Brandon Wehenkel: Waffle Lamp

 

Ghosted Black

 

Ghosted Colored

 Ghosted Black and Colored

Concept:
My initial idea was to create a lamp with a lid that also doubled as a frame for my engraved object.  However, with the numerous times, I restarted and changed my idea I had to ditch the idea of a frame for the lamp.  So I made a separate object which I talk further about in my engraving blog post.

I was inspired by Quinn Baldacci's rocket lamp with the lid.  I thought that was an ingenious idea to create a cavity for the light bulb while also keeping a design seamless and uninterrupted by large holes.  I created two designs that integrated the lid aesthetic. First was recreating the idea from Quinn Balacci's rocket and second was the bell shape inspired from Taiwanese Buddhist Temples known as a Pagoda.  I used an actual A-Frame design for the body of the lamp.

I saw the pyramid shape in Tamara Brennan's pyramid lamp and DISENO Y MANUFACTURA DIGITAL CAD/CAM's clear (acrylic) hanging lamp.  Their waffle style was what I wanted to replicate: using the corners as the rib for the horizontal cuts, plus the hanging lamp was gorgeous.  I would have enjoyed incorporating chains into the project, but I made a decision to make the lamps static on a flat surface instead.  I didn't have to worry about gravity and all the annoying small holes for the chain links.

I also was planning on using two materials for this project, so I also needed to figure out which ribs and which cuts were going to be what material.  Unfortunately, acrylic sheets are not cut to a traditional thickness measurement that matched wood sheets, so I had to be precise about where my inset slots were going to be.

Laser Cut Sheets

Modeling Technique:
I used polyline a majority of the time to create unique shapes.  I used curves to create an A-frame which I then polar arrayed 10x to get the style I wanted with a the flat triangle/ asymmetrical rectangle, I Boolean Unioned, Boolean Differenced, Boolean 2 objects multiple times.  I used project to slice the lids and the base.  I alt tapped to duplicate shapes.  I used spiral, twist, and pipe to create the light bulb inside as well as Interpolate Curve.  I used revolve to create the lid.

I had a hard time deciding which style I wanted.  I was going to make a frame for my engraved tile that was built into the lamp, but it just looked ugly.  I spent a lot of time deleting and revising my ideas.  The three styles were mostly from manipulating array polar and boolean 2objects.  I really wanted to incorporate an A-frame style into the design with a pyramid.  I ditched the pyramid idea because it covered up a lot of the triangles that were created from the polar array also I used contour multiple times with many failures with that pyramid shape.  Contour was used after I figured out which design to work with.  I have two materials, so I alternated the lid and the base as wood for a size difference of .1875 inches apart.  And the middle part which I call the torso is .220 inches apart.  I hope that small difference in thickness won't matter.  I felt like I might have messed up somewhere in deciding where to cut due to the size difference.

I used surface --> planar curves as well as extrudeCrv several times in the contour and section process.  I messed up a lot and needed very precise measurements when creating the complex waffle structure.  I followed the tutorial, as well as the class discussions.  I used Orient for the piped ribs.  I used split to cut them.  Again I might have messed up somewhere, so I'm hoping the print works.  This design is very abstract to me, and It has become an ordeal for me when I can't quite figure out how the slices will fit.

I also hope the hole I created for the cord works as well.  I didn't like that the cord could just freely sit anywhere through the design, so I had to create a base for the lightbulb to sit in.

 Keyshot 1 w/ Reference

 Keyshot 2

Materials:
In Keyshot:
I used glass for the vertical pieces and the glass on the lightbulb, I used hard plastic for the lightbulb base and soft plastic for the cord and textured wood for everything else.  I changed the colors of everything except the glass.
I liked the bump on the wood, so I made it slightly more pronounced.  I think originally it's at 0.5, I just bumped it up to 0.6.

 WIP

In real life:
2 - 24" x 48" x .220" sheet of acrylic, $56 each
5 - 24" x 48" x .1875" sheet of MDF.  $7.42 each (didn't end up being .1875 for all of them)
Home depot advertises, Medium Density Fiberboard (Common: 1/4 in. x 2 ft. x 4 ft.; Actual: 0.216 in. x 23.75 in. x 47.75 in.) and even that is still wrong.
Westinghouse Snap-in Candelabra base socket, 6'.
1 LED Lightbulb.
1 bottle of Gorilla Glue
3 bottles of Locktight Super Glue
Tears

Keyshot 3 w/ Cut Sheets

This lamp design was definitely not for beginners.  I had experiences I will never want to reproduce again. MDF is not worth the effort.  It's too fragile, and Home Depot does not cut every 1/4 slab the same.  I had 3 different sizes when I bought 5 boards. Needless to say, none of my slots worked with MDF.  It just broke or became very brittle. I think one vertical piece survived intact.

