Scott Choi: Castle Fall 2017

Concept:
My initial concept for my castle was inspired by the Reunion tower.  Being on a circular platform with a ring around it, my structure just naturally had a spherical and symmetrical theme to it. Most components are repeated around the center in a circular setup.


Techniques: 

Ghosted Image

Ghosted with Keyshot layer assignments

I used cylinder and torus solids to create the base of my castle. I used ArrayPolar to
evenly create the supporting rods for the ring. I then used a combination of curves which were extruded to create the four small towers, which were again placed around the center using ArrayPolar. I created the tower tunnels, rods, and 3 base plates using this same method. For the main tower, I drew half of the outline using a curve, then used the revolve tool to create the shape. This method was also used to create the "chimney's". Some other tools I frequently used were the Boolean tools and loft.

Materials:

I wanted my castle to have a clean, "industrial" look to it. To achieve this, most of the model is comprised of metal materials. I used chrome, aluminum, copper, brass, and anodized metals. I also did not want too many bright colors, so mostly dark/cool colors were used. A small amount of glass was incorporated in the base and the tower window. The base itself is made of carbon fiber.

Andrew F. Scott: Castle Fall 2017

Concept

A conceptual description of your projects and any artistic influences used to create it. My castle is based on the kardasian homeworld


Techniques

 

ghosted image

 

ghosted image with keyshot layer assignments

 Describe the modeling techniques used to create your model


Materials

 Describe your material choices and how they reflect the initial concept of your model.

Brandon Wehenkel: Waffle Lamp

 

Ghosted Black

 

Ghosted Colored

 Ghosted Black and Colored

Concept:
My initial idea was to create a lamp with a lid that also doubled as a frame for my engraved object.  However, with the numerous times, I restarted and changed my idea I had to ditch the idea of a frame for the lamp.  So I made a separate object which I talk further about in my engraving blog post.

I was inspired by Quinn Baldacci's rocket lamp with the lid.  I thought that was an ingenious idea to create a cavity for the light bulb while also keeping a design seamless and uninterrupted by large holes.  I created two designs that integrated the lid aesthetic. First was recreating the idea from Quinn Balacci's rocket and second was the bell shape inspired from Taiwanese Buddhist Temples known as a Pagoda.  I used an actual A-Frame design for the body of the lamp.

I saw the pyramid shape in Tamara Brennan's pyramid lamp and DISENO Y MANUFACTURA DIGITAL CAD/CAM's clear (acrylic) hanging lamp.  Their waffle style was what I wanted to replicate: using the corners as the rib for the horizontal cuts, plus the hanging lamp was gorgeous.  I would have enjoyed incorporating chains into the project, but I made a decision to make the lamps static on a flat surface instead.  I didn't have to worry about gravity and all the annoying small holes for the chain links.

I also was planning on using two materials for this project, so I also needed to figure out which ribs and which cuts were going to be what material.  Unfortunately, acrylic sheets are not cut to a traditional thickness measurement that matched wood sheets, so I had to be precise about where my inset slots were going to be.

Laser Cut Sheets

Modeling Technique:
I used polyline a majority of the time to create unique shapes.  I used curves to create an A-frame which I then polar arrayed 10x to get the style I wanted with a the flat triangle/ asymmetrical rectangle, I Boolean Unioned, Boolean Differenced, Boolean 2 objects multiple times.  I used project to slice the lids and the base.  I alt tapped to duplicate shapes.  I used spiral, twist, and pipe to create the light bulb inside as well as Interpolate Curve.  I used revolve to create the lid.

I had a hard time deciding which style I wanted.  I was going to make a frame for my engraved tile that was built into the lamp, but it just looked ugly.  I spent a lot of time deleting and revising my ideas.  The three styles were mostly from manipulating array polar and boolean 2objects.  I really wanted to incorporate an A-frame style into the design with a pyramid.  I ditched the pyramid idea because it covered up a lot of the triangles that were created from the polar array also I used contour multiple times with many failures with that pyramid shape.  Contour was used after I figured out which design to work with.  I have two materials, so I alternated the lid and the base as wood for a size difference of .1875 inches apart.  And the middle part which I call the torso is .220 inches apart.  I hope that small difference in thickness won't matter.  I felt like I might have messed up somewhere in deciding where to cut due to the size difference.

