Currently, I’m involved in the Washington Aerospace Scholars program.  For one of the lessons, I was required to design a Crew Exploration vehicle.  To do this, I used my Rhino skills I learned over the summer.  You can see the results below.  One of the nice things about rendering a model instead of preparing it for fabrication was that I didn’t need to make all of the parts water tight models.

MikeChaffeeCEV

The first thing I did with the Rhino demo was work on completing Bender.  He’s close, but still not done.

The body was much easier to build then his head.  I simply traced one half of his body and revolved it to turn it into a solid.  I did the same thing for the hands and feet.  For the arms and legs, I traced it with the curve tool, and used the pipe command.  I then rotated them just a little bit to make him seem less stiff.

This lets you see it in comparison to my reference pictures.  I was working on rounding his eyes before I got sidetracked by other projects

Yesterday I started designing a football helmet for a lego minifig.  I started by downloading a model Lego figure off of Google’s 3d warehouse and finding pictures of football helmets I could copy.  From the side view, I made a series of circles (starting from the top of the helmet) to the base, with their centers along a vertical line and their farthest points reaching the end of the helmet.  This gave me close to cross sections of the helmet which I was able to cut and loft together into the helmet.

  Using the Lego figures head, I was able to cut out the stud where it attaches to his head with the Boolean Difference command.

After I finished the main part of the helmet, I did the facemask.   I drew curves along my pictures and used the pipe command like I did with Bender.  Here are some pictures of the finished piece:

I made the facemask so I could 3d print separately and have it snap onto the helmet which I will be able to mold myself.  The facemask actually goes inside the ear hole, allowing it to clip on.  It also sits around the edge of the helmet above the eyes.

Tomorrow I’m planning to go to my local hackerspace and get a prototype 3d print!

The model I took from Google’s 3d warehouse, and the original drape.

I draped the model, and added a smile and eyes to the draped model before completely changing it.

I deconstructed the google file, to make a more interesting model.

The evolution of my draping to my final piece.

The simulation of the CNC machine’s recreation of the model.  I’m still waiting to cut it out!  While waiting for the CNC, I worked on my next project: Bender.

I found these pictures of Bender through google and used them to make my 3d model.  I started by tracing the edge of half of his head and revolving it.  I then traced the eyes and frame around them and extruded them to the same size as they were on the side view picture.

This picture shows the eyes, frame around them and the main head.  It also shows the piece I used to create the mouth.  I started by tracing the curve of the mouth on the picture and figured out how far around the circle it went.  I turned that into a surface, copied it and scale it down slighlty to make a solid in the shape I needed to remove from bender.  I dragged it into place on bender and used the BooleanDifference command.

And that is as much as I was able to do!

After we scripted, I laser cut my grid bowl and assembled it.

First I laid out all of the wireframe pieces of my bowl in plan/top view to make the path for the laser cutter.

Then I changed the layers of the curves, to make the laser cut out the insides of the discs before the outsides, so the piece doesn’t shift around during the cutting.

And here is the assembled bowl!

The 3d file I used to do surface modeling on the CNC.

The final product!  The CNC is a very cool tool, I prefer it to the laser cutter despite being harder to use.

And here is the grid bowl I had been working on, modified to be cut out on the laser cutter instead of the CNC machine due to time constraints.

Gluing together the laser-cut layers.

The final product.

The work in progress, the bowl for the CNC machine.

Up until lunch I spent working on preparing a new bowl for the CNC Machine.  I learned how to use different Boolean commands- Boolean Union, Section and Difference.  These are very powerful tools that I will need to use in the future in my own modelling.  I still have a ways to go on my new bowl before it’s ready.

During lunch and through the rest of the day, I spent finishing up my bowl from day 1.  My lunch hour I spent on the laser cutter, cutting out the rings I need for the shaping.  I finished cutting soon after lunch and began ordering and gluing the pieces.  I ended the day with my own paper bowl, that I had taken from original design to a physical piece.

Hopefully I will be able to get pictures up soon.

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