Michael A. Rodriguez, Project 2: Castle Model

 

Concept:

For the concept of this project all I wanted to do was make a castle that was in SPACE. So, from my imagination, I wanted to just let my creativity have a go at using rhino, and came up with this. At this point my cartoonish creation barely resembles a castle but hey a base is also a castle. The model started to look cartoony straight from the get go so I decided to roll with it and keep up the cartoon space ship aesthetic. 

 Process:

The process was slow, and because of my models angled shape it was difficult to use the polar array command to speed up the process as a whole. For now, I'll start at the beginning. Since the main aspect of this project was to utilize basic shapes and combine them to get more complex geometries, most of the modelling done with my castle ship was done through placing and scaling basic shapes, to make more complex ones. for example, the central tower was made with a topless cone, then I mirrored it and scaled it down, all while using control points to make sure the base of the two shapes was even allowing them to be BOOLEAN UNIONED together. I applied this principle as I worked down to make the body of the ship, repeating the process and rescaling as I went to form the hull and central tower. next, I used control point curves and the loft command to make the oddly shaped wings of the vessel. However, what's a mothership without armaments? with the body of the vessel solidified, I began constructing the weapons by combining an array of basic shapes like cylinders, torus', cones, spheres, and cubes. I made these components at different sizes and put them together like you would a model car to make some cool weapon systems for the ship. I took this a step further and implemented the same method for the shields and energy systems; copying and pasting objects along the way to give the ship the symmetry that all world ending motherships have. However, I felt as if I wasn't demonstrating enough core skill, and knew that for the secondary turret towers, detail needed to be added to them using the polar array command. It was very easy to use the polar array command on a circular base such as the cones that were the ceiling of these secondary towers to give them cool detail, as well as windows to the shaft of the tower itself. feeling bold at this point, I used the polar array command to add windows to the hull of the ship. However, Since the hull is a polygonal shape, the windows pathed around to their relative positions in the preview circle, but each window then had to be manually turned and rotated to get it to fit and look natural on the angular sides of the ships hull. 

Materials:  

in the final rendering phase of the project, I found myself sticking to a lot of metallic textures that were provided in the rhino rendering/materials engine, as well as some glass for the windows and energy projections. I did this to start to maximize on the space ship characteristic of m project, as all the small details on the exterior of the castle ship had only kept me focused on the cartoon aesthetic. One problem I found with the rhino rendering software was that it was impossible to get good lighting to have my metallic materials shine properly. in fact, the lighting seemed to be static and the shine was in a preset place based on my perspective viewing location. All in all, I was ha with the way that m cartoony space castle turned out, looking like something straight out of "invader zim".  

Michael A. Rodriguez, Project 1: Surface Population

 

Concept:

Above I have attached an image that was my concept for the surface population project. I happened across this image and it's simplicity really convinced me to try and recreate this image with the basics of grasshopper and surface population techniques. Simply put, the object is a sphere with tube like barnacles on the outside, both of which were basic shapes I knew I could easily produce in rhino. I began this project with the goal of reproducing a spherical barnacle, or at least a ball with holes in it. 

  Process:

The Process was something I just needed to keep rather simple; as I knew that manipulating the Rhino Grasshopper software would give me trouble and even a couple of errors the first time I attempted to run it. I started out with a basic sphere, followed by producing a tube. Next, I connected the sphere to the surface command block and the tube to the populator command block. After this process, all that was left to do was to bake the object into a new layer. One thing I would leave as a note to myself would be to decrease the amount of tubes I had set to populate the surface area, as well as decrease their overall size. the creation of my populated object put quite a strain on my computer and resulted in me crashing the program and losing a lot of progress the first couple of tries. Remember to save your work kids.

Materials:

With the end result turning out to relatively resemble the concept image, I was satisfied with the modelling and software usage of grasshopper. Using the renderer built into rhino, I applied a red mulch texture to the sphere, and further edited the render later by applying a plastic deep red to the tubes to get the resemblance to the concept image a little bit closer. The only difficulty here was making the realization that baking the object allowed me to texture the tubes and the sphere differently if I wanted to. without this knowledge, I would have had to to stick with the first render in the image with the orthographic display. However, I liked the outcome in the second rendered image that much more and decided to take a bit of extra time to get it where I wanted it. 

Kenny Tentri: Project 1 Surface Population

Concept:

As a musician I always try to incorporate music somehow into my designs. I initially wanted to model a tenor saxophone, but it proved to be a little too difficult with my current experience. I've always been fascinated with guitars, because there's various types of there but they tend to share the same shape and design. I used this outline as the basis of my model, because it provided a shape that moves dynamically similar to music. I kept this surface relatively simple, because I wanted the population objects to be the main point of focus.

