Object Design and Fabrication - Nadia

This week I finished creating my table. I switched from a coffee table to an end table, because I wanted the stem of the table to be longer, to better represent the shape of a plant. This table is a Voronoi patterned end table that is meant for a house plant to be a part of the furniture. The concept came from the question: how can plants become more integrated into our indoor environments? Plants, at least in my house, just sit on top of shelves and tables, this way the plant is fully a part of the furniture, and the growth of the plant determines the final design of the table. The name of this table is Nature Integrated Table.  The Voronoi pattern is inspired by the shapes of plant cells, and the overall shape of the table is inspired by a blooming plant. If this table was full size my hope is that the plant would be put in the dirt directly in the centre of the table, without a pot. This way the roots and the plant would start to grow through the Voronoi. The pattern also has na...

 I'm working on building my plant coffee table in Grasshopper and Rhino this week. Things went pretty well this week. I build the base of my table and created the Voronoi pattern. I just have a few questions about what I've done so far. For the Voronoi pattern, I have created a gradient for its density. It looks good on the base, but I can't figure out how to change the direction of the gradient. The next part of the project I am working on is the top of the table. I am currently reading about the best way to create the surface I need. The challenge I'm having is I'm not sure how to make a variable surface with places for plant pots that is also using the Voronoi texture. I can only make the tabletop in Rhino, then set it as the curve in the Voronoi definition. This is okay, but I would like to try to make it variable. I'm happy with the progress I made this week, but am a bit nervous about finishing by next week.

This week I came up with some ideas for a piece of parametric furniture. I started by researching other examples of furniture and other objects that are defined as parametric. I noticed additive designs looked really interesting, I also liked how the objects made out of additive patterns tended to look lighter and required less material. Common patterns of meshes I tried to use were hexagons, neuron-like shapes, or shapes that mimicked plant cell clusters. Next, I looked into materials, I found a variety of materials that could work but based on the texture I want to create, I think plastic is the most likely material I would go with. Here are some visual examples of the surface I want to create: Here is a link to the document with all the Parametric Object Research  and where the images are sourced. After I finished my research I began to sketch some ideas. I was really interested in the idea of incorporating plants into furniture. I chose the concept of a coffee table that has de...

  I actually started this assignment thinking I was going to make a funky lamp. Turns out the base of a lamp can easily turn out to be a skyscraper with a combination of the contour tool and the divide tool. I began this assignment by drawing a curve in Rhino. Then in Grasshopper I started extruding the curve, offsetting it, and extruding the offset. The above image shows the process I used to make the bottom part of the skyscraper, then I repeated this process for the top portion. After extruding and caping the shape, I used the contour tool to add "floors" to the building. I then divided each of the contours and added circles to the newly divided points, making the balconies. After the building was finished I used the custom preview tool and added colour to the object. I also used the material tool to add shine to the building. The last thing to do was use the remap tool to make sure everything I wanted to move, moved in the animation. I ran into some glitches in this proce...

 This week I did a series of tutorials about Grasshopper. Overall it was a smooth process. I learned a lot about curves, specifically Biarcs. The process of lofting curves in Grasshopper is really fun and led to a lot of interesting results. The first part of the tutorials didn't use Biarcs to create curves, instead, it used Arc, divide, and pull.  Once I got to the point in the tutorial where it said to pull up the centre of the curve I found it was much easier to control the shape of the curve. Changing the shape was quite a fluid process, but it was much easier once I began the Biarc section of the tutorial. Using the Biarc tool I started the process of connecting two curved lines over again. The results were a lofted shape that was easy to manipulate. Using the Brep Join tool was a great way to create one surface that was still a changeable shape.  The only issue I couldn't resolve in the tutorial was I couldn't get the gradient tool to work the way I wanted it to. I ...

 This is my final post for the semester. It was pretty crazy to do everything online, and despite that, I still learned a lot of new things about Rhino. Hopefully, we can all be back in the Thing Tank next year! Castle: The first project of the semester was to create a castle using some basic extrusion tools in Rhino. I forgot how to do a few things over the summer, so it was a good reintroduction to Rhino. I made a sandcastle because I wanted to practice using materials on different objects again. Surface Design Study: For the second milestone project, I made a 2D pattern based on a Greek tile. It was my first time using polar arrays and arrays, as well as hatching. I was really happy with how it turned out, but it was definitely challenging, as it was mostly organic shapes. I did get really comfortable using the curve building tools, which helped me a lot in the next project. Reverse Engineered Object:  For the third milestone project, I recreated my recorder in Rhino. I sta...

 This week I decided to move forward with the roller coaster ring design. I changed the size of the track and made it a solid shape. Then I remade the carts so they had more detail. I ended up having to backtrack on some of the details that were preventing structural stability, such as having a hollow place where the rider's feet would go.  I got a lot of positive feedback about my coaster design, and I chose to move forward with it because of that, and I found it was the most unique and not-so-ring-like of all my designs. I would like to choose steel for my ring because I think it looks the best with the coaster, but the plastic has a bit less yellow and red, so I am going to have to decide if I think my model can be printed in steel. Here are the final renders for my model in steel: Here is my model passing all the tests on Shapeways: Here are two heat maps the first is with fine detail plastic, and it is completely green, and the second is a heat map of polished steel, that...