3D Printed Hybrid Blog

Danielle and I were paired up which I was super excited about and within the first couple minutes we already had a sick concept and half an object being created with Rhino.

The idea behind our dream object was to render and create a three dimensional object based on the "tilt your phone to read" memes you'd see on Facebook etc. An example is given below. These images tend to be pretty explicit which makes them pretty funny, although I found a more appropriate one for this blog. 

We figured the hybrid was made from my incorporation of extruded lettering in my first object and we would taper and twist the object in a funky way like Danielle used in her objects. This would then make sense of our object and makes it work as our hybrid object. 

We had many doubts about this at first and knew there were going to be many challenges ahead to create it. We wondered 1) if the illusion would still work as a 3D object 2) How we would actually create it in Rhino? 3) What else were we going to include to create an interesting object?

For this object, we knew right away we couldn't loft the letters so we used the edge srf to connect the two sets of letters. I was pretty happy with this step and the fact that this would actually loft the letters perfectly. The next thing we did was twist the entire word so we would incorporate Danielle's hollow form objects from her blog.

Twisted wording from the top

Another view from the top

 As you tilt the object (screen) you are able to see the intended message

As we figured out the main concept for our object we were now faced with the challenge to connect each individual piece of lettering and to add interest to the object. We wanted to create a feature of the object that made you want to pick it up and tilt it. We came up with ideas to put it in a box with a selective hole, or to make the words come out of an iPhone shape, and Danielle suggested that we make the bottom of the letters cut out like the palm of a hand so viewers would want to pick it up and hold it leading to a change of perspective and then the reveal of the message. We first attempted to import three different hand figures of thingiverse to cut or split from our letters but it failed to select the object when we used the function. The next attempt we used Tinkercad to get a negative of the hand so we could place the words on the solid palm structure. 

We then continued to sculpt and reshape the palm of the hand shape in mesh mixer to refine the shape to integrate into our design.

Sadly the last class we had to refine our ideas and work on progress Danielle and I were both extremely sick and were pretty much useless. Somehow we made it through Meshmixer but while we  began to combine our wording and palm shape, we were just not happy with our design, out of ideas, and exhausted from using the software while battling an intense headache. We have not quite refined our concept completely yet so this is the process leading up to our current point. 

As a backup concept that was a more literal and basic hybrid object, we created a hollow concept that  joined the funky transformations of Danielle's objects with the gem textured object of mine as a backup in case our original object was never fully developed or failed to print. 

Made from a single textures surface, the shape was made taller and tapered with a tilted axis to distort and transform the object.