Technique:

I inserted a reference picture of a guitar into Rhino, where I could begin to construct a rough outline with the control point curve tool. I duplicated a cleaned up version of this curve, and used the loft command to create the actual surface to be populated. 

For the population object I experimented quite a bit before I settled on something I liked. I felt like many of the circular primitives looked too disconnected, and one box was too plain. Instead, I joined multiple boxes together and randomized their heights within Grasshopper. This introduced some more dynamic contrast throughout the piece, similar in concept to music like previously mentioned.

Materials:

Finally, I chose blocks within the sculpture at random to place on a separate layer. This allowed me to easily apply different textures as needed. Within the Rhino viewport I used the same matte plastic texture and just colored them differently. My main concern at that point was understanding what it might look like before importing into Keyshot. The weaving and interplay between the two textures reminded me of sculptures like this, so I decided to employ a mahogany wood and glass texture in Keyshot.

This project definitely taught me a lot about the Rhino workflow, and although the final product wasn't too complex in concept or execution I like how it turned out. 

Madison Larmeu Week 4: Surface Population

Week 4: Surface Population

Madison Larmeu 

Ghosted View: Ouija Planchette

Concept:

I have a love and fascination of the paranormal and often cause myself great distress watching horror films about possessions. It was difficult coming up with a concept for my design (that I felt I could ACTUALLY create) and I finally settled on something that is frequently used in the ghostly genre of horror films: the Ouija board. Ouija boards themselves usually do not have very unique surface structures - they are essentially a rectangular wooden board - so I thought I'd focus on a smaller, but essential, component of the Ouija board: the planchette. Planchettes are the small heart shaped objects with a circular viewing port that are used by participants. They are usually quite small, but I wanted to consider what it might look like in a larger sculptural sense. 

When considering what I should utilize to populate the surface, I tried to think of significant patterns/objects that are often associated with Ouija boards. There were three shapes I tested: eyes, stars, and cat faces. Of each, I felt the eye was most representative of the object itself without looking too kitschy or too complex. The stars felt a little too childish and didn't immediately scream Ouija like I was hoping. The cat face, although cute, was a little bit too complex of a shape. The eye was abstract enough that it offered an appealing facade, but was also explicit enough to make a direct connection between the object.

Surface Population Illustration 1

Techniques:

In order to get the Ouija planchette surface I utilized the torus 3-D shape which produced a donut like structure for the base of my object. Then I turned the points on and manually manipulated the points until I was satisfied with the shape. I was primarily focused on getting the upside-down heart like shape and then I began focusing on other aspects of the object. 

After I formed my root structure, I created by surface population object (and two other variations as specified earlier) in the shape of an eye. Using the extrude curve tool I made the object 3-Dimensional to utilize in the next phase: the box morph.

This was by far the most difficult part of construction I faced. In order to map the surface population object onto my root surface I needed to use the Grasshopper plug-in to create a box morph. I began by setting the surface and brep (boundary representation) to the root surface and surface population object. Then I began to create the 'grid' that the brep would map onto by using three tools: dividedomain^2, Sbox (surface box), and number sliders. Dividedomain^2 was used to create the grid like field that would be used to map out the brep objects and how many of those objects it would produce. In order to control the amount of objects I needed to utilize the number sliders. Then I created an Sbox component then used the root surface, the dividedomain^2, and the number slider (to determine depth) to map that grid onto the actual root surface. Then I used a box morph which compiled the output from my Sbox, and the brep object and populated the surface to create a unique appearance.

Surface Population: Illustration 2

Materials:

The materials that I used were a little bit less planned and more so about experimenting with the possible combinations. I separated the model into three separate groups to experiment with different materials and their interactions with one another. The first group I painted a bluish bruise color. I chose this color because I knew that I wanted the colors to remain dark and maintain this eery appeal, but I didn't want to choose black as the primary color because I felt it would make it difficult to experience the surface itself. Next I chose to experiment with a metallic bronze colored material. I wanted something to offset the matte colored paint without using bright colors. I chose metal because I thought it would add a sense of solidity and tangibility to the object. The paint I enjoyed, but it still felt a bit too flat and so choosing a material with a glossy texture felt appropriate. Finally, I chose to use a black plaster material. This was primarily because I wanted to draw focus to the lower field of view and less about the material itself. The opportunity to experiment with these different materials allowed me to consider the properties themselves and how I could utilize them to exhibit the curvatures of the object in a more profound way. 

