Zachariah Miller: Week 10 Waffles

For my Waffle Structure, I wanted to continue the idea of giant robot weapons from the free 3D print project. I'm a large fan of the "Star Wars" series, and went to find their AT-AT, or All Terrain Armored Transport walker from The Empire Strikes Back.


It was an easy shape to model, especially in Autodesk Maya. I didn't want to put a whole lot of detail into the joints or head, since it was going to be transferred into a waffle structure anyways, so the detail wouldn't transfer very well. I also left the legs straight, I was concerned that if I moved them into a walking position, the finished product would be more prone to falling over.

I then exported it out to Rhino and converted it into NURBS shapes.

I then contoured the model in the X and Y directions to get the slices I would need for the waffle shape.

I fortunately noticed, however, that part of the foot joint did not translate into waffle shapes very well. It wasn't connected at all.

So I did some improvising on the design, and just extended the foot shape into the actual leg to make it solid.

Back on track, I re-contoured the design, with more space in between each piece, so it would look more like a waffle.

I then imported the file into Keyshot, and put it in the University of Texas at Dallas mall to terrorize the campus. I wanted to keep it fairly grey and black colors, since it was a Imperial machine of war. Any other color would have looked tacky or out of place.