Ordo Ab Chao - A02 Review

The last few days have been a whirlwind of snow days, early birthday celebrations, Gugalun House drafting and confusing MoveFace demands in Rhino. Nevertheless, I came up with a design for my waffle cube that I'm actually quite fond of, despite having a few potential flaws. I like the concept but will need to fix a few things before I can declare it finished. Thoughts first this time. 

First off, it is nearly impossible to construct from the way it is currently designed. I placed the section cuts way too close to the edges, causing extremely tenuous holds that ended up either falling over or ripping. I struggled a lot right off the bat trying to fit pieces into each other without ripping the delicate holds. Unfortunately, I eventually ended up having to take an x-acto knife to some of the closed off notches due to problem number 2...

Case in point.

Second, I failed to take into account that just because something looks like it waffles perfectly in Rhino does not mean that you will be able to slide the pieces together perfectly to build it. I had a lot of cases where the slots were too small for the pieces to fit through because while the waffle notch at that section cut fit the cross piece perfectly, either one or both sides of the piece were too big to fit into the notch to slide through. I ended up only being able to fit a few slices into each other while the others wouldn't make it all the way through. 

Here lie the charred and straggly remains of the great chipboard battle of 3/5/14

On the bright side, I'm quite positive that fixing the section distances and slices will result in a stable cube. I tried to focus on two main forms of cross waffling but also used a small section of rounded slices to emphasize the cylindrical volume in the corner. I also decided to use the radial donut in order to elevate the wirecut section of the cube. One criticism that came up in class for several people was the unintentional existence of the "boring" side of the cube (my cube unfortunately also falls into this trap).

Description: Project 2 demanded utilization of newly learned Rhino skills to contour and waffle cut the cube from Project 1 and render the design diagrams using the V-ray plugin. "Clever"/efficient waffle cutting of the cube was desired, as we were not allowed to use adhesives to keep the slices together. After figuring out the waffle cuts in Rhino, we were taught how to use the laser cutter to manifest the physical shapes in chipboard and were instructed to put together the approx 5"x5"x5" cube. For the final presentation board, we used the rendering skills to highlight the different components of the waffle cut cube and to diagram the most important concepts that the laser cut cube or the project 1 cube had to offer as well as each individual slice of the waffled cube.