Brittany Jones: Waffle Lamp - "Comet"

Concept

As a school spirited UT Dallas graduate student, I wanted to incorporate the university's outer space theme into one of my projects. Since we're the "Comets" and comets emit light, I thought it would fit well with the waffle lamp project. I browsed Pinterest and Google images for comets and waffle lamps to become more familiar with the fabricated models out there. Then I drew a quick sketch.


Modeling Techniques
In Rhino, I combined a Nurbs sphere and a truncated cone to create the base shape. Then I copied the sphere and scaled it down inside the first sphere. I used the Boolean difference to carve out the center of the comet. For the comet trail, I used the cage editing tool to scale down the middle section of the cone to create a curve. After that I copied the cone shape and scaled it down inside the first cone. Then I used the Boolean difference to carve out the inside of the comet trail. For the notch details of the tail along the sides of the radial slices, I drew a handle curve and extruded it to create a poly surface. Then I modeled four cubes and a couple cylinders for the light bulb holder. I scaled one cylinder smaller than the other and used the Boolean difference to create a 1 inch hole. I copied the piece and moved it to the opposite side of the sphere to create two options for the light bulb placement.

For the contouring process I first contoured the Z axis. Then I created a bounding box and went to my top view to create a radial section for the X axis. After that I went through the process of cutting my ribs. The material thickness and cylinder thickness was 0.12. Then I used the massive unroll script to lay out my contours for slicing.

Materials
I used brown hardboard for the physical material of the Comet lamp. For the light bulb, I chose to get a flickering orange flame to emulate the fire of a comet. Due to the optional light bulb placements and form, the lamp can also be hung upside down.

Brittany Jones: Pepakura - "Loving Reach"

Concept
Professor Andrew F. Scott gave us the idea in class one day. At first, I thought it would be strange having multiple Pepakura hands produced, however, this turned out to be my favorite of all the projects this semester.

As the project progressed, I began to think about the deeper conceptual meaning of the project. Hands are expressive and every individual's hands tell a unique story. I decided to name my project "Loving Reach" to represent my endless reach for love. Whether it's the unconditional love of another, my desire to help, serve, and inspire others through education, or the passionate love of my creative endeavors (3D modeling, photography/cinematography, digital fabrication, and playing/composing piano music).

Modeling Techniques
During one class day, we created molds of our hands. My right hand had a sensitive area due to biting the skin around one of my fingernails, and I didn't want to irritate it further, so I chose to mold my non-dominant left hand. The process of creating a mold was a lot of fun. I hadn't gotten my hands dirty like that in a long time. It was quite liberating!

Professor Scott poured in more casting resin into my mold than the other students so it overflowed and created a round base.

The next step in the process was to use the 3D scanner to scan our hand and then clean up our geometry. I choose to use 300 polygons. I wasn't too fond of some areas of the mesh, so I cleaned it up even more and reduced the number of polys down to 191.

Materials
I chose to use the white cardboard because it was the same color as my resin cast and because it would be easier to paint. Professor Scott suggested using white tape to place along all of the edges to cover the numbers and any holes. During the re-topology phase of the project, I purposefully structured the geometry to produce the outline of a heart on the palm of my hand. When taping, I chose to outline the heart geometry in red tape.

Construction
After unrolling everything in Pepakura, I printed the model and pieced it together with my boyfriend at the 3D studio. The assembly process took about 7 hours total. My boyfriend became frustrated during the last couple hours of assembly, not expecting to spend his entire Saturday evening assembling a 4 ft replica of his girlfriend's left hand; however, listening to music, cracking a lot of "hand" puns, and playing around with the materials brought some enjoyment to the tedious process.

 

Brittany Jones: Laser Cut - Tree House Wall Hanging

Concept
"Treehouse Ln" is the name of the street where I spent my childhood. Thus, I am very fond of tree houses and the youthful air about them. My MFA thesis film is about a young girl restoring an outer space themed tree house, so I wanted to create a logo for the film. I sketched this image about a year ago and thought it would be perfect for laser cutting.

