Madison Larmeu Week 4: Surface Population

Week 4: Surface Population

Madison Larmeu 

Ghosted View: Ouija Planchette

Concept:

I have a love and fascination of the paranormal and often cause myself great distress watching horror films about possessions. It was difficult coming up with a concept for my design (that I felt I could ACTUALLY create) and I finally settled on something that is frequently used in the ghostly genre of horror films: the Ouija board. Ouija boards themselves usually do not have very unique surface structures - they are essentially a rectangular wooden board - so I thought I'd focus on a smaller, but essential, component of the Ouija board: the planchette. Planchettes are the small heart shaped objects with a circular viewing port that are used by participants. They are usually quite small, but I wanted to consider what it might look like in a larger sculptural sense. 

When considering what I should utilize to populate the surface, I tried to think of significant patterns/objects that are often associated with Ouija boards. There were three shapes I tested: eyes, stars, and cat faces. Of each, I felt the eye was most representative of the object itself without looking too kitschy or too complex. The stars felt a little too childish and didn't immediately scream Ouija like I was hoping. The cat face, although cute, was a little bit too complex of a shape. The eye was abstract enough that it offered an appealing facade, but was also explicit enough to make a direct connection between the object.

Surface Population Illustration 1

Techniques:

In order to get the Ouija planchette surface I utilized the torus 3-D shape which produced a donut like structure for the base of my object. Then I turned the points on and manually manipulated the points until I was satisfied with the shape. I was primarily focused on getting the upside-down heart like shape and then I began focusing on other aspects of the object. 

After I formed my root structure, I created by surface population object (and two other variations as specified earlier) in the shape of an eye. Using the extrude curve tool I made the object 3-Dimensional to utilize in the next phase: the box morph.

This was by far the most difficult part of construction I faced. In order to map the surface population object onto my root surface I needed to use the Grasshopper plug-in to create a box morph. I began by setting the surface and brep (boundary representation) to the root surface and surface population object. Then I began to create the 'grid' that the brep would map onto by using three tools: dividedomain^2, Sbox (surface box), and number sliders. Dividedomain^2 was used to create the grid like field that would be used to map out the brep objects and how many of those objects it would produce. In order to control the amount of objects I needed to utilize the number sliders. Then I created an Sbox component then used the root surface, the dividedomain^2, and the number slider (to determine depth) to map that grid onto the actual root surface. Then I used a box morph which compiled the output from my Sbox, and the brep object and populated the surface to create a unique appearance.

Surface Population: Illustration 2

Materials:

The materials that I used were a little bit less planned and more so about experimenting with the possible combinations. I separated the model into three separate groups to experiment with different materials and their interactions with one another. The first group I painted a bluish bruise color. I chose this color because I knew that I wanted the colors to remain dark and maintain this eery appeal, but I didn't want to choose black as the primary color because I felt it would make it difficult to experience the surface itself. Next I chose to experiment with a metallic bronze colored material. I wanted something to offset the matte colored paint without using bright colors. I chose metal because I thought it would add a sense of solidity and tangibility to the object. The paint I enjoyed, but it still felt a bit too flat and so choosing a material with a glossy texture felt appropriate. Finally, I chose to use a black plaster material. This was primarily because I wanted to draw focus to the lower field of view and less about the material itself. The opportunity to experiment with these different materials allowed me to consider the properties themselves and how I could utilize them to exhibit the curvatures of the object in a more profound way. 

The biggest difficulties I faced during this project was dealing with programs like Rhino and Keyshot on an outdated laptop. I, unfortunatel,y learned that my laptop has a difficult time supporting the Rhino program, so my computer crashed seven times throughout the entire process of creating and completing my project. Furthermore, I found out that Keyshot has the ability to nearly set my laptop on fire. This was incredibly disheartening because there were key materials that I wanted to utilize using the KeyShot program so I was a bit perturbed by this experience. I wanted to experiment with wood textures (wood being the primary component of most Ouija boards) because I felt it was a realistic material that would be used in the creation of an object like the planchette, but also because I would have liked to see it's interaction with glass and/or plastic components.