Melanie Estes: Week 5-8 Prosthesis

Drawings with notes

     After seeing the example legs of the woman in the video shown in class, I wanted to play with doing something clear. I like the aesthetic of water and wavy forms and decided to do a sort of water scene that descends further into the ocean as it goes further down the leg. I thought about how to incorporate the inside structure and decided to use an underwater vent that releases bubbles of air that climb around the structure. I plan to include lights inside that light up the bubbles and the magma looking in the bottom of the foot. I used this image for reference.

Example from TED video with Aimee Mullins of clear material

     My design is mostly organic looking as opposed to the other more mechanical prosthesis. I am making use of the network surface tool by drawing many bumpy and wavy curves to make an uneven surface. I am using boolean union to add items, such as the underwater vent, and to subtract areas, such as the indented cave in the inside curve of the foot. I will use altered spheres to create the bubbles that climb up the structure of the leg. I also plan to use curves and network surface to make the waves, only with gentler wavy lines. But I am looking into alternate ways to create that water effect.

Images imported into Rhino

In-process

     So far I have created the basic structure of the entire prosthetic and cut away the foot area to focus on it. The first foot I made was smooth like the rest of the leg, so I tested some ideas on it and decided to do another foot. This second foot is much rougher, as I believe rock should be. I have created the indention and will soon add the arching piece of rock. I have used curves and network surface to create all thus far. But for the vents, I first created a truncated cone and pipe to use as reference when drawing the curves. After making the surface, I used offset to make it a solid piece. I have been filleting my edges as I go. I am making the fillets uneven by adding additional handles to add to the more imperfect aspect of rock.

Curve Networks

     I completed the foot by creating a lumpy shape and adding and subtracting various parts of it around the foot, then filleting or chamfering the edges. I added the arching shape by creating the surface out of a network of curves and using boolean union. I added the bottom area of lava by coping the bottom surface of the food and extruding it to make a separate surface. I filleted the bottom of the rocky part and combined the two. I made the lava trails by drawing curves on top of the foot surface using the interpolate curve on surface tool. I used these curves to split the surface. I then added depth by offsetting the surface. I used the process of taking a curve from an edge, piping it, using boolean difference, deleting the indented surfaces, and combining them again with blend surface. I created both the vent on the ankle and the vent on the outside of the foot with their own curve networks. I combined all of the pieces with boolean union and fixed any naked edges. To be able to separate the materials, I then exploded a copy and assigned the various surfaces to the appropriate layers.

     The internal structure of the leg comes directly out of the main vent. I used the smaller sized pipe provided and scaled it up. To make the bubbles, I used the tool discussed in class called flow along surface. I created the surface to flow by making many ellipses of varied sizes. I trimmed off the bottoms and used boolean union to attach them to a flat rectangle. I had used the create uv curves tool to determine the right size to make the surface. After flowing the bubbles along the pipe, I adjusted and combined them with the pipe itself into one piece. I made the area for the limb to fit using a curve network and offsetting it outwards.

     The water polysurface was initially created with the same curve network as the foot. For my first attempt at the water, I added some variances by turning on control points and adjusting some manually. I used this way to create the main wave coming off of the back-top end. I made the other waves in the same way: i drew a curve onto the surface, used it to split the surface, and extruding that surface to a point. I then manually edited those points as well to curve them. I made other imperfections in the surface by creating and editing ellipses, then subtracting them from the main piece. I filleted where possible. Other spots I made by drawing a curve on the surface and trimming out the space inside. I used a patch with the adjust tangency option on and joining the surfaces. 

     I originally tried to make whitewater by using the same method I did to add bubbles to the pipe. Unfortunately, because of the odd shaping of the waves, the bubbles were stretching in an unrealistic way. 

Original Attempt of the Water

Instead I drew curves on the surface, used them to split it, and offset the ends. I made sure they could join back to the the main piece to make a solid polysurface with no naked edges.

     After taking a break, I came back and researched about modeling water in Rhino. I began again with a clean surface of the water by using the curve network from the beginning. I found out about the heightfield tool from this website. Using these two images, I created surfaces using heightfield. I created the UV curve to use flow along surface. I adjusted the scale of the waters so they would fit. I used the surface where the waves gradually tapered off for the main body of the leg, so that the waves decreased as it went down the leg. I created a top using patch and used the other wave surface on that piece. I combined the two pieces using blend surface. While this does not match my original idea and reference drawings, I like the way it turned out. The waves are more gentle and natural, as opposed to harsh surfaces coming off to a sharp point.

(There are four images of the edges because it was difficult to fit the whole model in one shot.)

Ghosted Painted Black 1

Ghosted Painted Black 2

Ghosted Painted Black 3

Ghosted Painted Black 4

     Because I wanted a rough and uneven texture, I was not able to rebuild everything to have a smaller point count. Therefore filleting and joining was a problem many times. I discovered the join edges tool, which can join edges that are slightly off from being on top of each other. I had to make extensive use of duplicating an edge, piping it, and using that to create a fillet. I also used curve networks and the network surface tool for almost all of the pieces. I made the water its own solid piece because, if made, I designed it to be a solid, clear material; so even if it is solid, the bubbles and vent would still be visible. The added area of lava at the very bottom acts like it's from a platform shoe.While the end mesh might not appear exactly as I wanted, I feel it looks close to how I imagined with the materials added.

3D Mesh to 2D Drawings

Layer Assignments

     To make the rocky material in keyshot, I used this tileable texture. I used it as-is for the color map, but took it into photoshop to turn it into a bump and then a specular map. I used an advanced material type and scaled the maps until it look alright. I did the same for the lava using this image, but added a bit of diffuse and specular transmission. I gave the metal pipe a hammered chrome material and the bubbles around it a slightly cloudy white plastic. I gave the water a regular clear glass material, but created a gradient image to give it the blue colors. I gave all aspects of the water a bump map I created from this image. I used another series of gradients on the white water to slowly go from the lightest blue to a gray to white. I made the sleeve have a mold-tech material scaled smaller and colored it white.

     

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