My 3D model was inspired by something that I work with a lot in my field, sound mixers. I wanted to make an object that was not only wearable, but that could also be interacted with like a fidget toy. To that end, I developed a model that recreated a fader slider found on mixers. To make it wearable, I looked to the Nintendo Switch for inspiration. For that I created a sliding rail mechanism that had a chain running through them and would slide into place on the main body. That way, it could both be worn and taken off easily and would be good, mindless, entertainment.
When I went to model my design, I used various techniques in Rhino. I tend to lean towards more geometric and angular designs and this model was no exception. I first started by adjusting my sketches to be to scale to the finished product. From there, I drew curves using my sketch as a reference image. For the main, long piece, I used extruded curve to turn it into a polysurface and then used boolean difference to hollow out the inside. I then used the hollowed out area as a template to create my end caps and slider piece. For the “wings” that are part of the main body and used to lock into the rail piece, I modeled them by starting with a cuboid, and drawing cuboids inside it. I then made copies of the internal cuboid, moved the copies out of the way, and used boolean difference to hollow out the parts that would later be connected to the main piece using boolean union. The internal cuboids that got moved would be boolean unioned to another cuboid with a hole punched in it to become the rail piece. The fader cap itself was made from creating a rectangular curve, then trimming off the top using an arc, and finally extruding it. I used fillet edge and chamfer edge to finish up the model and smooth out the edges.
In terms of materials, I initially chose a dull metallic material as most high end mixers have a metal body. I went for a grey color as many mixers tended to be grey, since they are profession equipment and most professional equipment don’t have vibrant colors. As for post processing my actual 3D print, I ran into many problems. First and foremost was that I didn’t account for tolerance of pieces that were meant to fit together, so many of my smaller pieces had to be ground down to fit. The rail pieces had to be reprinted, and due to circumstance, ended up being a different color from the rest of my 3D print. Second, was the issue of color. Due to how tight tolerances were, using an epoxy coating or acrylic paint wasn’t viable. I attempted to use a marker that had ink which was transparent but would give objects it covered a dull sheen as most of my piece was actually quite close to the color I wanted. However, I found that the ink wouldn’t bond to the plastic so that was the end of that experiment. By then, I had run out of time to experiment with color techniques, so I ended up making some adjustments to my render to change the material to hard plastic and change the color of the rail pieces to black, as I found the two-tone effect made for a good separation between the actual interactable mechanism and the attachment mechanism of the model.
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