Introduction to Digital Fabrication ARCH 433 | Spring 2019 Alex Dutoit and Eric Heckman
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ARCH 433 I Assignment 1 Alex DuToit and Eric Heckman
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Casting 3D Prints
Casting 3D prints not only allowed us to dive right into 3D printing at the beginning of this class, but it also helped us view the negative spaces used to create some of the precast architecture that we inhabit in our everyday lives.
the bat. We were able to easily remove and reuse all pieces. This made it very easy to make little changes to wrinkle out any design flaws. We were able to test the limits of our design, especially in the area of the tapered cutout. We started by having it split into two pieces and we were eventually able to combine it into one piece giving us a smooth cast because all seems of the mold lined up with corners in the cast.
In this lab assignment, we designed a skewed rhombus block with a tapered cutout through the center that angles through the block at an angle. Our intent with this design was to create an interesting geometry with a cutout Our failures involved the use of hot that only allowed a view through from a glue in an attempt to make the seams specific point. seamless as well as not being able to get some of our tapered cutouts out The final design is a one-inch-thick of the cast because It was not tapered extrusion that is skewed by ¾” in both enough. the x and y axis. The tapered cutout through the center was created using a In the next few pages you can read series of lofts that taper to one corner of about our process and learn about the design on the backside. what we did to come up with the final design of our module. Our goal was to completely activate the front face of the design without effecting the outside geometry while creating smooth faces as well as a mold that would easily be removed and reused. Our mold was very successful right off 4 | Introduction to Digital Fabrication
Research Question How do we create re usuable 3D printed molds to create stackable complex geometries? Keywords Cast, Mold, 3D Print Position This is the project’s thesis statemetn or position. Details Approx. 8 hours of total print time Approx. 80 cm3 total volume
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The Broad gave us a starting point and some inspiration for our design in its sleek modular precast facade. We liked that the individal module activated the entire face of the building letting light in during the day and out at night. The nice smooth holes they created in the module was also something we wanted to attempt to recreate in our module. We really liked the directionality of the hole and how it only faces the one direction depending on which facade
it is on. With that design the designers and architect were able to use it to their advantage and block the sun in some places while still letting in a nice smooth indirect light into the building. With it being a museum this is very beneficial for any of the artwork on the interior of the building. In the next few pages you can see how we created our own module using some of these similar ideas throughout our design.
Photo (Above): The Broad Location: Los Angeles, CA Source: Barco, Mandalit Del. “The Broad Museum Is A Contemporary Art Collector’s Gift To Los Angeles.” NPR. September 18, 2015. Accessed February 12, 2019. https://www. npr.org/2015/09/18/440574106/the-broadmuseum-is-a-contemporary-art-collectors-giftto-los-angeles.
Top View
Front View
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Parallelogram Extrusion
Stretched Equally in Positive X and Y Direction
Surface Impression on Front or Top Face
Tapered Diagonal Void Cut Through Center with a Filleted Edge on Top
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Photo (All Right): These photos and renderings are showing the process of how our mold has changed over time where we have learned new things as well as push the design of our module. Photo (Top Right): Starting from the left, you can see our first attempt at creating our void piece of the mold. This mold was designed with an oval shaped baseplate that mounts into the top plate. The void piece was designed in two pieces so that during printing we would be able to lay these two pieces on their side and not have to use any supports which would make removal difficult later on. Printing it in this direction also worked in our favor as the grain of the printer ran parallel to the pieces making them much easier to get out of the cast. For the middle void piece we wanted to try to change up the baseplate to try and make our cast look more seamless. Doing so left us with a very nice and sleek diamond shaped baseplate. However, the way this piece was printed required supports to hold up column, making sure it would not slump or tip over on the printer. This added another job of sanding down the piece, especially where the supports were connected. Overall, the middle void worked really well and did everything we wanted it to, including not getting stuck inside of the cast. Finally, on the far right, we moved on to our final design. After using what we leared from the previous attempts, we really wanted to try and activate the whole front face of our mold to create a more dynamic and interesting looking cast. We had some minor difficulties with it (shown later) but, once we worked through that and figured out the problems, this mold created a ten great casts for us. Photo (Middle Right): The final entire four-part mold that was used to create our final casts. Photo (Bottom Right): This line drawing show more detail of how our mold actually worked. When taking it apart we would first be able to remove the top plate. (The bottom middle part). Then we would be able to take off the two tapered walls that were locked into the top plate. Lastly, we would be able to remove void piece with a hammer which then left us with our cast and our mold parts to make another cast.
