Anisha Chaudhary Week 11: Laser Engraving

Concept:

For my Laser Engraving Project I decided to use an outline of a sculpture that I had made in a previous sculpture class. I really like the expression in the sculpture and I think the lines across this cat's face will turn out interesting when engraved into wood. This project is supposed to show the life of an aggressive alley cat. I got inspiration from Jordan Debney when creating this, since he has a variety of thick lined drawings that have a similar expression. His art work can be found on Instagram or online.

http://jordandebney.com/

Techniques:
I used a bamboo tablet on Photoshop and traced the image directly. I went back and added cross hatching to indicate the dark spots and shadows on the cat. For the background, I looked up images of trashcans, milk cartons, fish bones, rotten bananas, and yarn. For the banana, milk carton, and trashcan, I directly traced a .png. For the rest I took creative license to make the fish bones and yarn, since those are a lot less simple.

Materials:
I will be using my cherry plywood to engrave this image. I am thinking of painting sections after with some acrylic or gouache paint. I plan to paint the eyes green, the fur white, and the tongue a bright pink. For the background, I will paint a section of the milk carton blue and white. The banana will be yellow with brown showing through. The trashcan I might paint a silver color if I have that in acrylics. I will leave the fish bone alone and I will paint the yarn with orange.

I am going to take this image into illustration so that I can create curves to put into Rhino.

When I was working with the curves in Rhino, I struggled to create hatches inside of my thick lines. I think the mistake I made was drawing this piece in Photoshop instead of Illustrator, since it may have been easier if I had drawn AND traced in Illustrator. I decided to just engrave this piece as hairline outlines. I have changed my medium to Prisma colors

Completed with Prisma Colors

Maizie Desmarais: Week 11 Laser Engraving

Concept: My laser engraving project was heavily influenced by mandala designs. I wanted this design because I find beauty in patterns and thought it would look really cool to engrave on wood and then stain different colors. This design is actually from Final Fantasy X and I really loved the art in the game so I wanted to bring it to life.

Techniques: I worked in photoshop to work on the design and clean it up since there were no decent pictures of the glyph and I color selected each layer of greyscale to enhance it.

Melanie Estes: Week 12 Waffle Lamp

     In her spare bedroom, my grandma has a lamp that hangs from the ceiling above the nightstand. I've always wanted a hanging lamp like that, and so I played with the idea of making one with either a space or moon theme. I settled on a cloud and decided that I could always add an acrylic crescent moon to it later if I wanted. But, because the light needed to be able to sit on a table, I decided to make a base for it as well.

Cutsheet

Solid model

     I made the basic structure out of several spheres. I scaled and moved them in a scattered way to represent a classic poofy cloud. I combined them all with boolean union. So that it can sit on  table, I created a base I planned to  make out of wood. I made a simple truncated cone and used boolean difference to subtract the space where the cloud would sit on top. Following the tutorial videos, I created a bounding box and then contoured and sectioned off the cloud with a 1" vertical distance and 8 radial cuts. I went through the process of creating curves from the intersections, then piping them, snapping one end's center to the middle, coping, and snapping the pasted piece's other end to the middle. I planared and split the cut curves and split them with the pipes. However, when I went to lay them out with the imported unroll tool, they covered more than just one 24x48 sheet of each material. So I went ahead and laid them all out to the appropriate shape. When I went to scale, I selected all of the laid out cuts and the solid model and scaled them at the same time, ensuring that the lay outs would then fit in the required single sheet. I redid the contour and pipes. When doing the pipes, I used a .22 thickness as the assignment page said this was the thickness for plexiglass. I followed the process once more and finally unrolled and laid out the pieces. I redid the text with a single line font. I managed to get this scaled version to fit into one 24x48 sheet. To take the model into keyshot, I extruded each of the surfaces. I used the both sides settings and used the near osnap to extrude the exact width of the cuts. I created a lightbulb and wire as well. The lightbulb is a unioned elipse and cylinder, and the metal piece is 3 squished spheres and 2 cyliners. I made the wire by drawing a curve of 2 circles, triming the overlaping pieces, filleting the corners, and using sweep 1 rail to extrude it down a long curve I had drawn. I filleted all the edges of these pieces, but not the wooden pieces because the laser cutter does not fillet when it cuts.

Ghosted painted black

Layer assignments

     On the cut pieces, I used two materials in Keyshot: a wooden one for the base and a clear one for the cloud. I gave the bulb a clear glass, the metal a rough steel, and the wire a mold-tech. I scaled the size of the mold-tech textures down very small to have a very slight bump quality. I added a noise to the color and used a cream and light gray for the two colors. For the metal, I increased the roughness and darkened the color. I only increased the refraction for the bulb. I used a darker wood material that included a bump map and decreased its shininess and scale of textures. For the plexiglass, I used a clear rough plastic with increased refraction index. I imported a small sphere and gave it an emissive area light at 40 wattage.

