Christmas CAD

I've been muddling through Rhino 5.0 and Flamingo nXt attempting to make my lovely jewelry objects look pretty and becoming fustrated that the version is just different enough that it feels like I'm relearning everything, and everything I do make doesn't look as good as it should. But, let's begin with what I have worked out, with the example of my arrow rings. The above image is rendered with Rhino's built in renderer as compared to...

How Flamingo does it. I assure you nothing has changed between these two images other than the renderer. Flamingo images will always have more light in them by default.

 

 

The other new(ish) thing with Flamingo nXt is that it will keep making passes over the rendered image, attempting to smooth out the shadows each time until you tell it to stop or set a limit. Here I let the program do three passes. Notice how blurry the shadow are on the yellow ring in front especially set against the single pass image below it.

Another advantage of sorts with nXt is that they dumped in a ton of background options, or at least made them much easier to access. No longer is it necessary to create an infinity cyc by manually putting a curved surface behind your object you can instead set the background to be a two or three color gradient or an image. I tested it out going from black to white in the background of this earring and human shaped display prop I made.

Lights and reflectivity are still a huge problem and perhaps are even worse in this program. No matter what I do the lights are still too bright in Flamingo and over expose the hell out of it. This was perhaps the most aesthetically pleasing mistake because it sort of looks like the old PS3 game Mirror's Edge, which I never have played.

While I work out how to light and render shiny objects I'm building a few more complex ones now that im a little more into the Rhino groove. At this point I swear "sweep rail" must be my favorite command to do.


Well it's back to the virtual drawing board to see what else I can work out by my deadline! Ciao!

End of the Year Clean Up

Probably ought to do a little end of the year wrap up on my semester, so lets break it down by class.

CAD: Nothing changed since the last post, look for more stuff by the end of January.

Jewelry:

A sad looking drum that needs revamping when it comes to the head. But I have a plan for fixing it later....

And the whole shebang for this semester. Rather disappointing isn't it? It was a bit of a bad semester all around for everyone in the class though, blargh. Hopefully the next go around will be better.

Fibers has eight of my 10 samples here for the final project and

a blurry cell phone picture of the final piece. It's about the Albright-Knox and how the classical architecture is at odds with the modern art in it. The columns are trying to contain the art (or the art is trying to break out). Anyway, the columns growing over the background remind me of the Konami shooter Lifeforce in which your piloting a ship through some sort of organic thing with walls that grow and get in your way.

 

 

Since they are so far back in the top image have some exclusive images of my two favorite samples. First is a nice modern art looking one that was the basis for the final (and also looks better) and the second one has a nice japanese garden railing reflecting in the pond look to it. All in all a great year for me in fibers; I'm tentatively looking forward to the next class im taking in it.

 

Digital Methods: the less said about it the better I suppose but heres some stuff anyway,

 

Random ad I had to cobble together into photoshop.

Stupid illustrator tools.

The silly old southwestern chair hut.

Probably the best pieces from the class are these laser cut cloud earrings. I'm happiest with how these came out despite the bad glue job, would laser cut again etc, etc. Which means I ought to look into buying an Adobe Suite, especially when coupled with the fact my copy of Photoshop is three versions out of date.

Overall its been a a fairly good semster in all the classes that aren't directly concerning jewelry, funny how that happened. Since I am in a celebratory mood and it's nearly Christmas let's end with OCRemix again and a Mario/Christmas music medly:

 



CADverision

Waaay back over Thanksgiving I did get into Rhino CAD, finally, and here are the results:

First is an arrow ring I attempted to make in wax with little success and here I'm all happy it has no naked edges and can be 3D printed.

And the Nacell Ring, rather based off the Starship Enterprise. This is another one I attempted to build in real life which didn't work at all, especially since I attempted it in brass to scale (scale being that it's a size 7 ring with 4 mm stones).

A laser cut idea that I never got around to and was suprisingly fiddly to build in CAD, mostly because I couldn't just duplicate one of the trapezoidal shaped parts to the earring and scale it, I had to rebuild large portions that refused to join right for some reason. Eventually I did get it to work right though.

This is the other idea I've got for some laser cut earrings that I never had time to do so why not do it in CAD?