Adobe Photoshop/Illustrator Techniques
In Photoshop, I created a 15 x 15 inch custom file at 600 dpi. I connected my Wacom Bamboo tablet to my laptop and began to sketch the tree house design. I used the circle marquee selection tool and filled it in with black paint. Then I made a smaller circle marquee selection inside the first circle and deleted the selection. After that I began painting the tree house, telescope, and comet design. I exported it out as a .png and opened it in Illustrator. Next, I used the Live Trace tool to convert the rasterized image to a vector graphic. I exported the Live Trace selection as a .dxf file, opened it in Rhino, added a couple holes at the top for hanging, and prepared the file for laser cutting.

Materials
I used brown hardboard leftover from my comet waffle lamp for the laser cut.

Caotan Pham: Pepakura Geometric Unfolding

I decided to make a desktop because almost every aspect of our lives revolves around this piece of equipment. It is such an intricate part of daily life, if it was removed from reality this instant, several sides of our first world society would come to a standstill. Also, the redundancy of designing a computer on a computer seemed fitting somehow.

The entire model consists of three parts: the monitor, the keyboard, and the cpu. After designing all three, I moved them into Pepakura to be unfolded.

I then took it into Illustrator and exported into Rhino to manually fix up the lines and tabs. The neck of the monitor split in a weird position in Pepakura, so I redrew the parts. Additionally, the tabs connecting the neck and the base seemed too small and excessive, so I combined them into larger tabs.

I moved them back into Illustrator for final adjustments and exporting. The desktop still looked like a box at this point, so I drew in a power button and disk drives.

The keyboard, though slightly more trapezoidal, was the same, so I added in cuts to imitate keys. For the sake of cutting time, I decided not to engrave a grid into the top, and instead cut small crosses.

Here they are after the laser. I cut them onto mounting board, which is similar to cardboard, but without the corrugated paper in the middle. Unfortunately, this material did not cut as well, because higher strengths began to burn the paper, instead of cutting through. This meant that I had to go through and, with a knife, cut the parts which the laser could not cut through.

Here the monitor is having its final tabs glued shut. I used painter's tape to hold the edges together. For the monitor, I messed up and built the whole base and neck parts individually and then attempted to fit the neck inside after they had dried, instead of assembling the neck, and then building the base and screen around it. That was a lesson learned.

Here is the finished keyboard. You may be able to see the slight trapezoidal form. Also, while assembling, I noticed that the burn marks on the cardboard were meant to be on the inside, with dashed lines being valley folds, and dotted dashed lines being mountain folds, but I wanted the marks on the outside, so I reversed the folds.

Here is the cpu. It's size proved to be a challenge for the tabs to keep together while the glue dried. The drive cutouts and the power button turned out great.

Here is the monitor. It looked balanced in the 3d model, but as I was assembling it, I was worried it wouldn't stand up. It did, however. The neck holds up fine, and it doesn't tip, which is good.

Here are all three pieces together. It looks a lot more like the real thing than expected. This project was fun, and became some sort of a tribute to my computer habits. Bringing something digital, breaking it down, and bringing it into the physical realm was a good experience.

Brittany Jones: Laser Engrave - Achievement Awards

Concept
This semester I worked a very small part-time job (3.5 hours per week) as an Instructor for a local startup company called Tech EdVentures. I taught three classes: Tiny Tech, Robot Wizards, and a Girls Animation Lab. I had a total of 3 students in my Saturday classes and had the idea to give them achievement awards for completing the courses.

Adobe Photoshop/Illustrator Techniques
In Photoshop, I created a 4 x 6 inch canvas at 300 dpi resolution. Next I copied the Tech EdVentures logo into the file and created the text layers for the achievement awards to include the class name, semester, and students' names. After that I saved the document as a .png and opened it in Illustrator. I exported the selection as a .dxf, imported the .dxf file in Rhino, and prepared the file for laser engraving.

