Mary Effler: Waffle Project (The Treble Snail)

So I had a really, really hard time coming up with any sort of idea for this project. I tried several ideas, and Ed would remind me sometimes that it didn't quite fit what the assignment was asking for. One of the ideas I had was to make something like those office desk toys, like a jungle gym made from the waffle pattern with magnetic people you could have doing things on it, but it didn't seem like it fit the requests for this assignment. So I sat down and started sketching out shapes that I liked:

And in the end, I went with the treble clef, since it's always been a shape I love (I do sing soprano, after all). I used Blender to make a model of it, though after trying to model the violin scroll for my serial slicing project, I'd learned how hard it was to accurately model that type of scroll pattern. Plus, with space between the pieces, the waffle wouldn't look so good. So I used the rotating tools instead to make the pattern on the sides. In the end, I kinda thought it looked like a snail or something, hence the name:

Perspective view

Front view

Side view

To do the waffling, I tried using the scripts and Rhino to do it, but I couldn't get them to work for some reason, and a lot of others seemed to be having trouble as well. But Ed Whetstone pointed me to a program from Autodesk called 123D Make, which will handle waffles, serial slicing, and several other means of making slices from models for 3D projects. So I figured I'd give that a shot, and it's actually a neat program (it's also free). Here's the workflow I went through for it:

This is the basic interface you enter, with the model you imported in the center.
You can see the workflow and options on the left side.

The next step is to choose your method of construction. I went with the "interlocking
slices" option, which produces the waffles. It will give you a default output which you can add to and
customize within the program. You can also always see the slice layout on the right. The coloured pieces mean
there could be a problem with those slices. Red indicates structural issues, and blue indicates
an orphaned piece.

Here I've added more slices, and rotated them a bit to get a style I wanted. There's still some
structural concerns though.

The one piece left in the center is a concern, but it's necessary to connect the front and back together.
It's nothing that some Loctite shouldn't fix when I construct it.

You can have the program give you a rendering in different materials,
like cardboard, plywood, and plastic.

You can view the final slice layout, make sure everything looks allright, then save it out for use
in a different program. You can also export the mesh itself as an obj or stl file.

After that I took the files into Rhino and cleaned them up. Several corners were a bit choppy from the rotating tool, so I removed some of the sharp, strange points and made them straight lines. I also got rid of some pieces that were incredibly small and didn't add to the overall shape:

The file has been sent to the printer, but due to the backlog it isn't done yet. I'll post pictures when it's completed. Till then, here's the keyshot renderings of the mesh. I went with black plastic, as this is the type of texture and colour I always associate with music notes and scales.