Mood Board
I saw Felix's multicolored sandstone bowl from last year and it was really cool. I would love to make something like this. I also had 3 other ideas that I think would be fun: metal penguin, a little car (that rolls? and maybe holds something?) and/or a sandstone voronoi lampshade.
Naturally my first step was to completely disregard my mood board, so I started by playing around with the Elk tutorial. I imported the topography from that website where we got the topography from, and then also imported the outline of the island using the osm map—it won't let you select a large area so I had to spend a lot of time lining up four selections—and then I extruded the outline to boolean difference 'cut' my little island shape out
So I had the mesh for the piece of island, but I didn't know how to make it solid. So I tried capping it off in rhino and eventually it sort of worked, but then the bottom pieces had no thickness. So I added the red part below, which used the outline of the island extruded into a little piece and joined to the semi-solid mesh above.
This first prototype was not sucessful. Since I just kind of put a semi-solid mesh sitting on top of a solid outline extruded piece, they didn't line up—if I had moved the mesh lower, pieces would have been cut off because the bottom of my little mesh was curved, the capping did not work very well. This meant that it looked very ugly and did not bond, so there was a gap and the top part fell right off.
Next I realized I was going about making it solid all wrong—I didn't need to attach extra parts, I could just extrude the origional mesh surface downwards. So I extruded it down by 300 cm, then cut off the bottom 299 so that the bottom would be perfectly flat (if you just extrude it down 1 cm, then the lakes in the middle of the mountains will not reach down all the way [because they start higher] so it wouldn't be flat). Now that I had a flat good real shape, I kept one how it was and simplified one mesh from 300,000 triangles down to just 2,000.
I printed the simplified and the non simplified mesh to see the differences—and they looked really good. There are nice holes for the lakes, not just weird valleys, and I think both looked really nice. They are very solid, not weird and flaky like the last prototype. I made them yellow. I think I like the non-simplified more, but it's nice to have both because I could see choosing the other one.
I thought that my second prototype prints were really nice looking, but I didn't want the school to spend $150 on a little sculpture that I'd never use. So I wanted to incorporate my little island into something useful, so naturally, I thought of a 3 minute sand timer. I know they may not seem like the most useful thing, but I think sand timers are incredibly cool and it is really nice for the design to have some functionality. Also it fulfills a need—when I make tea for breakfast I will now know how long to steep it for (3 minutes for black teas is delecious). I drew this stunning little image you see to the right. And also the postit dispenser was another one of my ideas for functionality, but the hourglass is better.
I drew this new design completely in grasshopper, with a number slider that scales everything to the exact size that the hourglass needs to be (if I put it to 2.9 then it will make it so that there are 2.9 inches betweem the top and bottom house for the sand timer)
The sand timer swivel holder prototype. I am planning to fabricate the body out of wood now, and the sand timer and dowels will be bought, and the island will be printed in something kind of shiny so it stands out. Maybe silver if I can afford it for that size. This prototype turned out pretty well, I still need to figure out the swivel mechanism, but otherwise it is looking pretty great, so I'm ready to order the island part and I can build the rest once it comes!