I used surface --> planar curves as well as extrudeCrv several times in the contour and section process.  I messed up a lot and needed very precise measurements when creating the complex waffle structure.  I followed the tutorial, as well as the class discussions.  I used Orient for the piped ribs.  I used split to cut them.  Again I might have messed up somewhere, so I'm hoping the print works.  This design is very abstract to me, and It has become an ordeal for me when I can't quite figure out how the slices will fit.

I also hope the hole I created for the cord works as well.  I didn't like that the cord could just freely sit anywhere through the design, so I had to create a base for the lightbulb to sit in.

 Keyshot 1 w/ Reference

 Keyshot 2

Materials:
In Keyshot:
I used glass for the vertical pieces and the glass on the lightbulb, I used hard plastic for the lightbulb base and soft plastic for the cord and textured wood for everything else.  I changed the colors of everything except the glass.
I liked the bump on the wood, so I made it slightly more pronounced.  I think originally it's at 0.5, I just bumped it up to 0.6.

 WIP

In real life:
2 - 24" x 48" x .220" sheet of acrylic, $56 each
5 - 24" x 48" x .1875" sheet of MDF.  $7.42 each (didn't end up being .1875 for all of them)
Home depot advertises, Medium Density Fiberboard (Common: 1/4 in. x 2 ft. x 4 ft.; Actual: 0.216 in. x 23.75 in. x 47.75 in.) and even that is still wrong.
Westinghouse Snap-in Candelabra base socket, 6'.
1 LED Lightbulb.
1 bottle of Gorilla Glue
3 bottles of Locktight Super Glue
Tears

Keyshot 3 w/ Cut Sheets

This lamp design was definitely not for beginners.  I had experiences I will never want to reproduce again. MDF is not worth the effort.  It's too fragile, and Home Depot does not cut every 1/4 slab the same.  I had 3 different sizes when I bought 5 boards. Needless to say, none of my slots worked with MDF.  It just broke or became very brittle. I think one vertical piece survived intact.

Lamp 1

 Lamp 2

Lamp 3

Brandon Wehenkel: Granite Tile Engraving

Edit 1

Edit 2

Concept:
I loved the idea of engraving stone.  My sculptor's instinct of mine went crazy hearing that it was possible for this project, so I used one of my old drawings from my beginner's art classes and imported it into curves.   Like many of my other projects in the past, I like to incorporate the human and animal aesthetic, so I designed Bubbah, my gorilla-human character from my scanned object post.

My initial plan was to recreate an old 80s family portrait idea.  Where there is one person, and their face is superimposed and faded behind, off to the back somewhere in the photo.  But it became too muddled.  Too many lines and it didn't quite look how I wanted it.

Ghosted Frame

I wanted to create a waffle frame for this project as well, so the engraved stone wasn't laying flat.  I used an A-Frame design to create the frame.

Detail

The border is designed with this style.

Modeling Technique:
Adobe Illustrator, raster and image trace
Rhino
Photoshop

This cost me a lot.  I have 13,678 curves and 5548 hatches.
I used TWEENCURVES, and that's about it.  I got help from Professor Scott for making curves very quickly, and I used that about 80% of the process.  The other was hatch, copy, paste, move, interpolate curve.  I used picture frame and measured a rough size for my 12x12 tile and just started drawing over the reference plane.  I went into Adobe Illustrator several times to try to import curves, but it looked like garbage.  Just think about how children draw before they know how to, it was just scribbles. Apart from the nose and eyes nothing else was recognizable.  So I had to create the entire design from scratch.  I stayed up till about 4 am for about 5 nights in a row starting my work about 5 pm.  There were a lot of tedious, repetitive moves.

 Frame Laser Cut Sheet with Lamp

I used the same technique as my lamp design for my frame.  I even used some of the same curves. Such as the "A-Frame" curve. I wanted to incorporate an A-Frame design, which I provided a link earlier of what one looks like.  So I used a triangle with a sliced top to make the initial shape.  I sliced the curve a tiny bit more, so the angle the tile sat was similar to a picture frame, where it isn't completely 90degrees.  The frame should slide into the cuts I created; unfortunately, it did not.  Even though I measured 13/32", I should have made the cuts a tiny bit bigger. I used the pipe and orient commands to create the cuts in the planar surfaces.  I used section to create the verticle planes and contour to create the horizontal planes.

