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.