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Attempt 1: Shown in the photo, you can see where the void piece left an oval shaped seam around where it started to curve in from the face. Also shown is the seam running down the middle of the void. This was created from having the void part of the mold in two pieces.
Attempt 2: We tried to remove the seam, or make it less prominent by using hot glue to smooth the hard edges. It partially worked but it was not good enough. We also filled in the seam that was on the void part of the mold with hot glue.
Attempt 3: We created a singular void piece that was singular. This created a very nice seamless cast.
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Attempt 4A: Using the same idea as attempt three, we were able to push our design and try to create a curved face on the cast. However it had alot of friction from the grain of the print and ended up getting stuck.
Attempt 4A: Shown in this photo, we ended up snapping off the top part of the void piece with the hammer from hitting it so hard while trying to get it out.
Attempt 4B: After reprinting the broken void part we throughly sanded and melted down the print grain, which allowed us to easily remove the void part leave us with a very sleek cast.
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Illustrated line drawing design, annotated - labels, dimensions, etc
Entire Design Plan (s)
Entire Design Section (s)
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Rendering(s)
Rendering(s)
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ARCH 433 I Assignment 2 Alex DuToit and Eric Heckman
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Slump Molding Dyed Ceramic Tiles
In this project we got to 3D print with clay. We were tasked with creating a tile with the 3D printer called a Potterbot that operates just like a 3D printer or a CNC machine.
and lofted the two edges together with some manipulation between the two. From there we cage edited our loft to created points that reached the lowest and highest allowable milling planes.
3D printing dyed ceramic tiles is one of the best ways to display design intent digitally and comparing it to the actual output. There are so many variables when it comes to this process that can change the output while printing. Starting with the CNC slump mold, we were introduced to a new world of tolerance.
Then we had to develop and design our Potterbot script. We used a summation sin graph to get a tile that was had a tight sinusoidal pattern on the exterior and a loose sinusoidal pattern in the middle. We were able to choose a nozzel to print with on the Potterbot to add a little bit more uniqueness to our designs.
For our slump molds, our entire class created a grid of molds. On everyones assigned grid space we had to coordinate a class model and match up the edges of the top face to their mold. This allowed our class to learn what it is like in the real world when trying to coordinate things between 16 different people, or more. Using the edge of the slump mold next to ours, we duplicated the edge to give us our starting point. We then took the edge of another mold as our opposite edge
With our first attempt we used the triangular nozzle which caused a rollover effect with the extrusion. This caused our output to look like green ramen noodles. We attempted the same gcode with a round nozzle head and our output was more consistent with our initial grasshopper script and gave a nice smooth look to the tile especially in some of the tighter areas.
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In the next pages we break down what we did to get to our final designs.
Research Question How can we manipulate a grasshopper script while understanding the tolerance that comes with 3D printing cermaics? Keywords Gradient, Cermanic, Slump Mold, 3D Print
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Grasshopper Script Manipulation: We used the graph manipulation script as our script of choice prior to printing. Using the sin summation graph, we messed with the graph until we got line work that always appeared to be moving. The graph had a denser exterior and a more open interior which is easier to see in the second attempt. We used triangular nozzles for our first couple attempts which caused some rollover effect with the extrusion. We did not like how messy it looked so we attempted one more tile with a round nozzle and got a much nicer result.
