Posts

Even Bigger Robotic Drawing

Image
Yet Another Art Nouveau Inspired Drawing In Process In Process I had some fun issues during this project. They were extremely frustrating at the time, but they're the kind of thing that make you understand what's happening better when you have to learn why they're broken.  At first, my units were wrong. I was working in feet for the sake of getting the paper size right, but having the document set to feet completely broke the grasshopper definition. Well, actually it worked exactly as it was supposed to, it's just that every numerical value in the definition was now relative to my document settings. Which is how I ended up with a Z offset of 10 feet. That took some figuring out and a lot of back and forth between Rhino and Avid.  Then, my Gcode was throwing errors because I couldn't get grasshopper to stream the data the right way and had to just copy and paste. Then I had thirty thousand lines of code... that all had line numbers in front of them. T...

Experiments with robotic drawings

Image
This project was interesting and expanded my idea of what I can do with a 3D printer. I find I'm thinking less about it as a "printer" than as a collection of components which can be used in different ways.  I had some issues with it. Mostly getting set up and running initially, as we weren't totally sure what to do. Once the printer was drawing, it also became apparent that there was a major flaw in my design. Way too many lines! Working zoomed in, I lost track of how big this thing would actually be and way overfilled my curves. The fill didn't get finished because it was taking an insanely long time. Something to keep in mind if I do this again haha.  I can see a lot of fun applications for something like this and I want to try and set this up at home myself. I think I would tile a design and create a really big print out of a bunch of small sheets.  The drawing itself isn't that interesting. I tend to come back to art nouveau inspired imagery a lot w...

Intro to Grasshopper

Image
First small patch. Dividing and adding lines. Biarcs! Surfaces! This is giving me a lot of ideas for ways to model complex geometry more easily. Organic modelling in Rhino is something I struggle with. My attempt at using the basics. Baked and booleaned. My patch. Nothing too crazy yet. Idea was to extrude and twist as well, but I couldn't seem to make it any thicker. I also elected to ignore those warnings. Grasshopper is super cool. It’s hard to imagine just yet what I personally would actually use it for, but it seems like a versatile tool. I had some issues that are probably easy to fix. I couldn’t figure out how to change the depth of an extrusion or to merge my breps into one shape (brep join did not seem to do it?). Very interested to see what can be accomplished once I know more about the software.