Seok Hyun Kim: Week 7 Project 3 Waffle Construction Vessel

CONCEPT:

For this project, I wanted to create a vessel that I need in my real life. I have to drink a lot of water daily to prevent my sickness, but I face unstable water bottles very often. Therefore, I decided to create a water bottle holder that can support them to stand. After having my research and references, I chose to design it in a water drop shape for two main reasons. Firstly, I believed it would make sense since the theme is going to be water. Secondly, I needed a bottom heavy design to make the holder stable as much as I can for its purpose. That is the reason why I flattened the bottom of the design as well. Additionally, I partially hollowed out the design in a diagonal way, to make it much easier to access the water bottle into the holder without harming the silhouette of the water drop shape.

TECHNIQUES:

I modeled the holder in Rhino. I started with two circle curves for top and bottom of the water drop, and created body curves between them by using tween curves command. Then, I lofted the curves while the Record History button is turned on, so that I can continue change the shape of the water drop by adjusting the curves. I trimmed the middle hole for the water bottle and the diagonal hollowed out part of the design. After filling the surfaces between the curves, I basically followed along the professor Andrew Scott's tutorial videos. I contoured and sectioned the 3D model in desired directions, created surfaces and their intersections, made pipes and scaled them, and splitted the surfaces with the pipes to make notches. Then, I made a layout for laser cutting by using the Better Massive Unroll script with rectangle and move commands. I also created extruded and notched version of the 3D model to render it in Key Shot. Additionally, I was always color coding the layers and keeping my previous versions of the waffle steadily while I was modeling in Rhino by using copy and paste commands.

MATERIALS: 1/4" thick 24" x 48" Wood, Sanding Papers, Blue and White Water Proof Glossy Spray Paints

I rendered the holder in Key Shot. I chose the light and environment of a regular house, because I am going to use it at my ordinary home. I used the paint gloss blue and white materials because I was aiming for an icy cold water kind of cool toned feeling, since I like to drink cold water rather than hot water. For the physical vessel, I used wood material because I wanted the holder to be not too light or too heavy, since it needs to be stable enough while also being comfortable for carrying around at my home. The wood material had a medium weight, so it was working pretty nice. I know that post processing was not mandatory for this project, but I did a bit of sanding and sprayed glossy paints, for better looks and make it resemble the renderings. The paints were water proof, so it actually helped the holder to become more suitable for its purpose as well. Honestly, assembling was the most fun part of this project for me, since I enjoyed that the notches were made pretty accurately and working correctly.