When Ashlyn and I first sat down together we wanted to create a really unique object, as most of the examples were quite similar in nature. This led us to come up with our first concept which I explained here. It was a hybrid of designs that we pushed a bit, resulting in an object made up of skewed text that had a hidden message when held at a certain height. Although we were totally in love with the design and concept, we had a few set backs which resulted in us picking a plan B. Previously we had discussed using one of Ashlyn's designs to place our text on, but we re-thought it and came up with a completely separate object.
This second design used Ashlyn's geometric form which was made up of an alternating pattern on all sides (which I was obsessed with and could not shut up about for the life of me) in combination with the fluidity and organic characteristics of my designs. This resulted in a super funky form, which was almost an optical illusion as the pattern was inverted on certain sides of the organic shape.
After refining our final design we booked time to print, which turned out to be frustrating when we showed up and found Harrison and Mark who had decided to re-print their design at that time. So we had to come back a different day, which turned out to be a blessing in itself. Jin is a blessing from the printing gods. Jin thank you for saving us. (I will get back to this but I have to take every opportunity to thank him)
When we loaded our design in NetFabb we ran into our first problem - it lit up like a bright red Christmas tree. We tried to repair the model but it didn't do anything, so we had to go back to Rhino (and Jin) to find out it wasn't a closed poly-surface. We couldn't find the source of the issue, exhausting "boolean union" "explode" and "join". Bryan helped us fix the issue in a separate program, and it ended up loading a friendly green colour after this. The rest of the steps went fairly smoothly aside from a few hiccups of stupidity on our part. When it came to actually printing we had to have Jin babysit us because we were so nervous - Jin, thank you. For some reason the program crashed just after completing the bottom layer of the print, which forced us to start again.
Side Note- I had ended up booking time over Jin and Ty, who were extremely kind and let us go first. But with all of our technical issues we ended up printing through two time slots. Jin was extremely patient and helpful, and wouldn't even take food as repayment. The closest thing I could get to repaying him was dedicating this post to him. Jin you are our saviour, seriously thank you.
The second try at printing went way better, and aside from some construction issues we could have tweaked before hand, we successfully printed our first 3D object. Our object had an angle on the top piece that capped it. When the printer went to print this part some of the filament fell through leaving a few open spaces. But overall I was very pleased with our finished object. The texture ended up being one of the most interesting elements of the print, both me and Ashlyn had commented on how it was very intriguing and made you want to touch it. Although I am disappointed our first concept failed I think this object speaks well to a hybrid as well as being a successful closed poly-surface, hollow form object.
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