Ceramic 3D Print

First off for this project I started with a couple of very rough sketches, some of them just being concepts or ideas rather than fully worked out pieces. My two favorite ideas out of my concepts were the idea of a cup which starts energetic at the bottom and ends calm at the top, as well as the idea of the base being a triangle, which lofts to a square, which lofts to a pentagon, which lofts to a hexagon, and so on.

These two ideas sort of came together in the concept my group and I chose to be our final. The model, most clearly demonstrated in the slicer rendering, starts as fairly clustered waves at the bottom, then they slowly disperse until eventually the form reaches a circle at the top. The way this form was achieved was lofting six-sided stars, then a hexagon, and finally a circle together. As the form goes up, the points of the stars get shorter and the "body" of the star becomes a bigger and bigger diameter.

Possibly the most enjoyable part of this model for me is moving through the different layers in slicer. From the top view the shape seems to almost convulse.

During the printing the star shapes definitely became apparent. Apart from one minor hiccup, the finished print turned out extremely clean and surpassed my expectations. My group has agreed to me taking ownership of the cup, so once it is bisqued I plan to glaze the inside and upper outer portion white, either gloss or matte, and the bottom half of the outside gloss black. This project really fed the little industrial designer inside me and I am looking forward to doing much more with the ceramic printer.

Hollow Form Chalice Completed

Along the road of getting this project printed, there were quite a few hiccups. First off is that the support structure for the handle was being printed solid, second being the fact that the print itself took over 6 hours to complete, and finally the MendelMax isn't capable of printing 8 inch tall objects as we originally thought. The final problem listed was solved by breaking the Chalice into 2 sections, the base/handle and the bowl. once these 2 parts finished printing they were welded together with acetone. Because of the acetone welding, the cup is actually water tight! The final cup idea obviously incorporates the twisted mesh from my concept, but Mark's concept in integrated in a slightly more subtle way. Both of us thought that his chosen concept slightly resembled a water tower, so the idea of it holding water is carried over into the final Chalice. In the end I am very pleased with how our chalice turned out. Enjoy!

Hollow Form Print Progress

This is the concept picked out of Mark's batch of hollow form concepts, mildly resembling a twisted water tower

This is my concept that was chosen out of my 10. It has essentially no function and was made purely for aesthetics.

I know that my sketches are incredibly crude but I've always found that quickly getting mt ideas onto paper is much more effective for me than putting time into properly drawing the concepts in a realistic manner. As well I find doing really rough concepts helpful because the less refined they are, the more there is open to interpretation. This leaves room for new ideas to be easily added in your mind if any come up in the future.

 Mark and I were pretty stumped on the combination of our 2 designs for quite some time. A lot of the ideas we were making into rhino models were definitely visually interesting but there was just something missing from all of them. We remained stumped with one of our concepts until we realized that we could essentially just take the cap off of it and turn it into a chalice. With a few hours of mixing and refinement we ended up with something that I think we are both pretty proud of. For assurance we each made our own final version of the chalice idea so we could have 2 options of models to print.

For an unknown reason when we went to print off the chalice, slicer decided to make the center mesh handle solid. Because we were so caught up in the excitement of actually printing something off for the first time, neither of us realized that the one part was going to print solid until we were already 40 minutes into the print. So our options now are to either fix the model we are currently using or to send the 2nd model we created to the printer. Either of these two options would work fine.

Another modification I'd like to make to the model would be to decrease the angle at the base of the chalice. In our first attempt at printing some parts at the bottom got a little bit wispy because it was printing at such a high angle

Papercraft Project Complete!

It's complete! After hours of tedious work the project came together. I never made a final parts count but it is easily in in the 110-150 range, which is something that made this project such a personal grind.

While overall I am happy with the final product, there are absolutely things I would/will change about it. I think the most obvious issue with it is the mounting. The paper frame I made for the texture doesn't live up to my own standards in that it's sloppy, and not very well thought trough. This especially sticks out as an annoyance because if I gave myself just a little bit more time, it would have been fine, but by not taking the extra couple of minutes to thoughtfully plan it out, the frame ended up the way it did. Another future revision would be the addition of a way to hold down the texture in the frame. In its current state, the tessellation is simply sitting inside the frame with nothing holding it in other than friction. The lack of a hard connection is due to the fact that the tessellation only ever intersects the base of the frame perpendicularly.

Something I find to be just about, if not equally as interesting as the texture itself, are the shadows caused by close lighting.

In summary, this project proved to be an excellent learning experience. Not only about projects like this, but also how I work through them. Long and repetitive tasks, like the one I set myself, cause me to work in a way I'm not entirely happy with and produce works which reflect that. If I were to do something similar in the future I would definitely need to work in many short intervals to keep myself from getting super fatigued and mentally exhausted.

3D Hollow Form Concepts

Papercraft Project: Final in Progress

So it turns out that I vastly underestimated the time it takes to score and cut the templates for my project, so as of now, it is incomplete. For the final of this project, after taking into consideration the feedback from our first prototype crits, I decided to move the project in a direction that would make it as accessible to as many people as possible. This decision was to make it a primarily visual piece. As much as I was intrigued by the idea brought up in the crits to incorporate movement and tactility, I believe that these idea would make creating a clean and professional looking project very difficult. My final solution was to enlarge and replicate the texture I had created for the first prototype over a roughly 1 foot - 2 foot area. I first enlarged each component by about 50%, then replicated the tecture and cropped it to my desired size.

