Eugenio Gonzalez Lazo: Week 7 Adornment

Concept/Inspiration: My idea for a halloween costume this year is to dress up as a Dallas Maverick's player. I have a few jerseys and shorts already, but I am taking this project as an opportunity to create an accessory for my costume. I immediately thought of creating a Championship style ring, but in order to meet the requirement of a minimum of 2.5 inches for our designs, I shifted the idea a little bit to create a more generic Dallas Mavs branded ring. 2.5 inches for a ring is insanely large, so in order to achieve this I decided to implement the design of the ring into knuckle dusters that are meant to fit in the index and the middle fingers. Another thing I quickly realized is ensuring that the rings are a fit is harder task to accomplish, so I decided to create my ring into two parts that - the top design of the Mavs Logo that does not have to be a certain size, and the ring portion that has to match the circumference of my fingers. Since I am lucky enough to own a 3D Printer, I was able to print out multiple sizes in order to match it closely.

 

Process: For the top portion of the ring, I started by using the Import command in order to bring in a vector file of the Dallas Mavs logo. Having a vector drawing of something you want to 3D model saves you a lot of time from having to trace the object, and allowed me to focus on the overall design of my ring. I then created a cylinder around the midpoint of the design to serve as the base for the logo. To create the "3D" aspect of the logo, I selected the curves from the logo (The blue, white and silver part of the logo for those familiar with the Mavs' logo) and used Extrude Surface to raise them above the top of the cylinder. Since the logo started off as a group of curves, I used the Cap command to create flat surfaces at on both the top and bottom, therefore turning these walls into solid objects. For the bottom portion of the ring meant to go around your fingers, I initially created a pair of cylinders, one smaller than the other, and was planning on splitting the difference to create the whole, but I quickly learned that I could simply create a torus and it even had rounded corners! Creating a torus is a lot better, since it is easier to quickly create it to accurately match the size of my fingers. I then used the Array command to quickly duplicate the size of the torus and used 2D Scale to change the size a bit and make it fit the other finger. Lastly, for the connecting rod, I used the Tangent command to quickly figure out the angle and length needed, but then went over with a cylinder shape.

Materials: For the Keyshot rendering, I wanted to use a metal material that allowed me to preview what the ring would look like when shiny, as I genuinely am interested in continuing to work on my design and create an actual ring out of it. However, for this project, I 3D printed my ring with blue PLA filament, I sanded it, primed it and then painted it with fine detail brushes to replicate the logo colors with acrylic paint. To finish it off, I glued it with hot glue (Amazon has not delivered my loctite glue).