Week 7 - Full Prototype

This week we finally were able to put all of our pieces together and create a full model.

2006_11_17 - Dendrobium Full Prototype

It worked pretty well. We're worried that it's a little circus-tenty, but whatever for now. We'll keep working on it, and we're happy for now.

Week 5 - Lighting Concept

The focus for this week was figuring out how we wanted to light our piece and come up with a reasonable way to achieve said lighting concept. We decided to emphasize the counterweight aspect of our original idea by having the bottom glow and the top be lit with multiple, more visible light sources. The most important criticism/idea from our midreview last week was to leave the flower morphology terminology aside for the interior petals, and begin to think of them as lighting infrastructure. We really liked this idea because it allows us to bracket our thinking of the interior petals with pragmatic concerns: size of the lights, wiring, connections of wiring, degree of emanation of light, etc. So, here's what we came up with:


So we've added to our interior structure 3 extra petals. The inner petals are specifically lighting infrastructure, the next set out receive light and bind the outer sepals together. The elevation is an in-process drawing of one of the inner petals. At this point, the verdict is that we just need to test all this stuff physically and make sure it works. We'll be doing a lot of that over the next two weeks, and will post more photos of the actual piece, which we haven't done yet (sorry).

Week 4: Pseudo Mid Review/Internalizing Delamination

So this was a busy week. We had a mid-review today and were required to rethink how we represent our work. We've been looking at hand-tinted photography after thinking about how Karl Blossfeldt composes his photographs. This is allegorical to the way we're making our flower pieces. The plastic is totally clear, and while it picks up form and texture from the milled form, it has no color. So whatever colors we want will be hand-applied onto a surface that has character but little contrast (yes, I know that old b&w photos had lots of contrast, but work with me here). So with this intro (and please keep in mind that we haven't had time to apply this kind of thinking) here are our boards. The text is on there, cuz I'm tired.

Week 3: Digital Work

Elevations

The work for the creation of the vacuum formed piece started by figuring out the 3d model in a few different ways. The first was coming up with a form that would work mechanically, so as to test two of the joining conditions of our previous flower model. So as you can see from the elevations, we added smaller scale ribbing to try to make certain parts of the piece inflexible, as well as provide ways for separate parts to nestle together.

Perspective views


Sections

The sections, especialy the one on the right, show the main pinch. This pinch allows all of the rest of the flower to delaminate and form other spaces, and to expand into blooming petals. This is the crux of our project. So we tried to make it tight enough to allow for the stuff being pinched to push back on it and then some of the ribs would lock everything into place (the second and third colored perspectives shows this area the best). This didn't work exactly as we expected, but we learned a lot about how vacuum formed plastic works (we'll get into this on the next post). The sections then were vital to get everything to fit together, and will continue being the starting point for any modeling we do.

Exploded Axon

This axon shows how there are various forces at work within the piece. There is the internal pressure of the green piece (lovingly nicknamed Allie), which pushes against the pinching pressure of the pink and purple piece. You'll notice in this drawing that we actually milled the purple piece to be curved into the pink piece. This was to pressurize the fitting between the two, which would be a series of bumps, sort of like on a blister pack you find at the grocery store. Neither of these two joints worked out. We ended up scrapping the purple piece altogether and using two of the pink pieces. The bumbs didn't work when we tried to mill them, and ended up applying them afterward.

Budding Diagram

We call our revised bumps 'buds' because of the way they grow out of a surface, similar to how a bud forms on a tree branch. The bud is formed by heating up the plastic with a heat gun and depressing the back of a drill bit into it once the plastic becomes, well, more plastic. Then, a notch is cut into the side of it, so that a hole drilled into the connecting piece of plastic can slide over the bud and be pulled tight against it. See the photo stream below for pictures of gloved hands and a floating heat gun working on this process.

Week 3: Production Images

Dendrobium Production - Week 3

These are images of our first week of CNC milling and vacuum forming. The digital work will be in the next post, along with more explanation. I'll probably edit this post, as well as add captions to the pictures so they make sense. For now, enjoy.

