Clement Lee ATCM 3355: Project 5 Prosthetic Accessory

 

Prosthetic Accessory: Festive Hat

Concept

I wanted to make an accessory that augments the human form, have it functional, useful, and comfortable to wear. I wanted it to be usable on the daily if needed, and have a useful function for everyone. 

Because of such self-imposed constraints, I decided not to do a limb prosthetic, as I limit the usefulness to amputees. I also did not want to do shoes as 3d printed layers might give one blisters, and it might be a tight fit for most. I also felt like having a wristband might get in the way of everyday tasks. Though a wristband holder seemed decent as an idea, I settled with the idea of a big hat that provides shade. Texas is a very hot country, so having a way to cool down is very useful. if I were to print it big enough, it might as well double as an umbrella. 

Since it is a time of festivities, christmas, as well as my birthday, I decided to create a Christmas tree inspired hat. Christmas is always a time of fond memories.

Process

I wanted to use a technique that pushes the limits of what I could do. I stumbled across the works of John Edmark, an artist who uses the golden angle, golden ratio, and fibonacci sequence. I was fascinated with the concept of a spiral pattern using such method and proceeded to watch all his talks and then numberphile videos about phi. 

I couldn't 100% understand everything about such subject, but I could make something close enough. Here is the Grasshopper script I wrote and how it works. We first initialize numbers from 1 to a large number. For each number in the series n, the distance from the centre is the square root of n. This is so that it can pack more points in the outer parts where the spiral radius has more length the farther it goes out. We use polar coordinates to help with the script instead of using trigonometric functions. If we did not have the Point Polar function, we would use radius * cos(theta), radius * sin(theta) instead. Theta is calculated by the index n multiplied by the golden angle to get a nice spiral formation. I used Interpolate Curve to make spirals after every 13th and 21st curve, as 13 and 21 are Fibonacci numbers. I used Split on itself to segment the curve, and manually culled the curves to a split-spiral formation. 

  

Then I adapted the script such that I cull out every second point, and instantiate a sphere to each point for the ornaments, as shown in the image above.  

Then I projected the curve onto a conic, and then used the Pipe command so that it slowly has more width as it goes farther down. The pipe came out the bottom so I used BooleanDifference to clip it for better 3D printing. It is hard to explain, but when instantiating the spheres I reused the Point Polar's distance input to drive a Z offset to implicitly define the conic so that the points did not have to be projected.

Materials

I plan on 3D printing this, so the material will have to be PLA plastic. If I were to have separate colors, I would be printing such that the cone would have grooves etched in, and the balls could be beads, and the grooves could be painted or wrapped with string. Or it could be printed in one piece and painted after the fact. Or it could be printed with multiple filaments at once, if one has such a fancy 3D printer. 

Conclusion

I feel as if I strayed from the references to make this my own, but that's a good thing. I am very happy about how the model came out and Andrew Scott helped me find a happy accident that if I found it myself, I would have discarded the idea.