The biggest difficulties I faced during this project was dealing with programs like Rhino and Keyshot on an outdated laptop. I, unfortunatel,y learned that my laptop has a difficult time supporting the Rhino program, so my computer crashed seven times throughout the entire process of creating and completing my project. Furthermore, I found out that Keyshot has the ability to nearly set my laptop on fire. This was incredibly disheartening because there were key materials that I wanted to utilize using the KeyShot program so I was a bit perturbed by this experience. I wanted to experiment with wood textures (wood being the primary component of most Ouija boards) because I felt it was a realistic material that would be used in the creation of an object like the planchette, but also because I would have liked to see it's interaction with glass and/or plastic components.

Erika L. Skaar Project 1: Surface Population

 

Concept: I will be honest with this first piece I was just trying to understand the software. There isn't much in the way of a pre-ordained concept here. I squeaked out a basic shape to give me an idea and understanding with all the tools we have learned to use during class. I will use this though as a starting point, I had help from Professor Scoot in getting this beauty populated. I would like to mark this as my beginning, as simple as it may be.

Process: Arduous, yes, however, I emerged victorious. I went back to the lectures and rewatched them several times to understand and mimic the annotations and engravings. I also had to troubleshoot my dimension text and read through blog posts and watch youtube videos. 

I am waiting for KeyShot to approve my student status, So I would like to eventually update my post with advanced software. My first post isn't pretty or skilled in any way, but I am proud of it none the less, it is only up from here.

-EDITED-

I adjusted the size, DPI, focal point, and brought out the surface on second picture.

Concept: I wanted to start working towards making a model that looks are at least reminded me of something organic. I chose an Urchin, it has a beginner level shape that I felt I could work with well enough to make something in between geometric and real.

Process: I started with my centerpiece that I populated with tubes, which gave it a very sea creature feel. Inspired by the "Art Forms in Nature" I wanted to try multiple surface population objects in one picture for practice on my next assignment/personal project I am planning. So I added the outer ring, as more of a space-esque urchin. 

Finale: I was able to get URCHIN in KeyShot and play with it, I couldn't figure out how to blur the background, so I did a vignette. I also wanted a foot, and couldn't figure out how to get that in the picture. 

Andrew F. Scott Project 1 Surface Population

 

This post is provided as a guidelines for Blog Posting in general and the surface population model  specifically. When posting to the blog always frame your presentation in this manner.

 

 

Concept:

I wanted to use the surface population project as a opportunity to activate one of my favorite forms, the Mobius Strip.  I have been attracted to this form since some of my early studies of the work of M.C. Escher. In Escher he used ants to activate the form in my project I decided to use a different approach to reveal the underlying beauty of this form. I used the Viewport Renderer in Rhino to produce these images to show off both the form and the iso-curves that defines geometry in Rhino.

 

 

 

Process:

I obtained the mobius strip surface by downloading the LunchBox plugin from the Food$Rhino Website The food for Rhino website has many add-ons that extends the capabilities of both rhino and Grasshopper. I created two modules to populate my model. after applying each to the mobius surface I decided to enjoy the best of both worlds by combining the two. I also added pipes to my design by dividing the UV surface parameters of the surface and activating the lines.

 

I created two different compositions to show how you can approach the orthographic illustration that will be used to show off the dimensions of the model for 3d printing. At 10 inches this is a large model. If I were to have it done I would probably reduce the size 25%. I used this illustration as an opportunity to explore different colors and materials using the viewport renderer. In one image I made the curves visible so that they could be incorporated in the illustration output from Rhino. In the former Make2d was used to produce the orthographic curves that were then pass through Illustrator on its way to Photoshop.

 

Materials:

When I saw the model I immediately though of it as a canopy sculpture that would float above horizontally. I took two distinct approaches to the illustrations that Illustrate what can be done using the Viewport Render and then Keyshot. Surface materials were applied to the Rhino model to enhance the characteristics of the materials. I used metallic and paint materials to enhance the forms. In the keyshot Rendering I decided to use a gem material to see what glass would like like. I also created an ambient occlusion pass to enhance the form in Photoshop. 

Version 2

Andrew F. Scott: Project 1 Surface Population

 

 Concept

What are the underlying concepts for your design. Please include Links to references

 

Process

Describe the processes and software used to execute your idea.

 

Materials

How do your material choices in Keyshot reinforce your conceptual idea.