Research and Inspiration
Aside from the wonderful examples of art pieces made with CNC mills we saw in class I drew some inspiration from a few other sources. Some of my favorites include work on the following sites:
Looking through what other people were able to create using a CNC mill was a wonderful excercise because it provided so many different perspectives and insights into what is possible with this type of machine.
A good friend of mine also works at a company that has a 4-axis mill I’ve had the opportunity to have conversations about more and more of the possibilities of a more capable mill. That being said, I still don’t have enough perspective on what is possible. I showed him some designs that I’ve been playing around with created in StructureSynth and he said it might even need a 5-axis mill. Might have to find somewhere with that capability to play around!
I’ve also been spending some time experimenting with displacement maps for my Grad Critique project so it’s been nice to work with patterns that were not based on topological data. While I find topo maps beautiful there is something exciting about taking more complex geometric and abstract patterns into a third dimension.
Process and Progress
In the first part of this assignment I spent most of the time looking at patterns for inspiration and making patterns of my own that I wanted to see in a 3D perspective. This gave me an opportunity to experiment more with Affinity Photo (however there was one time when I went back to Photoshop to perform an action I was interested in).
Once I was had several images saved as displacement maps I was ready to jump into Blender and make a box ready to be displaced. At this point I had performed this action a few times and I didn’t have to reference any of the instructions. When it came to the time to do the loop cuts I ended up doing 50 instead of 30. I wanted to see if I could tell the difference in the resolution of the model. For most of the patterns I brought it I wasn’t, but when I brought in one of the more detailed patterns I had made it didn’t seem to have a slightly better outcome. However, I learned that the subdivision surface modifier accomplishes pretty much the same thing but my computer can’t handle it at the higher multipliers.
I’m super excited about the next step of taking some of these patterns to the CNC Mill and giving them a physical form.
Reflection
I think I got a little carried away with this assignment because I ended up making 10+ different models. Something about seeing the height data come into the model from a basic image is unbelievable every time. I was even more intrigued when the pattern created an organic looking curve in the model. While I know this is a basic functionality of Blender it just makes me want to learn more about the program. At this point I can’t even imagine what 6 months of practice will produce, but I’m looking forward to it!
Now that we have been introduced to the majority of the tools that we will encounter in the Digital Fabrication I understand that my experience with these tools is still a limiting factor on what knowing what can and cannot be done. However, I feel like that is a wonderful position to be in, a position poised for a large amount of experimentation and learning.