Isaac Oldham - Lamp Project

 For this project, I took inspiration from the elemental stones from the Fifth Element. I wanted to make 4 lamps that would each glow there respective color when placed over my puck light. 

      

       I started on Maker Case, where I mocked up a basic triangular prism. I didn't really worry about the dimensions too much at this early point. I mostly focused on getting the right proportions first to see how such a simple design would look. With my lamp only having 3 sides, I was a little worried that such a limited shape wouldn't look very good but I had some ideas to fix it afterwards when I finally saw everything put together. 

        Once I had all my parts printed, I got some light gels that I ordered online and cut them to fit each of the inner sides of the lamps. Then I put all the pieces together without gluing, and placed them atop my puck light to see how they glowed. It wasnt very bright at all, but that wasn't too much of a shock to me. A lot of the light was leaking through the seams where the wood connects, and also at the bottom where the diameter of the puck light was wider than the lamps themselves. 

        To fix this I got some DryDex and started filling each edge of lamps. DryDex is this goo used to fill in holes in dry wall. I goes on as a pink pasted, but then dries like a white plaster. This makes it super easy (and satisfying) to sand and smooth down. I had to do this 3 or 4 times to make sure I could get these to be as pristine as possible. The annoying part was, since I had to install the light gels before the sanding, I had to clean the colored windows every time I sanded. 

Lastly I wanted to fix all the light that was leaking in at the base, so I designed and printed a small platform that sits atop the puck light and a little triangular indentation to hold the lamps in place. after a quick black paintjob there was almost NO light leaking from the base, and made the colored windows really pop! 

For my 3D renders, I hopped into Maya and converted my 2D curves into 3D and used Arnold to mimic the glowing effect. I used a basic dark wood materials and darkened the edges within the holes to simulate the burns from the laser cutter.