My Companion Cube Wall Sconces

I have finally gotten the chance to update on one of my personal works, and hopefully I get the chance to update many more in the near future.  This work is based off of the Valve computer game Portal.  This dangerously addicting puzzle masterpiece with its witty sense of humor has become a favorite past time of my boyfriend and I.  So naturally, for our anniversary, I decided to make him something based off of the game that we spent so many hours playing together.

I have the computer program Rhinoceros in which I modeled the background portal booleaned to a half of a companion cube.  Modeling the portal was fairly easy, just making an oval with smoothed edges.  I did need to make the oval hollow however seeing that I wanted the piece to be light enough to hang on the wall. A general rule of thumb to follow when 3d printing hollow objects such as this is to have a sustainable wall thickness which I generally maintain at .08 inches depending on the piece (if I’m working in millimeters I generally keep objects solid for stability). To do this, I just offset my object within itself, then I booleaned differenced the offset object out of the original piece.  This leaves me a nice hollow cavity that saves me lots of money at the end of the day because it’s less material to print.

The trickiest part of creating the portal cube for me was the corners.  Getting that exact shape was fairly difficult and led to much cursing on my end while trying to get things to line up nicely.  However, the beautiful thing about the companion cube is that it’s symmetrical, so once I nailed down one corner I was able to mirror it to wherever it needed to be. 

I decided to print in plaster since it’s a cheap material, lightweight, and I am very familiar with it.  Fortunately I have a bunch of test parts of plaster lying around from previous projects, so I was able to test out how acrylic paint would dry on the material.  The plaster did absorb the paint slightly which gave it a softer look.  It also dried several shades lighter, so that is something to keep in mind if anyone wants to repeat my endeavor.  Overall, I thought the plaster received the paint nicely, so I decided against using any kind of sealer since it’s a decorative wall piece that will not be touched often.  Future projects I do plan on experimenting with sealers for wearable pieces. 

The printing provider I used was Shapeways (http://www.shapeways.com/).  They are very cost effective and super helpful if you have any questions.  They also provide a copious amount of printing materials to choose from.  So I highly suggest on checking them out. 

3d printed resin record

Recently in 3d printing technology a playable record was printed from the material resin with a Objet Connex 500.  Amanda Ghassaei documents her process in a video that I have linked below.  Most of us who have designed utilizing CAD are aware that you fabricate models by creating meshes that are made up of tiny little triangles.  Ghassaei explains, because of how complex it would be to traditionally draft an audio file, she had to create a program to do the conversion for her.  This conversion broke down the numbers that created the raw audio data into the form of a readable wave form or groove on the resin disc.  The wave length transcribed in the disc is read by the turntable stylus which travels along the path (groove) to re-create the path in an audio form that we can hear.

The quality of the recording is admittedly not great, but this does arise the question, how do different printed materials sound? The original vinyl record came into popularity since it had a much better sound quality than the original shellac records.    Over the last century we have moved from different ways to produce sound from the phonograph cylinder, to the shellac record, to the vinyl record, to the laser read compact disc, now we rely heavily on the mp3.



However, people are nostalgic.  What has come into fashion is using our current technology in the guise of its predecessor.  Such as the iphone with its retro hand telephone attachment. Or the large 1980's boombox that attaches to your mp3 player so you get that retro look with a clean modern sound.  We find it cool and hip to have the style of the yesteryear with the convenience of modern technology.  I would not find it surprising if this program is used in different materials to play with sound.  To use modern 3d printing technology to re-create something our parents used.  I would love to hear how different materials sounded and see what kind of music could be created with this program.  I really hope innovative companies like Shapeways eat this up and experiment to see how far we can go.

sources:

 http://www.amandaghassaei.com/3D_printed_record.html - Amanda Ghassaei's website with video and images

3d printing is a new and exciting field in the world of design.  It has become an incredible tool for creating the relics bound within our imaginations and gives us a way to give them tangibility.  3d printing and rendering has come a long way since my professors’ education in the nineties where CAD was a complex programming software that you had to grapple with, let alone the cost of materials. Now our fortunate generation is the one with technology at our fingertips.  We have several different auto CAD programs at our mercy that we wield to create objects from a long list of very cost effective materials that our fore fathers of the CAD-iverse did not have.  It even has come to the point that I know several people with their own personal 3d printer and I myself plan to get one.  A few years ago the tech nerd would drop a small fortune on a maker-bot that they would assemble themselves, and that maker-bot would take several hours to heat abs nylon through a tube to create your object.  Now we have small 3d printers available for around $2000 that can print in multiple materials quickly and more efficiently than its maker-bot predecessor.   It’s incredibly the leaps and bounds that the 3d printing realm has taken in the last few years.

Here I have linked a video of one of the latest feats our generation has opened up to the world of 3d printing. Printing liquid metal, developed by a team at North Carolina University, they have found a way to oxidize the surface of a small bead of liquid metal to stabilize it enough so that it can remain in liquid form to create malleable liquid metal structures.  We are very used to heating polymer materials that quickly cool into non-malleable structures when taken away from its heat source.  Here we have a material that stays liquid in room temperature allowing further manipulation which can lead to huge leaps and bounds for the technology field when it comes to computer parts, wires, connectors, electrodes, etc.   Anyone who has worked with metal knows that metal, to become liquid, needs intense heat typically from a torch, and it does not stay liquid when that heat source is removed.  It cools far too quickly, but this technique finds a way around that reality.  From what I understand the metal they have chosen to work with is gallium.  It is a very soft metal that does not appear in nature.  

Gallium has a very low melting point, just above room temperature.  It has been reported that if the element is held long enough it will melt in your hand.  I know it seems less impressive using such a soft malleable metal for this technique, but the metal does have the conductivity needed for electronics and it could lead to new ways of printing with precious metals down the road.  I look forward to where this will lead printing with metals since we typically tend to focus on printing with polymers.  

sources: http://www.shapeways.com/blog/?li=nav

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/adma.201301400/pdf

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallium