Indecisivity and Frustration - an official update on A02

I was originally going to title this post "i miss california" because what the heck, I do, but I thought that might be pushing it with the professionalism of this blog...perhaps best to keep most of that kind of stuff to my personal blog. Then again, I highly doubt anyone is going to be reading this except maybe the instructors and a very small number of my classmates so does it really matter? Then again then again, it IS a blog and not a portfolio, and blogs are for writing too, right?

Progress on A02

Unfortunately, I haven't been able to spend as much time on this project as I've wanted over the past week, so I'm feeling a bit behind on the baffling waffling (it's not baffling, I just wanted to use that word because it's a visual rhyme but not a phonetic one, which is somewhat related to what we were just reading about in LING). I made some progress today in class and gave some thought to what I want to waffle, but I didn't quite get to the point of making the interstitial pieces yet. I feel like I might have some trouble with the actual notched pieces but I can't say that since I haven't gotten there yet. We'll see.

Something that's been nagging at me for a bit is how to deal with the wire cut section of the cube, which is floating all along one upper edge. I really like the two-partedness and the crevasse, but gravity will certainly not agree to display it as proudly as I'd like. An option is to turn it on the side so that the two pieces will rest flat against a surface and the crevasse will go vertically, but that changes the whole idea of the cube. I added a dumb donut to stick the two sections together but I'm not really sure how I feel about it. I realize that this indecision will probably set me back quite a bit but hopefully I'll be able to spend some more time on this towards the end of the week.

Stuff and Things - fun with rendering

aka "more adventures in not really knowing what I'm doing but charging ahead and doing it anyway because I am a curious and investigative architecture student"

Today we started to learn how to use the VRay plugin for Rhino to make prettier looking renderings - just the basics. Here's a screenshot of some things I messed around with, using the final iteration (I almost said evolution, real life is NOT Pokemon unfortunately) of the cube from the last project and some textures from the broad depths of the internet.

Since our next project involves using the laser cutter to cut and waffle stitch layers of the cube, here's an in-progress shot of a rendering of the contour cuts in Rhino. It's quite beautiful actually, so I'm hoping that my grasp on contour cutting and finding good waffle pieces will improve to the point of being able to render and laser cut a decent looking cube.

A01 - The Cube

Description:

Assignment A01, "The Cube," was intended to teach us to utilize a) Rhino to manipulate a cube in a series of volumetric additions, subtractions, and other transformations and b) Illustrator to take 2D diagrams of axonometric and plan/elevation views of the cube and emphasize line weights to create depth. Through the 16-step morphology of the 10'x10'x10' cube, we were able to thoroughly explore the curve, surface, and solid editing tools in Rhino. I used the tools to design various abstract and geometric manipulations that were built on each previous version of the cube. Upon extraction of the 2D drawings to Illustrator, I deliberately chose a single version of the cube that I felt would best show multiple kinds of tool usage as well as three distinct views that would give the most information about the cube. The void diagrams at the bottom right show the various types of forms and spaces that can be created using the editing tools in Rhino. 

Thoughts:

I had a pretty good time making this cube. I didn't have any sort of preordained plan or desire to create some specific shape; I just wanted to test out the tools and see what kinds of things could be made. Things were pretty smooth sailing up until the Twist iteration, which is when things got a little messy. It turns out that twisting the extruded point I made previously will cause gaps when you try to line up the point again. It caused a lot of frustration when I was trying to use BooleanDifference later on and especially during the line weighting and color blocking in Illustrator because of the complicated outlines. 

Color blocking itself went okay; learning how to use Live Paint and do shades of colors took some time but it was a smooth routine once I figured it out.

I also ran into some trouble with the void diagrams, particularly with the volumetric axon. Because of the uneven planes due to the Fold iteration, the partial sphere took a lot of picky solid-editing to boolean out. The BooleanDifference-from-a-whole-cube method didn't work so I ended up having to make a very specific and small prism around the sphere and boolean it out from there.

Review:

Pros: the board turned out pretty well. I was mostly pleased with the font that I chose (District), as it's just the type of clean and minimal that I like. 

Cons: for some reason, I can never get the hang of InDesign and all my placed diagrams were fuzzy. It was suggested that I should have done them as various artboards in Illustrator, so I'll try that next time. The font sizes for the move labels were also a little big and bold, something that I didn't foresee when creating the poster.

A01 Update

Progress: 14 iterations of the 16.

As of Monday night, I have completed 14 of the 16 iterations of cube transformations. I tried to use several different types of tools and varied the location to create interesting views. Most of these were pretty easy to form; I struggled a little bit with figuring out how to use the Fold Planar Faces, Twist, and Extrude Surface Along Curve tools. In some of the later iterations, I tried to boolean out some volumes but discovered that it wasn't working due to some geometry gaps caused during the Twist iteration. I've decided to forgo any more BooleanDifferences until I can figure out what's wrong and how to fix it or how to go about removing volumes in another way.

Rhino Tool Practice

We were asked to try out all of the Solid Tools in Rhino, so I made an array of 20something cubes and spent some time figuring out most of the functions in the toolbar. There are still some that I'm a little confused/unsteady about but I figure I'll cross that bridge when I get there if I need to use them. Several functions seemed to do things that I already could do with other tools, so I suppose there's always multiple ways of doing things if need be. 

E01: The Cubes (practice!)

Hmm...changed the layout so the cubes are bigger. I think I like the below one better.

Also thinking about if I should change the footer too. Maybe next time.

Description: 

For this project, we utilized basic tools and functions in the 3D modeling software Rhino to make a series of cubes with geometric/curvilinear volumetric cutouts. Because Wednesday's class (2/5) was my first exposure to Rhino, I felt somewhat unsteady with using the various functions for keeping track of the four views, creating volumes, etc. However, with some practice, I successfully created a group of altered cubes that I liked and felt significantly more comfortable using tools like Pipe, ExtrudeCrv, and BooleanDifference. 

Then, I made 2D views of each cube from the same perspective using the Named View and putting each cube in the same location based on the red/green axes (I must have missed the part of the lecture on using layers but I'm certainly glad to have that tip for next time!) and exported them to Illustrator. This project was also my first exposure to Illustrator so I had a couple stumbles in the beginning figuring out Strokes and Layers, ie. how to apply line weights and dashes to the right layer, bringing the visible lines over the hidden lines, and using swatches to color the right lines. With much patience and exploration (and googling tutorials), I managed to create a coherent set of drawings and organized them in InDesign. 

Thoughts:

I probably spent way more time on this project than I should have (also due in part to procrastination on studio work (let's be real, everyone does it a little at least mine was productive)) but I'm glad I got a chance to play around with Rhino and Illustrator and explore tools that I might have missed hearing about in lecture. Hopefully these skills will come in handy later on in this class as well as in studio and potentially in the professional world. Having seen some of my classmates' work, I'd like to try more things like BooleanUnion and varying line weights/colors in Illustrator to determine depth/distinguish volumes.