Darrius williams week 10 laser engrave

 CONCEPT:
 For this assignment I used a Photoshop composition I made for my digital imaging class. I chose this image because was based in a personal experience I had the previous year and I wanted to turn it into something physical. I was also curious how might the detail transfer from the source material to wood.
 METHOD:
this completed composition was all original. i started with a few concept images of space, meditations and yoga poses to find what look best when layered to together. to get the color blends I wanted I made multiple of each layer and used different effects such as Gaussian blurs and liquefy and a few others before layering with different fills and opacity's. after which I made it a gray scale image and brought it into illustrator for live tracing.
MATERIALS:
 I used a piece of plane 1/8 inch plywood for the engraving. next time though i will instead use a thicker, higher quality wood as well as setting up my image better to capture missed out detail.

AKMarder: Modular Slotting with Canvas

Joseph Rowe: Week 10 Fall Waffle Structure

For my waffle project, I decided to do a piece that reflected the Fall season and could be used as a table centerpiece. I ultimately chose to do an empty cornucopia that could support an arrangement of fruit. This led me to aligning it vertically with an oak leaf shaped base for support. It would be made from cast acrylic for strength and aesthetics. I considered colors, but settled on clear so that the fruit would become the focal point and people seated at the table could see through it.

Creating this as a waffle structure proved to be a nightmare. My initial model below had only the tip of the cornucopia joined with the leaf shaped base. The model was oriented so that the centermost ribs would provide the needed structural support in a cantilevered arrangement. Alas, after many hours of trying various layer arrangements, I determined that the rib cutting script could not process it without cutting off or removing entirely needed layers.

 

I then altered the model, positioning the cornucopia so that there was a continuous vertical structure in the center of the model. Even so, I had to try at least a dozen different layer placements and orientations before the rib cutting script ran successfully. Even so, the orientation was not what I wanted and I was forced to omit some ribs. Here is the result.

 

Unrolling and laying out the contours for laser cutting was relatively straight forward. I managed to fit them all on a 24 by 48 inch sheet of 0.08” acrylic.

 

In retrospect, I learned that the rib cutting script is ill suited to models without solid central structures. I may, as time permits, manually slot my original design.

Joseph Rowe: Week 9 Halloween Slots

 

My slots project has a Halloween theme. I decided to do something my grandchildren would enjoy and the timing was right. The traditional “scary objects” of a jack o’lantern, haunted house, cemetery, witch, ghosts, bats, cats, owls and zombies would be included.

I decided to make a structure with two large crossing pieces as a base with lots of slots on top for attaching smaller stacks of objects. The base sections include the jack o’lantern, house, large witch with a cauldron, and a cemetery with a dead tree. The other objects were made in various sizes with slots on both the bottom and top to facilitate a flexible “stack” structure. The smallest pieces have slots only on the bottom to be used as the topmost elements. All shapes were derived from non-copyrighted silhouettes downloaded from the internet. Some were modified and combined.

 

 

I decided to use single ply cardboard for economic reasons, so the slots are 0.12 inches wide. Because I had so many different shapes and sizes, the array function was of little use in the layout. I had to cut most of the slots individually and that was a tedious process.

The end result worked well and the children thoroughly enjoyed it. It can be disassembled and reassembled in different ways each Halloween. I may recut it in a stronger material for durability. I’ll be adding a photo of the assembled piece later.

Victoria Tran: Week 10 - Laser Engraved Mountains Landscape

I wanted to take advantage of the rastering affect the laser system can offer, so I found how perfect this Adobe Illustrator (AI) tutorial could achieve that. With the tutorial, I warmed up to AI and learned alot about what it can offer.

Afterwards, I went in and grayscaled the whole thing and changed the stroke colors to match how I want it engraved and cut.

 Now... here comes the frustrating part. When uploading my AI file into the laser system, the system does not recognize any colors other than my different shades of rastering. No engravings, no cut.

I went back home and tried to fix the file: made sure the strokes were at 0.001 inches, the colors were formatted or chosen correctly, named and organized the layers, and I got rid of the sun's swirl and my text. At this point I wanted a simple and clean picture, so I got rid of the swirl. The text was not being recognized correctly because I downloaded the font online, so I got rid of that too. Overall, it did not change a thing when I went back to the lab.

We had to transfer my illustrations into Rhino to get more control as to what has happened. Ronald, the technician, really helped me out here. He advised me on labeling and cleaning up the layers. Then he taught me how to fill in each layer through "hatching". Lo and behold the colors to engrave and cut now appear on the laser system. We still could not find out why the AI file did not work as well as Rhino did.

 I bought a 24" x 24" x 1/4" mixed (multi-purpose) wood at Home Depot for (around) $5. The landscape is engraved onto half of the wooden board. I chose a non-gradient wood, because the landscape will get a clean background (with no distractions) to be focused on. It turned out very well. However, the darker rastering did not show as much of a contrast as I would like.

T Savage - Laser Engraving

Laser-cut MDF. I am still deciding how to finish the project.

     This project was a collaboration with a close friend of mine. She had drawn a transgender symbol (the large symbol here, with the male, female, and mixed gender arrows) with a K (her first initial) attached. This became the centerpiece of the cut. Outside of the symbol is a field of chaotic lines reflecting both her relationship with her body and the way others sometimes define her based on her body. Inside the symbol, however, the lines are much thinner, calmer, and ordered - to reflect the calmness that identifying with the label and that transition can bring.

Rendered view of the symbol.

    Here is a rendered view of the model. The female and male portions of the symbol are colored with the colors typically associated with them, and the mixed arrow is yellow, to be as different as possible from both.

Engraving file in Rhino

    The background is the most interesting part of the process; it was created by rendering difference clouds in GIMP (a free raster image editor), then thresholding out the darkest and lightest parts. Afterwards I traced the raster image in Inkscape, converted it to .ai and imported it into Rhino where I had a Make2D view of the model and trimmed the background around it.

Will McKiernan Laser Engraving

For this engraving I decided to use a photo of my grandfather I took. I really enjoy the contrast and varying values in the photo and wanted to see how it would turn out as an engraving. I was excited to try transferring one medium into another and I felt this picture would work well.

I first put the photo into Photoshop and adjusted the Levels to really enhance the values. I then ran the photo through two Guassian blur filters and adjusted the blur until I had very clearly defined value shapes and less fine detail. Then I transferred the photo into Illustrator and expanded it, then traced it to create paths distinguishing all the different value shapes and allow for engraving.

I wanted to use a fairly light colored wood because I felt that it would display the image the best. I choose a rough plank of wood that had some imperfections across the surface because I felt that the small imperfections would add a good artistic element to the image. Unfortunately, the gradient wouldn’t show up on the wood I chose. However, I am still very happy with how it turned out.