Finale 3d Printed Ring

This is what my ring from a few posts earlier looks like printed in stainless steel.  We got our rings printed from Shapeways which offers a variety of material that can be printed in.  I am very happy with the outcome of my ring.  It is slightly smaller than I had anticipated but that is actually a good thing in my opinion as I did not want to have it being too big.  It is definitely a good size and it fits my finger very well. Now that I have this ring I really want to come up with some more designs or even have this one printed in a variety of materials just to see what I can come up with. Its always exciting when you can actually hold something real that you have designed on the computer. I will for sure be using Shapeways in the future.

Final Concept Paper Prototype

I decided to do the diamond container due to time restraints, however I will keep the bust idea for later use.  I added a base to hold the container upright and an upside down diamond to add a little more sustenance and uniform to the hole piece. I also did some revisions in the tabs and as well as made a thicker hinge to add support.  All of this definitely made it a lot easier for me to make this time.  However I was still having issues with the glue a little bit and I definitely need to work on trying to keep it cleaner as the glue did get on my hands a little bit.  I do see the benefit in paper prototypes and with doing more of them it should become easier.

Paper Project Prototypes

I have realised that paper is the bane of my existence.  I can definitely say that this was difficult for me. Paper is hard for me to manipulate the way I want.  I also had issues with the glue not sticking very well, especially on the knob on top of the diamond container, but that could have also been an issue with the tabs being too short. Generally the bust is made up of a bunch of little triangles which were all supposed to line up and have a flat bottom, but in my model that is not the case.  Near the point the triangles stopped lining up thus giving the uneven base. The object is functional in the way that the head opens and could technically be used to put things in.  The diamond container worked better for me however it was much less complicated than my bust.  Yet I still had issues with glue and so on. I can say that paper prototypes are definitely not my strong point

Paper Prototyping Concepts

My five concepts for the paper prototyping project include a ring, a plinth, a diamond shaped container and two concepts originated from my scanned bust that I had done earlier in the semester.  The three other concepts are pretty simple because I spent most of time working on the two versions of my bust. Due to the time consuming nature of those objects I was not able to complete drawing in all the little tabs on 2d shapes.  To create the prototype busts I started by going into Meshmixer and reducing the amount of polygons to the desired amount and then importing the model into Rhino.  Once in Rhino, I used the contour command to get outlines of the shape.  By switching around the number on contour lines I was able to reduce the amount polygons even further as well it gave me a direct way to fold out and build the shape.  All the triangles were drawn in by hand after I got the basic contour lines down.  The less detailed model will be turned into a vase and the other will be a container with a lid.  Drawing these models was very time consuming, especially drawing the mesh as well as it would very often blend in with all the other mesh around that I would lose my place very often.  Given more time I would like to try and create a more detailed version of the bust.

3D Printed Ring Progress 2

I designed a ring for this project with the mixture of organic and linear shapes.  From the feedback of my peers last week, they concluded that the ring with the two hoops was the most interesting yet the side of the band was too thick.  Most of my rings had a band that was too thick, so I decided to redo the ring with the same basic concept, yet take that concept further.  Given more time I would have added a little more detail with it, yet I am still quite happy with the way it turned out.

Reverse Engineered Object Final

This is the final product for my Reversed Engineered Object Project.  I chose to reverse engineer a Lego Minifigure because of my love of Lego and all the different moving parts that fit together.  I used a digital caliper to record all the exact measurements and then transfer that into Rhino. For the most part it went quite well, the easiest pieces to model were the the head, torso, hands and pelvic block due to the fact that they are made up of simple geometry resulting in mostly squares and cylinders.  The hardest objects to model were definitely the arms and the hat because of their more organic like nature of the objects.  I had a few issues with the gun but only in the bend and to get that correct fillet in on the gun became quite process, something that I honestly thought should be quite simple.  The rest of the project fell together nicely and I definitely had a lot of fun working on it.

3D Printed Ring Design Progress 1

For the first week I am just playing around with shapes and seeing what I can create or what comes to mind. Most of the ones that I have now are just basic shapes, I was interested in playing around with rebuilding surfaces and warping them with points.  Flow along surface was another command that I was also playing around with. However I did have problems with Boolean unioning the objects so that they are water tight. I tried many different ways of cutting the objects and trying to rejoining them but that did not seem to work as well. Hopefully this will be figured out by next week.  I did however manege to create a few rings that are completely watertight.  I will possibly add a few more models but, for the most part I need to add more detail with rings I have. 

Reverse Engineered Object Progress Week 2

From last weeks problems, I did manege to fix the arms and get them more Lego like.  I managed to fix this by doing a combination of the sweep and loft commands to get a more accurate representation. After completing the arms I moved onto the hands which I have two different versions, which neither are 100% accurate.  I need some feedback before I decide which one works best for the project.  The gun was somewhat tricky to get the perfect bend in the handle.  I did manege to do it, however I could not get everything to Boolean union together, especially at the bend.  The last problem I ran into was exactly how to model the cowboy hat with its organic curves.  As you can see, I got part way there but it just became way too complicated for me that I just could not continue.  Looking forward to getting these problems fixed as the hat is the last project to model.

Reverse Engineered Object Week 1 Progress

Modelling a Lego Minifigure is fairly straight forward utilising basic shapes put together to form the figure.  So far I have modelled the basic shapes of the head, torso, pelvis and legs of the figure yet a few of them still need some slight touch ups and a bit more detail if possible. There are a slight change in the leg width and the pins for attaching the legs as well that still needs to be applied. Although my next step is to complete the basic shapes of the whole figure. I however had a lot of trouble modelling the arms and getting the transition of shapes to be smooth with the right angle. I tried a few different things but none of them seemed to work quite well. I first tried to make it in two separate extruded circles, then a loft through 3 different circle and lastly a sweep.  The sweep is best looking so far, however I could not get it to change diameters within the sweep to meet correct size of the piece. This is definitely something that I will need help and try figure out, hopefully it will be sorted by the end of the week.