Melanie Estes: Week 9-10 Serial Slice

     I used to never wear dangling earrings because I was afraid it would get caught in my hair (which they do), so I have a disproportionate amount of studs. Unfortunately my jewelry holders don't cater to studs, so I have to keep them in a small souvenir soap dish. After going over choosing cores for the serial slice, I know with round ones we need multiple so that it doesn't rotate. But I thought that rotating could be just what I wanted. I decided to make a spinning holder for my jewelry with multiple levels that can spin separate of each other, most likely thinking of spinning store displays like this or this.
     I wanted to do something like a honeycomb where some of the areas are filled in and some are open. Instead of having the location of the holes be more organic, I placed six evenly apart on each of the five levels. I also added a small lip to the edge of every opening. To make sure the earrings don't fall out, I made a small half covering to fit just inside the edge of each hole. I want these cut out of acrylic so that I can still see inside. To help the levels rotate better I also want to cut a disc out of acrylic to place in between them. I want to buy a cute door knob to top off the core.

Ghosted painted black

Layer assignments

     I started with a cylinder and used UV curve to start placing the holes. I used the polygon tool make a hexagon and copied and pasted six of them evenly apart using grid snap. I placed four more copies of the whole row evenly going up and down and staggered every other row. I used trim to cut out the holes from a surface and used flow along surface, tweaking the sizing to have it fit well on the outside of the cylinder. I then created a narrower cylinder in the middle of the first, representing the end of how deep I want the holes to be. I used the same flow along surface technique for it, but changed the hexagonal holes to be smaller. I made sure the bottoms of the shapes still lined up with the larger versions. After creating these two surfaces, I deleted the original cylinders and started using the loft tool to connect the holes. I then deleted the inner surface and capped the cavities using patch. Now that I had a sort of positive mold, I made a new cylinder. I used boolean difference with it and the mold to cut in the cavities. I made the whole piece a hexagon as well by going from the top, using the polygon tool, and using it to trim away at the whole. I made the lips by creating a curve from duplicate edge. I sized it slightly smaller and a copy slightly larger than the original size. I made a surface from the larger and cut the hole from the smaller. I lofted the surface .23, the width of the final slices. I put a lip over every hole and combined them all into the whole using boolean union. I then separated the levels by drawing a curve and trimming, leaving spaces for the discs. I made sure the spaces were the same width as the final slices. This way, when I decided the final scale of the piece, I made sure it was by a factor of .23 to be sliced cleanly. And if the acrylic does not happen to be .23, then it doesn't harm the final product. I had originally made the covers to be like a hexagon cut in half. I made a curve, filleted the corners, filled it in and extruded it .23. I copied and placed one inside each hole and saw they stayed well inside the lips. But when I tried to copy and paste them to the sliced version, the smooth edges were cutting into the layers of the cardboard since the transition was more jagged than the smoothed version. So I recreated them by drawing curves based on the jagged opening on the sliced version. I used these curves the same way to create solid pieces for keyshot, but used the original curve to set up the laser cutter version.

Cutsheet

     I made the top out of three progressively smaller hexagon extrusions, where the first is larger than the rest of the piece. The base is just one layer of these extrusions, but is the same size as the largest on the top. I made the middle cylinders separating the levels slightly smaller than the levels themselves. I filleted all of the edges before contouring. I placed a half-inch wide cylindrical core in the very middle. I then used the contour tool so that the slices were horizontal. Because the levels are all the same size and shape, just rotated, many of the cut pieces will be identical. And because the holes all come out of the edges, the pieces take up quite a bit of space. So, after using the move tool and placing the lines all level, they fill up two pieces of cardboard. I placed the disks and covers on their own piece because they will be out of acrylic.

Render 1

Render 2

     I had made sure to keep a copy of the solid piece before slicing so I could put it into keyshot beside a cardboard version. I using a cloudy plastic for the discs and covers to be like acrylic. I used a scaled wood for the solid model's levels and a metallic paint for it's top and bottom. I changed the paint colors to be a brown to match with the wood and added a scratch texture since the surface would not be perfect if it was really used. I used this image to color the porcelain material on the knob and increased the shine. I made the stem of the knob a slightly blue tinted aluminum. For the cardboard version, I placed a procedural wood on the core with slightly altered colors. I didn't add a knob for it yet since I plan on buying one and have no idea what it will look like yet. Because I didn't model the sides of the slices to look like the inside of cardboard, I knew it wasn't possible to make them look exactly like cut cardboard. Instead I tried to just make it look like the outside of the cardboard to still give the idea of the material. I used this cardboard image and made a bump map out of it to texture the levels. I used this cardboard image for the tops and bottoms, and the changed the bump height I made for it to be very slight.

Render 3

Render 4

     I did the two versions of the model in keyshot to show: one, the idea I was seeing in my head through the smoothed version and two, what it will probably look like after it's cut and assembled.

Render 5

     It took two sheets of cardboard and one smaller sheet of acrylic to get the entire model cut out. I glued it together in pieces; each level has two parts where I glued the top pieces together and the bottom pieces together, but kept them separate. This could make finishing it easier, and I can always glue them together later. I used a half inch dowel rod when gluing, but because the pieces fit so snug on it they don't rotate as easily as I would like. So when assembling the final product I will probably use the rest of the Jeremiah's 7/16" dowel he was so kind to give me. 

Initially put together

Taped Bottom

     I chose to finish only 3 of the levels because the total item was so tall it did not fit well on my furniture. I covered each half of the levels and the top and the bottom in masking tape to fill in the holes on the side of the cardboard cuts. I then covered them in a paper mache mixture of pulp, water, sealer, and mod podge. I included the mod podge to help make the mixture more sticky and adhere better to the tape. This left a rough texture that I sanded down slightly to get rid of the sharp points. Unfortunately the paper mache mixture took days longer than the box indicated to dry, and I was unable to cover it in the epoxy Ronald offered to me. But I do plan to do this at a later date.

     I painted it first by covering the entirety of each piece in black and then sponging on gold to give a sort of older metal look. I chose gold because both the paper mache texture reminded me of a beehive and the item itself is based on a beehive. While I had created small acrylic caps to each of the openings, the uneven surface from the paper mache coating allowed for the earrings to sit inside without falling out. I bought a decorative doorknob and drilled a hole in the top of the structure to place it. I chose a clear flower to complement the clear acrylic disks that separate each layer, allowing them to spin more easily. Each of the three levels spin all the way around, allowing me to looking at all of the openings easily. The knob on top gives me something to hold while I spin the levels.

Image 1

Image 2

Image 3

     The final product turned out much more organic that I had intended. This was partly driven by the interesting texture the paper mache gave me, which lead me to round off the edges rather than leave them harsh and sharp. Perhaps I can one day finish the other two levels in a truly geometric style and place them in between these as a start contrast.