Lamp 1

 Lamp 2

Lamp 3

Brandon Wehenkel: Granite Tile Engraving

Edit 1

Edit 2

Concept:
I loved the idea of engraving stone.  My sculptor's instinct of mine went crazy hearing that it was possible for this project, so I used one of my old drawings from my beginner's art classes and imported it into curves.   Like many of my other projects in the past, I like to incorporate the human and animal aesthetic, so I designed Bubbah, my gorilla-human character from my scanned object post.

My initial plan was to recreate an old 80s family portrait idea.  Where there is one person, and their face is superimposed and faded behind, off to the back somewhere in the photo.  But it became too muddled.  Too many lines and it didn't quite look how I wanted it.

Ghosted Frame

I wanted to create a waffle frame for this project as well, so the engraved stone wasn't laying flat.  I used an A-Frame design to create the frame.

Detail

The border is designed with this style.

Modeling Technique:
Adobe Illustrator, raster and image trace
Rhino
Photoshop

This cost me a lot.  I have 13,678 curves and 5548 hatches.
I used TWEENCURVES, and that's about it.  I got help from Professor Scott for making curves very quickly, and I used that about 80% of the process.  The other was hatch, copy, paste, move, interpolate curve.  I used picture frame and measured a rough size for my 12x12 tile and just started drawing over the reference plane.  I went into Adobe Illustrator several times to try to import curves, but it looked like garbage.  Just think about how children draw before they know how to, it was just scribbles. Apart from the nose and eyes nothing else was recognizable.  So I had to create the entire design from scratch.  I stayed up till about 4 am for about 5 nights in a row starting my work about 5 pm.  There were a lot of tedious, repetitive moves.

 Frame Laser Cut Sheet with Lamp

I used the same technique as my lamp design for my frame.  I even used some of the same curves. Such as the "A-Frame" curve. I wanted to incorporate an A-Frame design, which I provided a link earlier of what one looks like.  So I used a triangle with a sliced top to make the initial shape.  I sliced the curve a tiny bit more, so the angle the tile sat was similar to a picture frame, where it isn't completely 90degrees.  The frame should slide into the cuts I created; unfortunately, it did not.  Even though I measured 13/32", I should have made the cuts a tiny bit bigger. I used the pipe and orient commands to create the cuts in the planar surfaces.  I used section to create the verticle planes and contour to create the horizontal planes.

Materials:
12" x 12" x 13/32" black granite tile.
2 - 24" x 48" x .1875" sheet of MDF (didn't end up being .1875 for all of them)
Home depot advertises, Medium Density Fiberboard (Common: 1/4 in. x 2 ft. x 4 ft.; Actual: 0.216 in. x 23.75 in. x 47.75 in.) and even that is still wrong.
Gorilla Glue
Locktight Super Glue
Masking Tape
Black Spraypaint

 Building Process

The frame is in the back, and it didn't work out, the materials I bought were too varied in thickness.  I had bought a sheet of MDF 1/4 in size measured it to be .1875 instead.  I went back the next week and got the same material from the same stack on the shelf, and it was a different thickness.  I didn't know this till I was putting the pieces together.  It was also too fibrous and broke with the littlest of pressure. I couldn't get it to fit the tile right either.  I'll need to recreate the design again, and it was my own project within a project, so it wasn't worth the fuss.  My father helped me redesign a new frame from the broken pieces that survived the accident I had.  Its not the prettiest fix but it is very nice in terms of funcionality.  I only wanted something to hold my tile for better viewing pleasure so the image below is to show the alternative for my frame.

 Uncolored Frame

Colored Frame

Based off the cut sheet image, I can see where I went wrong.  I put the horizontal cuts on a different sheet than the verticle cuts.  Because the place I bought the sheets from did not cut all of their sheets exactly the same, I ran into a project destroying issue.  My horizontal sheets could not fit the verticle sheets, and I ended up breaking a bunch of my MDF cuts.  I had to create an entirely new design from my broken pieces.

Engraving

The small details that I shared above did not fully render.  I chose too small of curves together and should have made my curves further apart.  A lot of my detail was wasted to the grain of the stone.  I learned my lesson and will know for my process next time.

Engraving with Frame

Brandon Wehenkel: Pepakura

Ghosted Black

Concept:
We had two ideas.
Idea 1. - Jeremiah and I wanted to create something similar to this.  We experimented with five-sided shape, a six-sided, seven-sided and concluded with a five.  Jeremiah liked the idea of twisting the shape slightly, so we ran with that in the model.  Jeremiah also likes illusions so this concept was perfect for his interests.
Idea 2. - We also wanted to create about 30 squares and hang them from the ceiling in a way that looks like they had exploded from one central space.  The viewer would be able to walk around the space and see it from all sided differently.  This plan was much more ambitious and it would be an amazing task to perform but the process could have taken much longer than two weeks, so we chose to make one shape with many interior perforations instead.

