Reduce, Radiate

We all have been spending an exorbitant amount of hours on our own during the pandemic, a roller-coaster of emotions where self reflection is embraced, but also has potential to transform into spiraling rumination. This project is an opportunity to illuminate inner shadows, overcome, and radiate.

Using Slicer, I created cross sections of myself and cut out these planes out of color photo gels with the Cameo 4.

Originally, I had intended this to be a project with more fabrication involved, but with limited resources and unreliable shipping, it turned out to be more of a Fusion360 exercise.

I decided to remix the essence of two past projects: 37 Hour Self Portrait and The Self is More Distant Than Any Star.

Main takeaways

• Absolutely reduce the face count in your mesh. If you intend on using Slicer, a Fusion360 plugin, it will not be able to handle complex 3D models. Both Slicer and Fusion kept crashing over and over again, and upon Googling, plenty of people experienced this issue. Forum responses from the Autocad staff member said to make sure your GPU can handle it and that you have the most updated drivers. I knew my GPU could run more GPU intensive programs, so I didn’t think this was the problem.
  I knew my model had a billion or so faces, so I ended up erasing everything from my neck down. Within the Mesh tab > Modify, there is a tool that can be used to reduce the face count. What I also didn’t realize immediately was that my imported 3D model was way larger than I thought, so check your model size with the measure tool.
  

• Convert your mesh to BREP (boundary representation). In order to make any changes to the imported mesh, you will need to convert it into a solid object. To do this conversion, you have to right click the project in the component list, click “Do not capture timeline” which will then reveal the Mesh tab. Now you can right click the body and select

• Quads > triangles. When selecting an .obj or .stl file to import as a mesh, it may be imported as a model composed of a triangular mesh. Most editing functions within Fusion360 will only work if your model has a quad mesh, which would then need to be converted to T-Splines. I spent a lot of time trying out Extrude / Thicken / Push&Pull tools within the Solid / Surface / Form / Mesh workspaces, only for none of them to work with my triangles. To create the slices of the silhouette I imagined, I wanted to give thickness to the model of my face, which was only a surface.
  I downloaded another Autodesk app called Recap as a recommendation from this tutorial. This program does a bunch of wonderful things, but the main key feature is the ability to export your file as a Quad .OBJ. Sort of frustrating that isn’t built into Fusion360 somewhere. But since I was already using that application, I made use of their extrusion function.

• Slicer is sooooo much fun. There’s just so many options I had decision fatigue. I exported both the stacked and folded panels. Export the .DXF package in Slicer > re-save it in Illustrator > open up file in Silhouette.

• For the photo gels I used, it took a lot of trial and error to get the right settings for the Cameo 4. I ended up with the settings below:

Fusion360: Sweep Function

Ben showed us the sweep function within Vectorworks, and I was curious about how to do the very same thing in Fusion360. I spent a bit of time getting familiar with the Fusion360 interface, and ended up creating an undeterminable form after playing around with the sweep, extrude, and thicken function. Above is a speedrun video playing around with these tools.

I started off using the spline tool to create a wiggly shape. Within “Patch” mode, you can extrude lines to create a surface, which you can then thicken to give it body.
When using the sweep tool, you select the path in which a profile shape follows, whereas in Vectorworks, you would use the locus tool to select a point in which to sweep around.

Here is the Fusion360 tutorial that I watched:

CAMEO 4 Vinyl Cutter

Yay! The CAMEO 4 vinyl cutter safely arrived a few days ago, and I immediately opened it up to play with the latest toy.

Seems that I did not receive vinyl transfer paper, heat transfer, or any fun neon colors in my box - were there other packages sent to different people?

For my first cut, I wanted to cut out something fairly easy and especially cute - Rilakkuma, a character from Sanrio. I found this already made vinyl decal that you can order for $6+ each. I opened this image within Illustrator, used the Image Trace option, exported it as a .DXF file so that the Silhouette software

Adjusting the size of the cut

Cut preview

Ta-DA! Here’s the final result of the Rilakkuma vinyl sticker and its negative.

LOIE, A Sculptural Light Study

Inspiration

I named the piece Loie after the artist Loie Hollowell. I attended her exhibition at Pace Gallery last year titled Plumb Line. I thought to myself that her use of gradients with bold colors and geometric forms could be easily translated into washes of light.

I began to look into her other paintings, and came across The Land’s Part, a painting she did in 2017.

Loie Hollowell, The Land’s Part, 2017.

In addition to Hollowell’s paintings, I’ve always been inspired by the Art Deco movement - the patterns, the architecture, and the lighting fixtures that were being made in the 1920s.

I used to work at Remains Lighting, a bespoke lighting manufacturer that started off with antique restorations. One of my projects was to oversee the repair of these beautiful Frank Lloyd Wright stained glass sconces:

Objective

• Light and Interactivity: to create a light fixture to be installed in an assigned room within the ITP floor. I chose phone booth #467, with the desire to cover the several holes that exist in the walls because of previously installed shelving.

• Subtraction: use joinery to create an object. Below is a drawing of the final dog bone joint that I used to connect all of my pieces together. It took 3 tries to get the perfect tension fit, the hole ended up being a .02 offset from the key width.

Materials

• 3/4 plywood

• Materials from the “scrap bin” at Remains

  • Ingersoll glass globe

  • Brass trapezoid + strips

• Two-way mirror acrylic

• Mirror Acrylic

• Hue Light controller, created for Connected Devices assignment

• Hue Light system

Process / Assembly

Glass globe print from Remains Lighting

Skill Builder: Joinery

Ahhh… such a satisfying feeling.

This week, I wanted to create a miter joint inspired by Rick Powell’s design that was showed to us in class.

Rick Powell’s miter joint

I feel that my biggest and perhaps silly set back in this skill builder was within my Vectorworks drawing. When using the paint bucket 2D polygon tool, I didn’t realize it was creating a duplicate of the object it was forming. I kept bringing it to Mastercam and thinking to myself, I SWEAR this is a solid object! I talked out my frustrations with Julian and Aidan, and rechecked my drawing to find multiples of the shapes underneath each other.

Another lesson I reinforced was the tool path order. In my first run of the donut piece,

Skill Builder: CNC

The Other Mill

This week, I used the OtherMill Pro to carve out my partner’s signature in steel.

Materials

• scrap steel

• 1/8” flat end mill

• 1/16” flat end mill

Process

My partner had sent me an illustrator file with her signature on it, and I thought it would make a pretty neat Valentine’s Day gift if I could carve something out for her. Originally, I had brought a piece of brass in, but it was not a truly flat piece. I then found a piece of steel that I thought would work for this project.

Because of the way the signature tapers at the end of certain letters, I had to scale up the drawing and use only her first name so that I could begin the job. I asked David Rios if I could borrow his 1/16” FEM for the thinner ends.

I made sure to clean the surface of the spoilboard with acetone before beginning the job. The project started with the 1/16” bit for a few seconds, and then 1/8” for the rest of the job.

Skill Builder: Router

This week, I practiced using the manual router and router table. I found a circular cutout of plywood, and followed the edge with a rounded finishing bit.

I did a few quick passes on the routing table with a standard end mill on the back side of the circular piece. I did not quite get a straight line because the circular piece had no flat edge to glide along the table’s fence.