 This size, as seen in the image above, ended up being 17 1/4in by 11 1/2in. because the texture is cropped into a frame, cut components of the texture were created. These specialized parts obviously need their own templates, which can be seen highlighted above in red, cyan, and white.

 I dug through the model and found each unique part, unfolding it and making it 2D. Because these special parts are unique to the mesh they are a part of, they need to be printed in specific colours. Using the "text" command in Rhino, I first numbered each part, then made a quick inventory of of what parts are in what colours, and how many of them are needed.

Wrestling all of the parts required onto the same page turned out to be quite the task, with only one template having a minor cut off by the restrictions of a printer. In total the print came out to be 18 pages. 6 white, 6 charcoal, and 6 blue.

 So this is where the underestimation of time required comes in. As of Monday night (November 6), all 18 pages have been scored for folding and 6 have had the shapes cut out of them. While not being physically difficult, these shapes appeared to be a challenge to my sanity. This ended up being a learning experience for myself in that not I know that projects involving immense repetition, like this, have a very hard time with holding my attention.

I apologize for not having my finished product ready by the time this blog post is being written, but hopefully I will have something presentable by class on Wednesday. Once it is completed I will create a follow up post on the final project.

Papercraft First Prototype

Out of the possible concepts I created to move forward, I chose the abstraction of a fabric knit. This was my decision because I believe it is both the most visually stimulating and the concept which utilizes the properties of paper the best. My prototype for this pattern consists of 13 repetitions of the individual pyramid form. You can see below that 6 of them make up the red top mesh and 7 make up the black bottom mesh.

 Because I needed 13 templates in total I printed off 2 sheets which each had 7 on them, leaving me 1 extra in case I messed up. This extra turned out to be much more useful than I anticipated.

Here is how my small first prototype turned out.

So back to that extra piece I was talking about. After I had completed the original idea for the prototype. I was messing around with the extra when Liam pointed out that an entire third mesh, above the red but below the black, could be worked into the design. This is definitely something that will be included into my final production of the project.

Papercraft Concepts

Below are 7 concepts-some including multiple forms, some being one form repeated-that were inspired by the idea of papercraft, and more specifically the works of Matthew Shlian.

A simplification of the Brandenburg Gate, significant to me because of the Christmas & New Year's I spent in Berlin in 2015.

Propeller and hub. Up until recently aviation was the only thing that had an extremely firm grasp on my attention

A little over a year ago I had a big change to my life and personality. Part of my own personal growth was shown through my own fashion sense. This texture is an abstraction of the knit of fabric.

Brick texturing. My high school/middle school had a very prominent brick wall on the exterior of the building, making it one of the first things I think of from my schooling.

Mountains combined with trail boot tread texture. A majority of my greatest experiences with nature have come from hikes and trips to mountains/vallys.

Fish scales. Because my grandfather lives across the country, I rarely see him. When I was younger the opportunities I did get to see him were spent on lakes or rivers fishing; something I only ever did with him

The grip on my drafting pencil. I don't think there is an item I use daily that I appreciate more. The last time I held it got me just as much as the first time I did; although the gnarling has worn down some.

The biggest challenge this project posed to me were the ideas of unfolding. Many of my un-executed concepts revolved around things that simply could not be unfolded or would cause the object to have too many tiny pieces. As well unfolding objects in a way where they could be folded easily was a more difficult than I imagined.

Papercraft Research

Out of the given papercraft artists, the one that jumped out to me the most was Matthew Shlian and his work. Shlian's work intrigues me more than any of the others because if is easily the most design-oriented. it isn't trying to tell a concise story or be representational of things from the real world. It is purely aesthetics. Because of this I believe that it is the most innovative art from this group of papercrafters. That would be because while all the other works mimic other artistic media, Matthew's works embrace the structural and geometric properties of paper. Things where paper really is the best, most efficient material to be using for the job.

Shlian is described as bridging the gap between art and engineering. This is the exact kind of art that I am most interested in and is similar to what I plan on producing in my own future. Like he says about himself in the short video Here, I have always had a more mathematical, mechanic view on life and the things I produce. For me careful calculation can hold as much beauty as the greatest paintings from throughout history. This idea is most prominently shown off in the piece by Matthew Shlian shown below.

Something about the slow twist seen throughout the piece draws my attention to how much of a blast this would have been to model in a CAD program to begin with. The piece looks very unnatural and looks as if it was created solely by an algorithm. My eye has always been attracted to things like this. When hand work by man can be done to such a precise degree that others mistake it for the work of a computer. I don't know what that says about me but then again I don't need to. Inspiration-wise Matthew's work leads me down a rabbit hole of designs that may have functional applications. When I first saw the above piece I imagined how breath-taking it would be as an architectural texture; something possibly used as the shape of an exterior wall of a certain museum or art gallery. So that is what Shlian's work mostly inspires in me, design that can be weaponized with real-world functionality. Whether it is for something as simple as a book cover or something as complex as an architectural exterior, designs such as these will always hold a special place in my heart and mind.