Week 2: Plasticky

(click each picture to enlarge - this is your last reminder)

So the first thing we needed to do was revisit the Arthur Church illustration. We went back and drew more precise sections and figured out how to remodel the flower to focus on the areas we were interested in. We figured out a scale for the drawings based on how thick a sheet plastic would need to be to accurately represent one layer of flower-material (in this case, a sepal of the orchid). These serial sections were made to show off the interior parts we are interested in and a couple were blown up to full scale (the full size versions of the images in this post are 24" x 36").

(don't know why the preview looks bad... click for good image)

So the next thing was to take this stuff and turn it into plastic. Specifically, plastic sections that can be made with a vacuum former. This process is basically making a mold that has a vacuum hose attached to the bottom of it and pulling heated drooping plastic into it. This drawing explores breaking up the model into several pieces, as well as different ways of joining the pieces. The idea is to build joints into mold so that mechanical processes are not required to hold the model together. Another issue with vacuum forming is that the exposed edges of the plastic cut out of the mold are not very nice or clean. So these kinds of joints minimise exposed edges giving a smooth surface. The grey diagrams are our first attempt to work out the section of the mold.

This is an axon showing how the different pieces currently go to together. The second from left is the total assembled model. This drawing is lacking details about connections, but those will keep getting updated throughout the quarter.



Hopefully these renderings will help put it all together. It's a little confusing, but that's one of the things we need to work on. There are a lot of things to work on, so hopefully much will get clarified in the next few weeks.

Week 1 Review

(click images to enlarge)

We were tasked this week to analyze the illustration of our chosen flower for hotspots. A hotspot could mean several things; for us it meant a conjunction of structural and formal relationships that created an interior space. We focused on how a pinch of material from the stem creates a mass that acts as a counterweight to the rest of the structure of the orchid. Progressing away from the stem, the pinched material starts to delaminate, creating the petals. There is then another interesting rotation and pinch. Before the bottom petal unfurls completely from the back of the orchid, two side petals delaminate downward, trapping the sides of the bottom petal and creating the interior space.

This pinch-delaminate-pinch is the thing we are going to keep developing for our project. We must now tighten up the 3d model, get rid of the wiggles and put it together a little smarter so that we can modify it into something that can be vaccuum formed. Bearing that in mind, we have to reconfigure our model from surfaces that vary in thickness (although very minute, these variations in thickness seriously affect how the petal performs) into uniformly thick surfaces. We also will start to think about micro scale variations in these surfaces that can start to break up the surfaces or give extra support. Seams are difficult as well, so we will have to consider how sheets of plastic can connect with each other. We have been duly warned of the problems with raw edges of PETG plastic.

Dissecting an orchid

We found a member of the dendrobium family and started pulling it apart to see how the different parts come together. We are interested in how the petals form from one point near the stem, fold back on themselves, curve backward, curve down, and finally curve open all the way. This creates a complex space inside where the sexual organs converge and all sorts of structural shenanigans occur. More on that later...

The rest of the photoset is here.

Dendrobium wardianum: drawings

So this is our flower. The drawings are from this book, by a man named Arthur Harry Church. We're going to start looking into hotspot regions, like where thin meets thick, or where a petal recurves back on itself. Not areas having to do with color. From these areas we will extract geometry and start modeling surfaces in Rhino or Maya. The idea is to find areas that interest us architecturally and explore them. I think we'll find out where it leads later...

Origins

So the idea is that we as a team could use this space to document our work throughout the quarter. This is pretty easy and maybe fun. 'Tulip Batter' is actually the name of my portfolio that got me into columbia. It's a dumb story, but shows how crazy life gets when involved with this architecture thing. We were sitting in IHOP trying to come up with what I should put on the binding of my portfolio (I said 'Stand on my face' because the cover is made of cork flooring) and Taryn looked around at the giant sized images of tulips, some electricity leaped around her neurons for a couple nano-seconds as she connected that with our in utero pancakes, and Tulip Batter was born. But I'd been thinking of starting this for awhile and this is as good a reason to start as any...