After a few months, the RoboSculpt project finally has a real example. Awhile back I blogged about a new project I had started for a digital fabrication class required of the MSDT students. When Wes McGee helped me cut some tests and I did some fiberglass layups, I gained some more excitement on the project. The normal semester took over most of my time, […]
Update: http://www.smartsculpture.com/2012/05/robosculpt-synergy-between-sculpture.html For the past few years I have walked by the KUKA robot at the University of Michigan architecture FabLab and couldnt wait to use it. It took until this Masters of Science program that I was able to do work with the robot. During my BFA in sculpture I had a few ideas for what I wanted to do on the […]
After a not-long-enough time period I and three teammates, Jesse Wetzel, Cameron Stewart, and Justin Tingue under Professor Maciej Kaczynski, completed a four month project researching parallel pleats and their application within plastic folding. Using the 3-axis Zund Knife cutter we creased a cut an aggregated structure held together by its neighbor using a somewhat involved tabbing system. Through my time as an employee in the […]
The semester has concluded and our Digital Fabrication research has ended as well. Our four person research trajectory was exploring how to use parallel pleat techniques found in origami to manipulate plastic in a way that can be aggregated into a self standing structure. Before we even chose research topics I had begun to fold parallel pleated octagons after seeing them in an origami […]
One of the few things our digital fabrication group knew for sure is that the edge of a bounding box was the same length we wanted for the edge of an octagon. At first I thought about being able to select a set of curves and re-creating them into an octagon. This was a nice idea, but when I did some research it turns […]
After hearing some desire for a script to offset multiple times I decided to go ahead and tackle this problem. Rhino, like many programs, has an offset command. The offset command allows you to select a curve and offset by a specific amount. There are quick ways of duplicating that offset but to my knowledge there is no internal way of auto creating the […]
This is the second part to my explanation of Centroid and Modules in python. The first part went through the conversion of a centroid function into python. It ended with a python script that had some functions, but none of the functions were called. This part will show a simple way to split functions into different files. This can come in handy in many […]
While I have been writing code for the DigiFab project Parallel Pleats, I started to redo my workflow in programming so it would fit better with the functionality of python. Coming from C++ I was not used to the simplicity in separating functions in different files like how python can. With this, and the fact that it never occurred to me that rhino had […]
As part of a four person team, I have been exploring parallel pleats to create forms that will aggregate into a “big” self standing structure. This class, taught by Maciej Kaczynski, is linked to generative computing (taught by Glen Wilcox). Some previous blog posts look at the work being done in that class. Our team has been looking at parallel pleats to create hyperbolic […]
The MS_DT program has a few required courses. Generative Computing with Glenn Wilcox is one of these. The course starts with introductions to programs and scripting environments in Rhino, and then turns into a joint project with Digital Fabrication. As previously posted, the Digital Fabrication class started with a CNC Book box project. The two classes will look at plastic folding and naturally we […]