When you're left to your own devices in a 3D program, shit gets wierd. I made these goofy earrings by simply getting bored and messing about in the program and I think they look kinda stupid because of it. Evidently I need to go in with a plan or a sketch or attempt to duplicate a real life object instead of trying to start with Rhino first.

Obviously I never got a chance to render these with the crushing weight of my other studios, so that's the next step, in addition to building a few more interesting jewelry pieces. Not a very vibrant update really on what I've been doing so here's a gaint water balloon popping in slow motion:

That'll do.

Fibres! Fibres!

Well I attempt to relax over Thanksgiving a bit, I have been trying to come up with a pattern to deconstructively screen print on the last project. Due to time constraints and other issues it has been cut down to ten 12 inch by 12 inch samples and on a three by five foot final piece.

We are also to continue to work with our assigned building and the whole City Bits/ City Bytes theme, but I've really run out of ideas on how to use the Albright-Knox in a different way than on my devore project.

Since I want to involve the sculpture Light Matrix that sits on top of the Albright -Knox addition more in this piece than I did the last one, I went to the master of using dots, Maurce Binder's opening for Dr. No in 1962. Trivia time, the electronic beeping in the very beginning with the producer's credits is supposed to represent that Bond is a spy for the computer age. And, the dots themselves are actually price stickers stop motion animated.

Factoidial knowledge aside, I have sketches like these follwing themes as far afield as Space Invaders
 and geology, but little to do with the art museum and Greco-roman revival architecture.

I'm no closer to an acceptable design for the final, but at least I've had fun going through all the old Bond intros.

And what are the Side Projects?

The darling side projects are:

A Decipticon logo pin as a birthday present for a friend,

A commision for a Jupiter Pendant with the possiblity of more in the,

 

Student Sale which is happening in early December for which I have to prepare my summer production pieces for.

Well, one bit on the main project for jewelry. It will be an extremely tight schedule but I hope to smith a small toy drum for what else, the toy project in jewelry. Observe sketches! 

 

 



Since I don't want to keep filling the ending musical noise video with just various iterations of video game back ground music lets have some random Japanese animation from 1933! The plot as far as I can gather is that a Fox (disguised as a samurai) and a Tanuki (with his father) try to outwit each other in an abandoned temple. I do love classic old animation and, hey look at this bonus remix some one made about old cartoons.

 



 

And from there I guess I am obliged to post Disney's infamous Silly Symphony from 1929, The Skeleton Dance.

 



I'm going to have to stop myself before I post the entirety of early animation history here.

Having Bitten off More...

...Than I can possibly chew at one time, I've reorganized some priorities to bring you the process of making my latest jewelry piece.

We begin with forging the lower half of my necklace out of quarter inch copper rod as they are just about to be annealed again for more hammering.

Once I shaped and drilled the ends of the piece I riveted them together. Some how I always wind up having to rivet on top of a dapping punch since the pieces have just enough of a curve that a flat anvil or bench block won't work.

Because I learned my lesson with the Pac-man necklace about how rigid riveted pieces are the top half of the this one is a normal chain that I twisted into a sort of curb chain, which doesn't lay right with the rest of the piece but eh live and learn? Also notice that you cannot see the solder seams on the chain since I used a copper solder I got from the Rochester gem show. It's a lot like low temperature silver solder and actually flows with out using flux. It means however its easier to stick feed it than to use pallions. Still want to get more of it and keep experiementing with it though.

Here's how everything starts to line up so far for the necklace. Once the chain was attached and the clasp made and put on it was time to start adding the plastic.

I had to have help slicing the tubing since there are difficulties involved in running it through power saws. After that it was time to begin fitting the pins that hold the plastic to the metal necklace.

While I started working on the plastic part of the necklace the Nor'easter Iron Conference was happening, specifically they were doing their big 1,000 pound iron pour outside next to the jewelry studio. Such a lovely smell from the coke furnace, indeed.

By now I have the top and bottom circles fitted to the plastic rings and its time to start gluing.

Gluing even with some practice proved to be messier than I had anticipated but here are the pieces half assembled and filled halfway with aquarium gravel, some Monopoly houses, miniature dice, and random key knockouts plus tiny rhinestones.