Materials:
12" x 12" x 13/32" black granite tile.
2 - 24" x 48" x .1875" sheet of MDF (didn't end up being .1875 for all of them)
Home depot advertises, Medium Density Fiberboard (Common: 1/4 in. x 2 ft. x 4 ft.; Actual: 0.216 in. x 23.75 in. x 47.75 in.) and even that is still wrong.
Gorilla Glue
Locktight Super Glue
Masking Tape
Black Spraypaint

 Building Process

The frame is in the back, and it didn't work out, the materials I bought were too varied in thickness.  I had bought a sheet of MDF 1/4 in size measured it to be .1875 instead.  I went back the next week and got the same material from the same stack on the shelf, and it was a different thickness.  I didn't know this till I was putting the pieces together.  It was also too fibrous and broke with the littlest of pressure. I couldn't get it to fit the tile right either.  I'll need to recreate the design again, and it was my own project within a project, so it wasn't worth the fuss.  My father helped me redesign a new frame from the broken pieces that survived the accident I had.  Its not the prettiest fix but it is very nice in terms of funcionality.  I only wanted something to hold my tile for better viewing pleasure so the image below is to show the alternative for my frame.

 Uncolored Frame

Colored Frame

Based off the cut sheet image, I can see where I went wrong.  I put the horizontal cuts on a different sheet than the verticle cuts.  Because the place I bought the sheets from did not cut all of their sheets exactly the same, I ran into a project destroying issue.  My horizontal sheets could not fit the verticle sheets, and I ended up breaking a bunch of my MDF cuts.  I had to create an entirely new design from my broken pieces.

Engraving

The small details that I shared above did not fully render.  I chose too small of curves together and should have made my curves further apart.  A lot of my detail was wasted to the grain of the stone.  I learned my lesson and will know for my process next time.

Engraving with Frame

Brandon Wehenkel: Pepakura

Ghosted Black

Concept:
We had two ideas.
Idea 1. - Jeremiah and I wanted to create something similar to this.  We experimented with five-sided shape, a six-sided, seven-sided and concluded with a five.  Jeremiah liked the idea of twisting the shape slightly, so we ran with that in the model.  Jeremiah also likes illusions so this concept was perfect for his interests.
Idea 2. - We also wanted to create about 30 squares and hang them from the ceiling in a way that looks like they had exploded from one central space.  The viewer would be able to walk around the space and see it from all sided differently.  This plan was much more ambitious and it would be an amazing task to perform but the process could have taken much longer than two weeks, so we chose to make one shape with many interior perforations instead.

Keyshot 1

Modeling Technique:
Jeremiah sculpted the model with truncated pyramid with five sides.  He then created a stamp that was used to create the interior cutout.  He just duplicated the shape seven times and scaled and moved to create steps.  He also rotated each layer about 10 degrees each.  He used Boolean difference to make cuts both inside and underneath.  The shape was not quite finished when it was initially cut from the inside so I made the decision to slice the shape on the side.  Jeremiah wanted there to be at least 2 large cuts which gave the shape a unique backside.

Keyshot 2

Materials:
In Keyshot:
I used marble for the exterior because I loved the shine the lighting gave on the object.  I had hoped to recreate the same gloss but I didn't find a spray paint that was full gloss, only semi-gloss.  The interior colored sections I used soft plastic for the material because it looked similar to the paint texture.  I did not use a bump map.


In real life:
We used cardboard bought from the fabrication lab.  The blue acrylic paint was applied to the internal cut faces.  We used painters tape to cover up the connection points of the pepakura.

 Gluing

The entire building process was a bit tedious, but we managed to get it finished with only two sessions.  Jeremiah did most of the gluing, and we split taping. I painted and folded pieces.

Interior

We started by painting blue acrylic paint onto the pentagonal faces.  I made sure to label the faces with their corresponding numeric values on the back of the cardboard for easy assembly.  The flaps were much smaller than we had anticipated so instead of waiting for the super glue to tack together, we used hot glue.  The project, for the most part, was a simple task from then on until we put on the exterior faces.  Something didn't translate right from the 3d space to real space.  The thickness of the cardboard wasn't translated in real space so when we assembled the interior cuts, there was a significant gap.  It was too big to force the pieces together, so we chose to create L-pieces cut from scrap cardboard.

 Favorite Angle

After it had been assembled, we covered up the holes with paper and cardboard bits, to save the blue paint from being ruined and spray painted the exterior.  We also attempted to color the gap with white spraypaint.