Render1

Render 2

Render 3

Render 4

     I used one 24" x 48" sheet of acrylic for the cloud and one 24" x 48" sheet of birch plywood for the base. I stained the wood a light golden color before assembling it. I used super glue for bot the cloud and the base to ensure that the pieces would stay together.

Image 1

Image 2

Image 3

     I bought a yellow LED bulb on sale at Walmart, but could not find a simple socket with a chord and plug for a standard size bulb. Instead I bought one of the porcelain bases that screw into a ceiling and have an on/off pull. I planned for it to sit on to 3rd wooden vertical level, and while I trimmed two of the radial pieces so that it would sit flat, the base was too large to fit inside the Plexiglas cloud. Michael helped me solve this problem by disassembling the base and fitting the socket into the small hole in the 3rd layer of wood. This way, the bulb sits nicely inside of the cloud. As Professor Scott said, the larger bulb was too bright. He suggested using a piece of paper in the center of the cloud to diffuse the light. I found a piece of scrapbook paper at Michael's that is a slightly transparent white. I rolled and glued it into a tube and cut it at an angle to correspond with the angled opening in the top of the cloud.

Randall Villegas Week 11: Laser Engraving

Concept: For my laser engraving, I wanted to base it off of an old project and I decided my castle would have the most interesting  shape and intrigue to work with for the engraving. When I found out the laser engraving would work well with thick paper, I knew I wanted to do something something with watercolor paper and ink wash. While I did change it some from the original project, I think the essence has stayed and will make for an interesting piece.

Process: I had the modeled prepared essentially, all I needed to do was remove everything that wasn't part of the main structure, pillars, stairs, etc and begin to make my 2d image. I used make 2d with the four views to solidify that my front view choice was the one I wanted to continue with for the project. I scaled down the front view and made a border with the hatch tool. I decided on some varying engrave depths and made a cut inside the papers to stay within the 8x10 sizing.

Materials. I used a thick paper for the laser cut, I wanted to make something that looked like a drawing that was framed in a design. The burn was slightly lighter than I would like, but the over quality is good and detail is ultimately discernible.

Rebecca Genung: Week 11 Laser Engraving

For this project I wanted to do a heart. Heart abnormalities run rampant in my lineage: so much so that I, my mother, and my great-grandmother all have a extra, fully formed, and functioning valve. I also have a heart rate averaging 4 times higher than the healthy amount for someone of my build. I'm not unhealthy, it's just genetic. With that in mind: I will die of a heart attack one day relatively soon. To me, hearts don't represent emotion but rather the duality of life and death. My heart powers my body, but it will ultimately be the thing that kills it.

For my image, I drew a heart in vector in PhotoShop with the pen tool (shape mode). Then I imported the .PSD file to Illustrator and converted it to a .AI file. I wanted to imply the animation of a beating heart.

While I think cut metal would be the nicest looking,  I went with cardboard for financial reasons. While the lines were smooth, the cut has several puncture areas that stand out. I still like how it turned out though.

Jose Diaz - Waffle

When thinking about what to make for the waffle project I knew right away that I wanted to do ceiling light. My parents are in the middle of remodeling their dining room. And I thought this was be a great way to incorporate something I made by making a ceiling light for them.

I wanted to make the waffle structure as simple as I could in order to make it as big as the 2’x4’ laser bed would let me. So I avoided making small pieces that would later take up space on the plywood I was using. So I created a truncated octagonal pyramid that was about a 1 ½ ‘high and 1’ wide. Then I created a cylinder that was 5” in diameter and used it to punch a hole through the center using the Boolean difference feature in order to provide a way to change the light bulb. For the horizontal pieces I used the contour command to slice those sections. And then the section command to create a radial slice for the vertical pieces. Then I used the waffle and unroll scripts to lay the pieces out for cutting. Then I went back and cleaned up my edges so that my slots where cut cleanly.

Once my waffle structure was cut I stained the birch plywood I used a dark brown so that it matched the edges of the pieces and it hid the burn marks on the underside of the wood. After that I used satin polyurethane to give it a matte almost rough look to it. Once dry I put the lamp together and attached a ceiling light kit to the smaller side of it and secured it with liquid nails, I wanted to make sure it didn’t fall apart.

Hannah Revelle- Week 11 Laser engraving

Concept 

For my Laser Engraving project I want to make a hand mirror for when I travel. I have a tattoo of a sun so I am following this design to start than I played around until I found a appealing design. 

Technique

I made 3 curves for the rays of the sun than used the rotate command with copy to yes to make a complete circle. I than joined the outer layer. The inner ray is just one curve I made and than the waffle design that will be engraved on my piece is using the command Hatch. I have an inner cut for my mirror and I am printing a blank back to attach the mirror to.