mudbox, and I was pretty much immediately in love. My only other exposure to modeling was Maya (which was an incredibly painful experience) as well as Rhino (a much less painful experience). Now that I know about Mudbox/ZBrush/etc, modeling is a like a whole new world for me. I still am fairly new to modeling so it's very useful that Mudbox has starting points you can work with. I took a Tree Stump and shaved it down and messed with it a bit. I kind of felt I wanted the sphere of light to be consumed somehow, perhaps by some kind of black sludge. With this concept in mind, I kept playing around in Mudbox until I was satisfied. In order to easily place a light inside, I attempted to hollow out the sphere and the base by cutting a hole in each, offsetting the mesh to an eighth of an inch. The base seemed to be hollowed out fine, but when printed, the opening I had created for the sphere was closed, though fortunately it was still hollow inside. I will have to figure out where I went wrong with this in my Rhino model. I ended up burning a hole into the base of the printed sphere using a soldering iron. Unfortunately, there was some sort of support material stuck inside the sphere that I had not anticipated. This caused the inside of the sphere to have shadows when a light was placed inside. I contemplated scrapping the idea of creating a luminary and just painting the sphere a nice solid color. The Keyshot renderings of metallic purple were pretty charming to me. But I came this far so I figured I would try and work with it. My model somewhat resembled a sort of crystal ball. I researched mineral spheres and noticed all of the lovely various colors and designs embedded inside of these rocks. I decided to paint over the sphere in a muted purple, trying to get a sort of crystal/mineral-like design. I frosted the sphere before and after painting it purple in an attempt to make it look a little more natural. As for the base, I mixed ModPodge, black paint, and black sand, trying to get the texture I wanted. I initially liked the idea of a sleek black sludge, but realized I kind of wanted a texture that would contrast the smoothness of the sphere. I figured the sand would give a nice rough texture. I was pleased with the outcome of the base texture. I wish that I had maybe used some different type of paint than acrylic for the sphere. I like some of the effects cast from the paint when illuminated but I probably would have been more satisfied if I had given up on turning this model into a luminary. I might later attempt to paint the sphere with a metallic purple or silver.