 Distance

Brandon Wehenkel: Serial Slice

Close Up (Physical Object)

Ghosted Black 3D Scan (Before)

Ghosted Black Serial Slice (After)

Ghosted Black Serial Slice

Concept:
Fall 2016, created a bust of a character of mine with polymer clay then scanned him into digital information.  Because I had several models 6.3M poly, 900k poly, 12k poly, and a 3k poly I thought that maybe this project would be perfect to test the serial slice design with him.  I have a facination of anthropomorpic design so his overall style is designed from several animals:  Gorilla, Chimpanzee, and Human.

Ready To Cut

Modeling Techniques:
How I made the model please refer to my 3D Scanned Object post.
My model started off as 6.3M polys.  I reduced it down to 12,744 polys for this project.  I used Mudbox to do this.  I pressed page down to change the normals map to level 1.  Then I exported as .obj and uploaded it to Maya where I used the cut faces tool to make a nice base for the model.  I used the edge selection tool and the face selection tool to delete any of the excess polys under the line.  Then extruded the mesh to close the hole.  The fill hole command didn't work for me.  I forgot how to manually close it in Maya so I made the hole fairly large so that I could just close it in Rhino with a series of mesh tools.  I used Mesh --> Mesh Edit Tools --> Delete Mesh Faces (to remove several of the weird naked edges around faces); Mesh --> Mesh Repair Tools --> Rebuild Mesh (to eliminate the rest of the naked edges); Unify Normals; Fill All Holes.

I used contour for the serial slicing as seen in the tutorial from class.  I separated each curve by .1875 inches.  The dowels cut are at .25 inches in diameter.  The dowel placement is in a slightly different spot than from the image above.

There are four holes in the model for dowels.  Because my traditional sculpting capabilities aren't perfect the figure isn't symmetrical; remember I used a scanner to make this model so all of that information is also translated. When I put dowels into the shoulders they popped out in bad areas.  I attempted to place the dowels in the most central locations. One of the dowels does not go all the way through while the other pokes out and stops at one of the outer slices.  I did not want it to go through because it would have created an ugly exit. 

I had to use a vice, nuts, and a ratchet strap to press all of the parts together.  I ran into a minor issue with warping so the ratchet strap was useful for pressing the materials together during gluing.

Keyshot Serial Slice (Front)

Materials:
In Keyshot:
I used Soft Maple and mixed mauve with the woods texture to get the color of wood that closely resembles that of Medium-density fiberboard.

In real life:
The wood I purchased is MDF, like I mentioned above, 1/4" 2'x4' sheet which for some reason is actually 3/16" - .1875" at Home Depot.
I found a metal threaded dowel that was 3' long in the parking lot about three months ago.  It is 1/4" in diameter.   I figured I would need it someday since I have 3 various sizes at home of various material types.  I have a few nuts at home that would work for securing the wood together.
I also have plenty of wood glue as well.

 Keyshot Serial Slice (Right)

Keyshot Serial Slice (Back)

Bubbah Natural Light Interior

Comparative

 Bubbah Natural Light Exterior

Bubbah Natural Light Exterior - Backside

Michael Crow: Week 16 - 3D Scan

Concept: For this Project I worked with Melanie Estes. She created a candle overnight with fast drying clay, using small beads and animal sculptures, she created a relief into the wet clay of the candle base  and placed a candle int he top.

Modeling Techniques: Once it dried we scanned the sides of the object, in 12 continuous shots at the wide settings with Standard Definition. After the sides we took a single snapshot of the top to mold onto the rest of our models. Moving into alignment mode I cut out all the background scanned material and we merged the families using the tips of the fins on the dolphins, waves, and Fish Fins. this created a model with .01 deference, a very good result. This allowed us to move onto the smoothing using sandpaper and eventually an overall smooth. from there we were able to make sure there were no holes in the model, and create other , lower poly versions. Going form 1.2 million polys to only several hundred in our Polygonal model.

Materials:While the original Candle holder was made from fast drying clay. I imagined it as a mass produced little under the sea kind of room decoration for little kids. So the materials I went with for it were soft plastics and rubber. I made the candle  a blue color that would both allow for maximum visibility of the relief texture, while also maintaining the theme of the sea.

Keyshot - In Keyshot I imported the model in multiple times and aligned them all up to the grid, using show grid under the camera settings. Making sure my camera was in the proper 11 x 17 ratio I went through thee different lighting environments till I found one that mimicked the street post lamp and night sky as well as I could. making sure that each one had the right gloss, texture,and was casting proper shadows I did a number of renders so that i could composite it to the best single image in Photoshop possible including a clown render for each object, a color Render and a shadow render.