Kristy Yin: Week 12 Final Project - Skateboard Deck Laser Engraving

Concept: 

    From the start, I knew I wanted to gift the skateboard to my brother. To make it more personalized for him I decided to use his Chinese name and to match the Chinese characters that I decided to go with something reminiscent of traditional east Asian paintings. I was inspired by the aesthetic of the black ink paintings with the red sun in the back that gives it a pop of color. I wanted also wanted to include bamboo and some traditional architecture like the Chinese pagoda and bridge. 

Techniques: 

    

    I started off by bringing in my design sketch as a reference picture with 'PictureFrame'. Then for basically all of the design I just simply traced over my reference picture with curved polylines. For the Chinese calligraphy, I imported it from illustrator which made life a lot easier. When creating the board I used 'ExtrudeCrv' on the curves created for the outline and then used 'Bend' to get the curves on the board. For the fill engravings such as the sun and bamboo designs, I made them a 'Hatch' for the laser file and later used 'DupBorder' to get the curves around the hatches as needed. Then once again used 'ExtrudeCrv' on the fill engraving to extrude them as a closed planar curve. Continued on to 'BooleanDifference' the extrusions to create an indent for the fill engravings. To assign materials in Keyshot, I made sure the create a surface with 'PlanarSrf' to sit on top of the indented parts of the design. For the lines to show up in Keyshot I made them into pipes with the 'Pipe' command. The trucks and wheels were made of various solid shapes that were joined together with 'BooleanUnion', the shape for the bottom of the tuck was made with 'FilletSrf'. Due to the use of way too many curves I made sure that there were no duplicates using 'SelDup'. Various other commands such as 'Move', 'Copy', 'Mirror', 'Join', 'Explode' were also used here and there to create the model. 

Materials: 

    The board material assignment in Keyshot was simply oak wood. The fill engravings were assigned red paint. The truck was stainless steel and the wheels were rubber with white coloring. I assigned the line engravings with two different darker wood colors, so it would actually look like darkened engravings based on the intensity/power level of the laser. Then for the environment, I found a nice-looking room and places the skateboard against the wall like I would in my own room. For the lighting, I used interior mode with self shadows and ground shadows to give it depth. In post-processing, I simply cleared off the soot from the burns and smoothed out the larger fill engraving areas with sandpaper, then cleaned it with denatured alcohol before painting it red.