Seok Hyun Kim: Project 1 Maker Case Lamp

Final Product 1

Final Product 2

CONCEPT:

The goal I was going for this project was creating a lamp that would be on your bedroom nightstand and give you a nice dream. The two main concepts that I could think of from the night time was the moon and owl since I am an animal lover, so I did research for them to have inspirations and more understandings. Because the owl is a living thing, I thought engraving the bird in a flat surface will be not enough impressive. Therefore, I went for using two sides of the lamp at the same time by utilizing its three-dimensional structure to give the bird's face a volume. Despite the reference image have the lights coming out from many spots, I decided to reduce the light areas to make the owl's eyes as striking focal points. I believed if the lights are coming out from not only around the owl's eyes but everywhere, the focal point will have less energy to draw the audience's eyes even though there are many guiding lines supporting it. I added thick lines of raster engraving to let the design have some more contrast, so that everyone can recognize the design even from far behind. After laser cutting was done, I surfaced the lamp with several sanding papers.

Shaded View

Ghosted View

TECHNIQUES:

Firstly, I created the blueprint of the lamp by using a website, MakerCase.com. I adjusted the blueprint and added designs on it that I traced from reference images. It was done in a software called Rhino 7, and required a lot of uses of line, curve, picture, and trim commands. It might seems a double of work that I have decalcomanie designs, but it was fairly easy to make because I could simply use mirror command. The join, explode, and group commands were highly useful when I was copying or moving around the designs. After the designs were done, I extruded the curves and created surfaces to have a 3D model of the lamp for rendering. The snap and nudge have helped the works to be greatly convenient all the time. Also, using precisely colored layers for the vector lines in Rhino was critical for laser cutting.

Render Daytime

Render Nighttime

Render Birds Eye View

Render Pedestrian View

MATERIALS:

1/4" thick 24" x 48" Plywood, Sanding papers, Loctite, and Area Light 1200 Lumen Warm.

I rendered the lamp in a software called Keyshot. Because I did not an access to it yet, I used a free trial demo version for this project. I utilized wood textures on the lamp to give a feeling of friendly nature that is related to the moon and owl concept, and sometimes applied different variations of wood textures to obviously show the lamp's structure and design contrasts. I also gave a warm toned common type of light coming out from the lamp, because I want the lamp to be on a nightstand and I am not aiming for a too splendid looking. I chose an indoor environment as a background in the same context, and the Keyshot tutorial videos were especially helpful for adjusting the environment.

Overall, as my first digital fabrication project and a first laser cutting trial, I am pleased with how the lamp turned out. I feel that I would have a pretty nice dream if I sleep next to it. However, if I could have another chance to challenge on a similar project in the future, next time I would like to create a lid that has a fascinating design. Since it was my first trial, I could not exactly calculate the shadow casting along the light spots, but I believe it would look gorgeous if I had a night sky themed shadow casted on the ceiling of bedroom with the lid.