Victoria Mayfield: Slots

Concept: The first few ideas I had for possible slot pieces were not as successful as I had hoped. I began with the idea of branches and leafs for a natural look, but the designs I created didn't work very well together. I then pulled inspiration from one of my favorite themes, steampunk. What better idea for modular slots than gears, which are designed to work together!

Modeling: I was able to use the Picture Frame tool to bring in reference images for different gears that I liked. I knew I wanted a few different types of gears that I would be able to incorporate into my design, since generally when you think of gears there are many different styles and sizes of gears all working together. After I used the circle tool to create the main bodies of the gears, I was then able to use the scale tool to get achieve the different sizes of gears I wanted. Then I used the polar array tool to create an array of rectangles that were .25 inches wide. I used the curve tool and the circle tool to create the different designs within each gear. After that I used the curve boolean tool to essentially cut out each slot from the gears.

Materials: For my material I decided to go with a 2-ply cardboard, as I wanted the gears to have a somewhat heavy appearance, and was concerned MDF would be too heavy for me to assemble the gears the way that I envisioned. Also, the material was light enough for me to get the height that I had intended with my original design. I really liked how you can see the corrugations on the edges of the gears since I used the 2-ply cardboard, I think it gives each gear more character. I would like to spray paint the gears in brass and copper tones to match with my steam punk theme before I glue all the gears together into their final form. 

Travis Fowler: Castle

Concept:

The foundation for my design comes from the gears on a bicycle. Concentric gears with sharp edges and protruding spikes at regular intervals mimics that of a set of gears. The gears are linked together by a flat surface with a circle removed from the middle, resembling a chain. I didn't the entire piece to be free-floating so I added a triangular case around the main structure to soften the silhouette.

Technique:

This was my first exposure to rhino and I began the modeling tutorials with a bit of hesitancy but quickly started to see the possibilities that the Boolean functions can offer. Everything was very easy to control because I could break down the design into patterns of numbers. I stumbled across the fillet tool at the time and used that to soften the edges of the capsule.

Materials

My first inclination was to make the entire inner section out of metal, as gears and chains are so often seen, but Keyshot proved to provide some absolutely fantastic glass materials. I might have gotten a bit carried away by making everything different colors of glass but the consistency in material helps unify the piece and still gives predictably sharp-looking edges.