Brendan Young- Serial Sliced Project

Concept:

While in class looking at images for inspiration online, I shuffled between quite a few different ideas of creatures to combine. I initially wanted to combine mythological creatures, but eventually settled on the idea of a cobra-like sea-serpent with big bug eyes. Some aspects I wanted to adopt at first I needed to rethink as serial slicing format would make it near impossible to still keep detail and give structural support. I even thought there would be no chance that I could do a serpent due to its shape and the thinness in structure to allow for registration rods. 

Process:

Oh boy, this part of my project was an absolute nightmare. Boolean union and boolean difference were not cooperating with my model at all. Most of the time I could not get these two commands to even work at all, and after finally achieving a model I was happy with, I used the contour command to slice my model. At this stage, I also experimented with using Grasshopper to lay out my contours for laser cutting. This is where I realized that I had many self-intersecting curves. Rather than redoing my original model or figuring out how it could be fixed at all, I saw it easier to fix the sliced contours instead. I went through every single layer, spending hours reshaping every piece of my model that had self-intersecting curves or too many individual pieces. By the time this was fixed, I ended up realizing as well that somehow the contour command had messed up and many of my layers had small bumps on the Z-plane that made each layer not truly flat. So to fix these as well, I had to go back through every layer, isolate it from the model by placing a point and using the move command, and used the project to C-Plane command from the top viewport to lay them flat. At this point, I thought it was over, and used the extrudeCrv command to develop a solid model for my renderings. I thought I had made far too many changes to my model's shape by now, so rather than using my original model in grasshopper, I decided to try and reverse engineer a complete model from my slices. I knew I could probably just use my hand-fixed layers to laser cut, but I needed to still make the holes for my registration rods. So there went at least 12 hours of my life trying and failing various ideas, each with its own problem that was a combination of my own mistakes, as well as computer error. I have already gone into great detail about my modeling problems, but trust me I could go on far longer. Finally giving up, my last hope for moving forward with my project came with simply throwing my model, still individually sliced, into Grasshopper. So after finding out what needed to be done differently with the plugin, it perfectly laid out every layer of my model to be sent to the laser cutter and I was done with Rhino.

Rendering:

Rendering went far smoother, I took my model into Keyshot and thought that the weathered gold look could give a cool ancient Egyptian feel to it as if it were meant to be a statue of a creature. My only troubles came from figuring out how to get a dirty texture on top of the gold material. The Keyshot model was a bit more faded like the original cardboard color than I would have preferred. 

Fabrication:

By the time I was able to get my model sent off to be laser cut I was running relatively short on time. I also realized that once I received my laser cuts back, I had mislabeled nearly all of them, so I also needed to hand compare every cut to every layer on my computer, which became very difficult for layers with little difference such as the neck. The same day my car also decided to break down so I had to uber to get supplies. I used 1/4" wooden dowels and cut those to size with a Dremel. I then laid every layer down onto the dowels and used a hot glue gun in between each layer. Near the top of the model, there is no longer support from the dowels, and for overhung pieces, I used superglue and relied on their lightness to keep them in place. I decided it was cool to see through the model and chose to simply spray paint it rather than try to cover it as well. I also felt that covering it or sanding it would have eliminated the uniqueness of this serial slicing technique. I used black primer all around my model and then coated the model with gold spray paint. I then held back the same primer at a far distance to give the old gold look.