Sean Johnson/Blake Philley: Final Knight Chess Piece

We decided to pick the Knight for our piece, but instead of the traditional Horse head we decided to make our piece a bit more literal and make a knight's helm. The original form was made in Maya using planer modeling, then transferred into Rhino for proper scaling. Once we were happy with the size we brought it into Pepakura and unfolded it. We ran into a small snag once it was printed but all it really did was slow us down a bit. 

We put a scratched metal texture on our model in Keyshot since we both thought it would be cool to make an even bigger statue made of actual steel. It also made a lot of sense considering it's a piece of armor. putting a metal texture on it wasn't too insane as far as our ideas usually go.

The End result was two separate pieces, the helm itself and a base for it to rest on. We took this picture just to be silly, but we both ended up liking the idea of being able to wear the over-sized helmet so we cut off the tabs that were intended to fuse the pieces and left the helm wearable. We're both pleased with how it turned out and ended up having a good time working on it, even with the crunch time. 

Sean Johnson: Week 13 Geometric Unfolding

Well, you said all we needed for this post was a picture of the end result sooooo...yeah. Here ya go.

Sean Johnson: Week 12 Lamp

Of the five prototypes I made, I liked this gear shaped one the most. It had a good solid look to it and I liked the radial symmetry it had. Just in case you haven't noticed yet....I really like symmetry.As for what made me come up with the prototype in the first place, I was actually fixing my dad's watch for him and All the gears just looked really nice. I've always liked machinery with visible gears and pistons so I figured why not make a lamp that was a big 'ol gear?

The shape started out in Maya where I extruded some of the faces on a cylinder to make the outter form. Then I took that and brought it into Rhino and booleaned a hole through it. After that I used the pipe method we talked about in class to end up with the image above..

I picked a wood grain texture because once again I was going to be using hardboard for the final result. I actually would like to make my lamp out of actual wood but that isn't really an option right now so hardboard it is.

Sean Johnson: Week 10 Waffle

I wanted to make something that just had a nice clean look to it. Something with a good flow to it, and not too complex. I wanted a good amount of space between the ribs so that it didn't look too packed together either. I ended up with a smooth wave-like design that I really like. I plan on hanging it on a wall and using the chambers like little shelves for various stones and crystals.

The building process was pretty straightforward. I extruded a plane and used the contour command along the plane's original axis to get the basic ribs. The scripts for cutting the ribs actually worked perfectly and I didn't even need to clean up any of the edges afterwards.  

Going off my concept of keeping it simple, I picked a flat even material with a low specularity, and since I knew I was going to be making the real waffle out of hardboard I went with a light brown color.

Sean Johnson: Week 9 Slots

I approach this project with to intention of making a set of slots that I might be able to give my kids, should I have any down the road. That said, I didn't want any particularly sharp edges and I wanted to make sure I had plenty of small connector pieces as well.

I wanted to have a large variety of different pieces, and each of them to have at least some kind of symmetry. Each of the pieces was made using a series of curve booleans. I made sure to fillet all of the sharp edges and used polar arrays to arrage the slots on the ends of pieces.

Sean Johnson: Week 6 Serial Slices

I decided to build a Helmet that I had designed a while back. I used basic plane extrusion in Maya for almost the entire form, except for the eye ports and the "seem" between the front and back halves, which was face extrusion. For my Keyshot renders I wanted to show off the forms more than look like the final result. I actually ended up using one of the skin materials for the top render, because I really liked how well it accented the various curves, without being too shiny. I also used one of the gemstone materials in order to show some of the densities as well as the support holes in the sliced model.

Sean Johnson: Week 4 Flashlight

I didn't so much have inspiration for my flashlight, so much as I used it for practicing some of the Rhino tools. I made sure to use each of the tools we talked about in class at least once, such as the different booleans as well as curve projection and the like. While I was submitting to shapeways I picked the blue plastic for my flashlight so when I brought my model into Keyshot I put a similar material onto it.