Shapeways Project

Phase 1: Moodboard

Some of my first ideas

Phase 2: Design

I first created a polyline around the texture of the grass pixels to simulate the grass top

Extruded the line from a surface and created a box for the cube

Added flat top + edge pieces

First Grasshopper Script - very simple voronoi test replicated from 2D

Box with Voronoi pieces - they don't quite line up with the outside edges

Grasshopper Preview of Script

Pieces scaled up to intersect with all regions of the box

The script didn't quite produce the intended result, there isn't much of the hollow voronoi element I was looking for. More like a block of cheese

Cube altered to have space in the middle

Script Output

Revamped script for generating voronoi curves around an geometry

<- Output of my script after adding multipipe

Multipipe components connected to my geometries ->

There were some small glitches in multipiping due to my grass' unique shape and corners, so I had to delete those meshes from my design.

Final Script (got Rhino 7 trial to be able to work on my computer)

Phase 3: Prototyping and Testing

Prototyping took me the longest out of the three steps, as I was trying to get a lid to press fit and my top mesh was consistently too small to fit.

There were small highlighted parts (the cyan dots) that had open meshes, and had caused some errors in slicing and printing. I fixed them in Rhino by using the FillMeshHoles command to each individual open mesh, and was able to continue with printing.

Mesh with all open meshes deleted

Rather than printing this version, I shrunk the walls of my box to a thinner form (50% of original) and redid my multipiping

Cube polysurfaces

Updated multipiping

Cube meshes

Printed model at 50% scale (1.07 in x 1.05 in x 1.05 in) and extra fast 0.3mm resolution

First grass mesh version in Cura (1270% scaling is to convert model from mm to inches at 50% scaling)

First attempt at printing (failed very quickly)

Second attempt

First successful print

This is an error I ran into every print (the material error seen on the screen), usually causing it to stop once or twice. But nothing was actually wrong, so I would just continue the print.

Did not fit the cube, as the multipiping overlapped with the cube's multipiping

Second version, slightly better fit but still cannot sit flat and requires significant pressure to push in

All three printed grass pieces, from left to right

Above on the left is the third version I was able to print, it fits ever so slightly better than the previous but still requires pressure to fit. A significant bend is also visible, which will not suffice for the real Shapeways version.

As can be seen above (the two dark, thin lines on the right are the cube and the two thicker ones on the left are the grass), there is still a small overlap of meshes. When making my grass bigger and bigger for printing, I overlooked one small sizing factor, which is the actual size of the multipiped cube. I used the original polysurface cube for reference for fit when the actual cube would be bigger due to the piping. The screenshot below shows the grass after re-sizing, and the fit looks much better and cleaner. However, I didn't have a chance to print and test this one because I realized my mistake too late, so I just submitted it as my final. Either way, it would be better for the grass to be to bigger than too small.

Phase 4: Shapeways Testing

This part went pretty smoothly, as there were little to no errors.

Cube piece 3dtools checks - passes all of them

Grass piece 3dtools checks - passes all of them, but wall thickness is suspect. Not a huge deal because they are still allowable, and the 3dtools automatic fixes didn't do much, so I left it as is.

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