Nozzle Size : 03 mm
Nozzle Size : 03 mm
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Projected Mesh
Projected Mesh
Grasshopper Mesh Lines
Grasshopper Mesh Lines
CNC Mold : 01,01
CNC Mold : 01,02
* third mold and tile were done using the same script but on one of the waft slump molds *
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Stonework Attempt 01: This was the very first tile that we printed. By doing this initial test with the stoneware allowed us to get a general idea on what extrusion speed and print speed we needed to use to get good results in our final tiles. We also used a triangular shaped head for this print.
Nozzle Size : 03 mm Extrusion Speed: 110
Dyed Porcelain Attempt 02: For the dyed porcelain tiles we used our second script which gave our tile larger voids. One problem we had was with the triangle head as it twisted the porcelain seen in the top left corner of the tile.
Nozzle Size : 03 mm Extrusion Speed: 100
Dyed Porcelain Attempt 03: In one of our final attempts with the porcelain, we used a circular head to eliminate the hard edges of the extrusion making it look twisted. We also used our first script for this tile, which is the same file as the first stoneware tile.
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ARCH 433 I Assignment 3 Alex DuToit and Eric Heckman
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Plasma CNC Extruder Dies + Extrusions In this project we got to create our own extrusion die as well as use that die to extrude clay. The Plasma CNC Extruder Dies and Extrusions project was by far the project that had the greatest tolerance in terms of transitioning from digital to physical unlike the clay tiles. This was one of our biggest concerns when starting out because there is so much that can go wrong between the CNC to the firing of pieces. There can be cutting issues, extrusion issues, drying issues, you name it.
Our second CNC Die was shaped like a shark tooth that is shown above. This design was extruded using the Pug Mill. We discovered very quickly how much more effective the Pug Mill was compared to the hand extruder. The Pug Mill gave us very smooth extrusions and we were able to get them to be much longer than our attempts with the hand extruder. With this project, a multitude of variables come into play. Your extrusions can fail due to the consistency of the clay before you extrude. They can fail because of how they are handled during extruding. They can even fail depending on how long they sit before cutting. This project was fairly time sensitive and easy to cause imperfections. We believe that it is a great example of how modeling digitally is air tight and precise while modeling physically is far from fail proof.
Our initial design intent was to create extrusions that would not only work as an undulating facade but also an art piece of some sort. Our first CNC Die was bow tie shaped. We designed this die so that the edges facing East and West would fit in the edges facing North and South. This would allow us to stack them on each other to make some sort of breeze block or a nice block for a brick pathway. The extrusions for that In the next pages you can read through die were done using the hand extruder. our process and how we created out The hand extruder was kind of difficult designs. to pack and use but the extrusions turned out decent. 30 | Introduction to Digital Fabrication
Research Question How can we use a plasma CNC to cut extruder dies to create stonewear extrusions that serve an architectural purpose? Keywords Extruder, extrusion, plasma, CNC, die, paint, slice
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EXTRUDER DIE 1 : CAMO BOW TIE
2.8” .37”
The camo bow tie design was one that was designed to puzzle piece together no matter what angle you sliced the extrusion as long as you make the same angled slice rotated 90°. Overall we would consider it to be a success and we chose the camo face design to hide the gaps in between extrusions.
4.0”
EXTRUSION PROCESS
PLASMA CNC DIE _______________________________________________________
EXTRUSION _______________________________________________________________
22.5° SLICE _____________________________________________________
EXTRUSION LEFTOVER ______________________________________________________
FUTURE SLICE ROTATED NINETY DEGREES ___________________________
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2.8” .37”
EXTRUDER DIE 2 : NICKELODEON SHARK TOOTH The nickelodeon shark tooth design was designed to fit together and rotate around a singular point. While this was successful, we also discovered that the flat sides could be mirrored and the design could continue to spiral in a different direction. We painted the sides white spray paint and used the CCL green to make could Nickelodeon slime face that dripped down the sides.
4.0”
EXTRUSION PROCESS
________________________________________________________ PLASMA CNC DIE
___________________________________________________________________ EXTRUSION
_____________________________________________________ 45° SLICE
_________________________________________________________ EXTRUSION LEFTOVER
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