Keyshot 1

Modeling Technique:
Jeremiah sculpted the model with truncated pyramid with five sides.  He then created a stamp that was used to create the interior cutout.  He just duplicated the shape seven times and scaled and moved to create steps.  He also rotated each layer about 10 degrees each.  He used Boolean difference to make cuts both inside and underneath.  The shape was not quite finished when it was initially cut from the inside so I made the decision to slice the shape on the side.  Jeremiah wanted there to be at least 2 large cuts which gave the shape a unique backside.

Keyshot 2

Materials:
In Keyshot:
I used marble for the exterior because I loved the shine the lighting gave on the object.  I had hoped to recreate the same gloss but I didn't find a spray paint that was full gloss, only semi-gloss.  The interior colored sections I used soft plastic for the material because it looked similar to the paint texture.  I did not use a bump map.


In real life:
We used cardboard bought from the fabrication lab.  The blue acrylic paint was applied to the internal cut faces.  We used painters tape to cover up the connection points of the pepakura.

 Gluing

The entire building process was a bit tedious, but we managed to get it finished with only two sessions.  Jeremiah did most of the gluing, and we split taping. I painted and folded pieces.

Interior

We started by painting blue acrylic paint onto the pentagonal faces.  I made sure to label the faces with their corresponding numeric values on the back of the cardboard for easy assembly.  The flaps were much smaller than we had anticipated so instead of waiting for the super glue to tack together, we used hot glue.  The project, for the most part, was a simple task from then on until we put on the exterior faces.  Something didn't translate right from the 3d space to real space.  The thickness of the cardboard wasn't translated in real space so when we assembled the interior cuts, there was a significant gap.  It was too big to force the pieces together, so we chose to create L-pieces cut from scrap cardboard.

 Favorite Angle

After it had been assembled, we covered up the holes with paper and cardboard bits, to save the blue paint from being ruined and spray painted the exterior.  We also attempted to color the gap with white spraypaint.

 Distance

Brandon Wehenkel: Serial Slice

Close Up (Physical Object)

Ghosted Black 3D Scan (Before)

Ghosted Black Serial Slice (After)

Ghosted Black Serial Slice

Concept:
Fall 2016, created a bust of a character of mine with polymer clay then scanned him into digital information.  Because I had several models 6.3M poly, 900k poly, 12k poly, and a 3k poly I thought that maybe this project would be perfect to test the serial slice design with him.  I have a facination of anthropomorpic design so his overall style is designed from several animals:  Gorilla, Chimpanzee, and Human.

Ready To Cut

Modeling Techniques:
How I made the model please refer to my 3D Scanned Object post.
My model started off as 6.3M polys.  I reduced it down to 12,744 polys for this project.  I used Mudbox to do this.  I pressed page down to change the normals map to level 1.  Then I exported as .obj and uploaded it to Maya where I used the cut faces tool to make a nice base for the model.  I used the edge selection tool and the face selection tool to delete any of the excess polys under the line.  Then extruded the mesh to close the hole.  The fill hole command didn't work for me.  I forgot how to manually close it in Maya so I made the hole fairly large so that I could just close it in Rhino with a series of mesh tools.  I used Mesh --> Mesh Edit Tools --> Delete Mesh Faces (to remove several of the weird naked edges around faces); Mesh --> Mesh Repair Tools --> Rebuild Mesh (to eliminate the rest of the naked edges); Unify Normals; Fill All Holes.

I used contour for the serial slicing as seen in the tutorial from class.  I separated each curve by .1875 inches.  The dowels cut are at .25 inches in diameter.  The dowel placement is in a slightly different spot than from the image above.

There are four holes in the model for dowels.  Because my traditional sculpting capabilities aren't perfect the figure isn't symmetrical; remember I used a scanner to make this model so all of that information is also translated. When I put dowels into the shoulders they popped out in bad areas.  I attempted to place the dowels in the most central locations. One of the dowels does not go all the way through while the other pokes out and stops at one of the outer slices.  I did not want it to go through because it would have created an ugly exit. 

I had to use a vice, nuts, and a ratchet strap to press all of the parts together.  I ran into a minor issue with warping so the ratchet strap was useful for pressing the materials together during gluing.

Keyshot Serial Slice (Front)

Materials:
In Keyshot:
I used Soft Maple and mixed mauve with the woods texture to get the color of wood that closely resembles that of Medium-density fiberboard.

In real life:
The wood I purchased is MDF, like I mentioned above, 1/4" 2'x4' sheet which for some reason is actually 3/16" - .1875" at Home Depot.
I found a metal threaded dowel that was 3' long in the parking lot about three months ago.  It is 1/4" in diameter.   I figured I would need it someday since I have 3 various sizes at home of various material types.  I have a few nuts at home that would work for securing the wood together.
I also have plenty of wood glue as well.

