3D Objects in Rhino

 For this week's progress post, I wanted to take advantage of the fact that the project date was extended and to refine my elephant model. I'm using more lofts and constructing surfaces to create more precise polysurfaces, rather than my previous approach of sculpting a blobby network surface. A more structured and even geometric design will translate a lot stronger into the stacked layers of laser-cut material than my original more organic object. 

 For the first milestone project of the semester, I've started sculpting an elephant that will be split into multiple flat surfaces lengthwise and then be laser-cut. 

      I got very lost and confused during the tutorials during class so I used this tutorial by GH Tutorials as the framework for my definition.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TT5a7HZxaE0   The remap numbers function was only used to control the taper of the definition using a graph mapping function, I couldn't figure out how to make it do anything else for me.  dna.gif

 This first week we introduced grasshopper and experimented with some basic functions to create objects following along with the "Grasshopper Getting Started" video series (1-8 only) posted by David Rutten. With the functions learned, I decided to make a shape that may resemble a piece of gemelli pasta. Someday I hope to learn how to do a rotini pasta shape. To avoid having the biarc pieces intersect when vectoring tangents, I opted to divide the shape into multiple pieces and vectoring each tangent individually along multiple curves, and reversing the lofts as necessary. The end result is a nice spiral pasta shaped object. To give the object a nice pasta shade, I used the "custom preview" and "colour picker" tools to colour it from grasshopper.  These pieces segments of grasshopper commands were repeated for all individual surfaces of the object.  Preview of the object before rendering  In the end, I decided adding the textures in Rhino was more effective...