Concept and Inspiration: For my sculpture, I took inspiration from another sculpture that sits outside of my local soccer stadium in Frisco. It is a layered rendition of a foot that, when viewed from the front, nearly disappears due to the space in-between layers. It's a really cool roadside attraction because every time you drive passed it, you get to see this neat effect.
Process: I wanted to mimic this effect, but first I had to make sure that my printer could pull off printing something like that. Before I got into Rhino and Grasshopper, I downloaded a low-poly model off of thingaverse and manually sliced it up in Maya. I wanted to make a prototype first to see what kind of problems I would face with the final print. I printed out the base, and the layers separately which took about 36 hours total. After the prints were done, I had to do a lot of sanding and some gluing to get all the layers in the right order on the base. a couple of the layers ended up snapping in a few places when I was putting it all together, but others slid in perfectly.
This is what I got for my prototype print. It's a little messy in some places, and admittedly I screwed up and got some of the layers out of order, yet I still think it looked really cool for my first attempt!
I figured with how tricky putting the model together was I could get away with printing the whole thing in one piece. So I imported the same low poly head into Rhino/Grasshopper and rotated it 90 degrees so that the slices would be vertical instead of horizontal. After I got the parameters just right I exported it back into Maya where I could edit each layer and delete the ones in-between. I printed it a little smaller than the prototype to reduce the print time as much as possible. This print took a total of 27 hours to do, with only a small amount of clean up afterward.
Materials: I didn't spend a lot of time on materials at all. I used the basic plastic shader that comes with rhino and gave it a matte finish.
No comments:
Post a Comment