Look at that glorious strat-o-sheen shine! Anyway, not only does the gravel make a falling water sound it looks a lot like flood water especially with houses floating in it. The dice represents the chance of rain since the whole necklace is supposed to be a modern tribal attempting to summon the rain kinda thing.

Here it is finished! Photographed on the world's worst background in the vent where I glued it together with quite caustic acrylic cement. It's not as wonderful as I hoped and I haven't had a chance to try it for weight since I have been letting it to cure for a full 24 hours but at least it's finished and ready for a likely brutal critique.

 



And there was one more benefit to the glue practice, expect to see this piece as a background enviroment in CAD which the entirety of my Thanksgiving break will be spent doing in attempt to bring that project to fruition.

Non sequitur noise time, how about another Cyriak animation, Welcome to Kitty City?

Its amazing what some people can do with a copy of Photoshop, After Effects, and Fruity Loops while I continue to look askance at Illustrator, but the Adobe Suite and I are getting along better now, thanks for asking.

Sheer Diversions

Let us discuss fibers for a moment since I've been having rather unsually successful results in my fibers II class, at least when compared to the minor disaster of fibers I.

Way back in October I completed a woven shibori scarf which is where you weave a scarf on a loom with supplemental warp thread (the dark purple strings here).

You can also remove some of the strings as I did here. Small note, this actually began as plain undyed cotton thread, but I dyed everything blue before the next step:

which is to pull all the shibori strings tight to create a resist for dying:

then dye it purple over the blue and start cutting out the shibori strings and open the scarf up.

 



And the final scarf which I liked for its very NES Metroid colors even though I was aiming for more of an SNES F-zero look.

Just to prove it here's a screenshot of Samus arriving in Norfair in the aforementioned Metroid game. The game itself is a long, huge, lonely, and difficult side scrolling trek through an alien planet which I never quite got the hange of since I prefer more shooty arcade like games.

November's project was largely to do devore on a couple of velevet scarfs, devore being an oldish technique to burn out some of the velvet in various patterns leaving open spaces of the silk base fabric. This project we had famous Buffalo buildings assigned to us to go with Runway 6.0's theme of City Bits/ City Bytes and the college's Year of the City thing. What annoys me about Year of the City is that it got more attention than last year's Year of the Arts, but I digress.

The point is I got the Albright Knox Art Gallery, that most Neoclassical of public buildings with the obligatory art museum ugly 1960s additon. I got some very good exterior shots of it at night for inspiration: the middle one reminding me very much of the landmark first person shooter Goldeneye 64.

Of the patterns I created to use for this project, I wound up using one based on the Ionic columns throughout the building seen here on the left velvet sample and another one one based on the folds of the caraytids on the rear exterior of the building.

Here are the rest of my lovely samples of burnt out velvet. I don't know whether I've just improved that much from fibers I to fibers II (my weaving certainly has) but I really liked how well the dying came out on these samples. Though like the woven shibori project my samples came out a bit better than the actual finals.

This is one of them, which I still like even though it was supposed to turn out more like the top left sample in the group of nine above. My other scarf was supposed to look like the pink sample to the left of the image but as you can tell below:

It didnt. Instead of scarlet with stripes of a color that can only be described as mulberry, I wound up with scarlet and nothing else until I freaked out, scrunched it up, and dunked in black dye for a half hour and got this. I'm still rather lukewarm about it but I didn't want to mess it up even further, and thankfully the professor seemed to like it as is.

While I meditate on what to do for the deconstructive screen printing process that is the next assignment here's today's musical interlude. I considered posting the background music to Norfair but it's one of the more boring songs from Metroid's bass heavy soundtrack when there are better tunes like this one. I also was going to post the classic Goldeneye Gets Down video (caused by the crooked cartridge trick) until I discovered its audio had been taken out by copyright claim.

So I am left with the excellent soundtrack ripped straight from the Cosmic Wars, a real time stategy space sim that never made it out of Japan. I tried playing it once but was immediately bored by the fact it is an RTS game. But it is made by Konami, a company know for having some great sound tracks and this one s quite nice to listen to.