Melanie Estes: Week 12 Waffle Lamp

     In her spare bedroom, my grandma has a lamp that hangs from the ceiling above the nightstand. I've always wanted a hanging lamp like that, and so I played with the idea of making one with either a space or moon theme. I settled on a cloud and decided that I could always add an acrylic crescent moon to it later if I wanted. But, because the light needed to be able to sit on a table, I decided to make a base for it as well.

Cutsheet

Solid model

     I made the basic structure out of several spheres. I scaled and moved them in a scattered way to represent a classic poofy cloud. I combined them all with boolean union. So that it can sit on  table, I created a base I planned to  make out of wood. I made a simple truncated cone and used boolean difference to subtract the space where the cloud would sit on top. Following the tutorial videos, I created a bounding box and then contoured and sectioned off the cloud with a 1" vertical distance and 8 radial cuts. I went through the process of creating curves from the intersections, then piping them, snapping one end's center to the middle, coping, and snapping the pasted piece's other end to the middle. I planared and split the cut curves and split them with the pipes. However, when I went to lay them out with the imported unroll tool, they covered more than just one 24x48 sheet of each material. So I went ahead and laid them all out to the appropriate shape. When I went to scale, I selected all of the laid out cuts and the solid model and scaled them at the same time, ensuring that the lay outs would then fit in the required single sheet. I redid the contour and pipes. When doing the pipes, I used a .22 thickness as the assignment page said this was the thickness for plexiglass. I followed the process once more and finally unrolled and laid out the pieces. I redid the text with a single line font. I managed to get this scaled version to fit into one 24x48 sheet. To take the model into keyshot, I extruded each of the surfaces. I used the both sides settings and used the near osnap to extrude the exact width of the cuts. I created a lightbulb and wire as well. The lightbulb is a unioned elipse and cylinder, and the metal piece is 3 squished spheres and 2 cyliners. I made the wire by drawing a curve of 2 circles, triming the overlaping pieces, filleting the corners, and using sweep 1 rail to extrude it down a long curve I had drawn. I filleted all the edges of these pieces, but not the wooden pieces because the laser cutter does not fillet when it cuts.

Ghosted painted black

Layer assignments

     On the cut pieces, I used two materials in Keyshot: a wooden one for the base and a clear one for the cloud. I gave the bulb a clear glass, the metal a rough steel, and the wire a mold-tech. I scaled the size of the mold-tech textures down very small to have a very slight bump quality. I added a noise to the color and used a cream and light gray for the two colors. For the metal, I increased the roughness and darkened the color. I only increased the refraction for the bulb. I used a darker wood material that included a bump map and decreased its shininess and scale of textures. For the plexiglass, I used a clear rough plastic with increased refraction index. I imported a small sphere and gave it an emissive area light at 40 wattage.

Render1

Render 2

Render 3

Render 4

     I used one 24" x 48" sheet of acrylic for the cloud and one 24" x 48" sheet of birch plywood for the base. I stained the wood a light golden color before assembling it. I used super glue for bot the cloud and the base to ensure that the pieces would stay together.

Image 1

Image 2

Image 3

     I bought a yellow LED bulb on sale at Walmart, but could not find a simple socket with a chord and plug for a standard size bulb. Instead I bought one of the porcelain bases that screw into a ceiling and have an on/off pull. I planned for it to sit on to 3rd wooden vertical level, and while I trimmed two of the radial pieces so that it would sit flat, the base was too large to fit inside the Plexiglas cloud. Michael helped me solve this problem by disassembling the base and fitting the socket into the small hole in the 3rd layer of wood. This way, the bulb sits nicely inside of the cloud. As Professor Scott said, the larger bulb was too bright. He suggested using a piece of paper in the center of the cloud to diffuse the light. I found a piece of scrapbook paper at Michael's that is a slightly transparent white. I rolled and glued it into a tube and cut it at an angle to correspond with the angled opening in the top of the cloud.