  

Materials

For the material, I used clear acrylic to emulate the laser etched glass awards. In the future, I plan to use vector graphics instead of using a rasterized image.

Caotan Pham: Laser Cut Box

I have a cat at home that sleeps in a small bed at the end of my desk. Sometimes, when she is careless, she will slide the bed in her sleep and it will tip over the side. She may not be as social as a dog, but she is a constant companion nonetheless, and I decided to make a box to prevent her sliding around.

I chose a 12x6x3 inch box from boxmaker.

Here is the finished design in Illustrator. I made a kitten, a cat, a ball of yarn, and a mouse to put onto the sides. I also cut out a large portion of the lid, because even though the notches look good, I thought that my cat may be annoyed by the feel of it, so I opted for the lid, while keeping the open top idea. The bottom has several strips cut out to allow for airflow to prevent moisture from possibly getting trapped under the bed, preventing mold and other growth.

Here are two walls getting glued together. I made this out of the same material as the smash plaque: 2.7mm hardwood plywood.

She let me keep the cutout parts.

Here is the finished product. The burnt edges give it a rustic look, and even the thin tails of the cats, mice, and yarn came out nicely. Assembly went mostly as planned, except that one side I could not fit the burned part facing out. All the other sides, including the top and bottom, could, but not that one side. This is why the long sides have the same shape if you look through them.

Unfortunately, I measured improperly, and the box is too small for her bed. Alternate uses for this box can be for new kittens. The box can be lined with blankets for the kitten to feel warm and secure, and will stay dry because of the slots on the bottom.

Caotan Pham: Laser Engrave

Super Smash Brothers is a Nintendo fighting game that brings in many different characters from many different series to duke it out. It is the game that my friends and I play together the most, and the game that represents our friendship the best. Therefore, I picked the logo to be engraved into wood.
The symbol replacing the "o" in "bros." is the symbol representing the fighting game, which I have reproduced.

The entire thing was drawn in Illustrator. The symbol itself was the easiest, simply creating a circle and subtracting two lines creates the shape. The fire was harder, but it was based from a larger circle, with shapes that were pulled from it, and modified to look like a fireball. The Smash Bros. symbol was then placed on top. The wisps of flame were also simple drawn paths. To add more detail, an outline was traced around the outside of the main fireball. Partial outlines were also drawn on the wisps, resized, and subtracted, to give a lighter feel to them. The levels of black were adjusted for raster depth, and exported into .eps format for the off campus shop I went to.

This is the final product. It was cut into 2.77mm hardwood plywood, which was cheaper than expected, and still relatively soft. It turned out pretty well, and smells like campfire. In hindsight, I should have cut the background into more of a plaque shape, but that is for future consideration.

Here is a closeup of the product. Here you can see the various details of how it was cut. If you look closely, you can see that the laser does not have a steady beam dragging across the board, but instead, it shoots thousands of concentrated beams, with varying strength, to give different depths.

Vincent Lo: Pepakura

Concept

This concept arose in class, and we decided to pursue the idea of Pepakura hands.

Techniques

We started off by creating molds for our hands, and once that was finished, we filled the molds to generate our hand figures. Using Scan Studio, we digitized our figures into scanned data. However, the data was full of holes, so we used Rapidworks to fix them up. We also used Rapidworks to decimate our hands to lower-poly hands. 

At this point, I used Maya to re-topologize my hand using quad draw. I did my best to be efficient with the number of faces while keeping some evenness among them. With a clean and relatively low-poly model, I used Pepakura Designer to layout the mesh. I was able to fit my 2 ft model into a 24x48" sheet. The data was exported into .EPS and .DXF files.

Using Adobe Illustrator, I combined the two files into a single .DXF file, which Rhino can read. After some organization and color coding, I was finally able to setup the appropriate file for laser-cutting.

Materials

For the Keyshot render, I used a gemstone material because I felt it was the most appealing and showed off the faces of the model well. For the sculpture, I used white cardboard for a similar reason. I thought white would be more aesthetically pleasing than brown.