 Keyshot Serial Slice (Right)

Keyshot Serial Slice (Back)

Bubbah Natural Light Interior

Comparative

 Bubbah Natural Light Exterior

Bubbah Natural Light Exterior - Backside

Brandon Wehenkel: Prosthetic

 Mechanical Horse Leg Front

Mechanical Horse Leg Left

Concept:
Anthropomorphism is, by all means, my most favorite form of art.  It's one of the oldest variations of sculptural form discovered.   Egypt was where it began for me.  Their culture was by far the most anthropomorphic cultures in history, they have a god/goddess for everything, and many are half-man-half-animal.
In my brainstorming phase, I remembered seeing an elephant that received a prosthetic foot.  Think about it, that prosthesis has had to have been a super strong material to withstand the weight of an elephant.  But as I always try to make everything 50x harder than it has to be, I thought of my friend and his love for horses.  I wanted to design a mechanical horse leg prosthetic.  It started out as just a regular horse prosthetic but thought about the complexity of horse movement.  Horses require a very complex anatomy to be able to run as fast as they do, so why not make a prosthesis that can also withstand the weight and complexity of a horse stride?  I used Andrew Chase - Mechanical Horse for the project.

I'm not an expert in mechanics but I did spend a lot of time, about 4 years, learning the mechanical make up of a weapon while I was on board a navy ship.  The Gyroscope (not actual mechanism, but similar) and the wobble gear (not actual mechanism, but similar) were one of the most complex mechanical mechanisms that I did maintenance on.  I really didn't enjoy the maintenance but I did love the complexity of the mechanics.

Also thanks to the excellent Ted talk by Aimee Mullins for giving me the idea.  I very much enjoyed seeing her anthropomorphic body morph where she portrayed a Cheetah with actual Cheetah hind legs as prosthetics.  She can be seen in "Cremaster 3," (2002) a film by © Matthew Barney.

 Ghosted Black

Organization Colored

Modeling Techniques:
About 80% of my design is copied from Andrew Chase's design, but I didn't make everything as crude as his design.  He made it look like actual welded pieces of sheet metal. I really liked the natural angles of a horse and morphed the angles of the knee and the hoof to match a horse's actual resting position.  So what I did was look up Horse anatomy by Herman Dittrich and drew some photos that resembled muscular anatomy.  I mostly just traced his designs so I could get correct angles.

Anatomical referenced leg

The image above was the leg I had based my mechanical drawing off of.  I used curve interpolate points to create the outline of my reference image from both the front and right sides.  I then manually bent the front curve to roughly get as center as possible from the right reference curve I created.  I used F10 to get the control points for the curve. The reason I bent the front curve was so I could create inner circles to loft the shape.  I used 103 curves to create the mesh for the form.  I lofted all of those curves together, which I give great thanks to Professor Scott for the assistance, and that is the image you see above.  The only difference is the green hoof is different.  I used that hoof and adapted it for the mechanical parts.  It's not entirely mechanical looking, but I think it looks better than the hoof in Andrew Chase's model.  I was not getting the NetworkSRF to work, so loft did the same thing for me.

Keyshot - Left and Front angles with Reference Images

Keyshot - Right Angle

From here on out it was very easy for me, organic stuff just doesn't click well yet.  I used MoveUVN coupled with Select U and Select V to smooth out all of my yucky curves.  Something that saved me hours, unlike my stupid mouse.  Thanks again Professor Scott for giving me this incredible tool.  It's the most essential tool for this project.

Keyshot - Gear / Knee

I used pipe for the cylindrical sections of the shin and thigh.  I created a cylinder for the knee gear, ankle, and a couple other locations on the top basket.  The knee is the only gear with slots on the leg.  I created the cylinder, a small box, and used array polar with 180 degrees to make the gear.  I used the reference image to create a majority of the shapes with curves and then extruded them.  The nub box on the top was purely impulsive.  I wasn't sure how I was going to draw that in my references so I left it out to sculpt later.  This was the hardest part for me to design because I wasn't sure what to do.  I used boolean difference to create the spot where the nub of the leg will rest inside.

Keyshot - Nub Seat and Ball Bearing Gear

Materials:
I wanted to use a tough metal like Titanium or Steel, but their color spectrium wasn't working for me even when manipulating the attributes.  I really liked Zinc's attributes because it had more than one color slot.  Then I used the pearlescent metals because they have the flakes.  I really like seeing pearlescent paint on cars.
Color inspiration, I used zinc and recolored it to more resemble the fire-bronzed metal on the image, I used colored metallic paint similar to the fingers.  And I wanted to add a little touch of color so I used another colored metallic paint and used one of the browns for the nub seat.  I changed the color of the flakes to make the overall color brighter and somewhat match the orange sheen similar to the other metallic paint I used..

Keyshot - Hoof and Ankle Detail