G Lee: Project 3 Waffle Construction Vessel

Concept

Going into this project, I had very few ideas. While searching up various pots and vases to take inspiration from, I ended up coming across the panda vase shown above. From there, I remembered seeing a frog teacup with tadpole cups, and let my brain find many other connections from there. Since we had to build a vessel, the cauldron Halloween candy holder and the monsters helped me to figure out how I could provide a unique flair to my own design. IKEA's Spöka lights were important in helping me figure out how simple I could try to go with my design.

The end result was a tiered vessel that looked like two creatures with their mouths wide open to hold whatever you want to put inside. I gave them differing eyes and fang placements to complement each other, and then added limbs so they would read better as living creatures. Originally, I envisioned them as being separable, but for the sake of modeling and construction they ended up attached instead. The tails were added simply because I thought they were cute.

Techniques

Control point curves were built to make the general shape of my design - one for its profile shape and its base shape - then I used the sweep command to actually create the surfaces. I repeated this for the smaller base on top, as it has a slightly different shape than the bottom base. Then, I made curves resembling the shape of the mouths with the control point curves tool, trim, and mirror. The final curves were then projected onto the surfaces. I created solid ellipsoids roughly the size of the horns and feet, then trimmed them in half. Sweep 2 rail built the rest of the legs through making curves out of the ellipsoid edges and copying that to the end of control point curve rails.

My ribs were cut manually using the pipes method. After selecting all of my slices and using the intersect command, I built pipes with .25" diameters out of the curves made. These were then all manually moved to the middle of the curves, duplicated to cover the other side, and extended to make sure they cut the slices. With the split command making the notches in the mesh, I cleaned it up and deleted any pieces that I couldn't keep no matter what. I moved the slices to fit into the notches and then extruded the surfaces to fit the .25" material thickness.

Materials

In KeyShot, I chose a Pine Wood material since I knew I would be using birch plywood for this project. The textures were rotated to prevent the artificial look the procedural material had. I also modified colors to better match the material I had. Studio lighting was used for most of the images, but for an appropriate environment I picked the kitchen lighting and backdrop because I envisioned the item being able to sit on a kitchen counter holding any stray snacks or items related to food considering the open mouths.

Were I to be able to make the physical sculpture, I would've sanded down the pieces a little so they would be totally smooth to the touch and less burnt. The soot from laser cutting would've been undesirable for its usage especially, but the look is desirable. Otherwise, I had no further plans for post-processing. At most, I'd try to seal the entire thing with something clear.