The Weave - An Investigation Into the Intersection of Craft and 3D Printing

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The Making of the Weave The “threads” and the “weaves,” described in the previous section, have certain properties inherent to them. The thread’s pertaining property is texture, and the property of the weaves, that arises when threads are combined and woven together, is porosity - not completely unlike a tree, having branches with texture, and a crown with varying density. Thus the creation of a thread, being what we apply the dynamisms onto, is different from the generation of a weave. The threads are created from a vertical line (1) which has had its shape transformed by a noise algorithm. This is the first generation of a fractal process since the line is then thickened and turned into a mesh, and the same noise algorithm is applied over and over again in increasingly diminishing scales to transform the mesh surface and apply texture (2). In our project, we have explored several different dynamisms inspired by Hindu temple architecture. Out of these, three are used in the generation of our project proposal, one of which is taken straight from Hindu temple architecture: the “staggering” dynamism (3a), and two of which, at least to our knowledge, are not. These two we call “radial array,” (3b) and “mirroring” (3c). Radial array is the copying of a form in a circular manner, and mirroring is, quite simply the doubling of a form by mirroring it in any direction. After the threads have been generated, we combine them using the dynamisms to form what we call a “sub-weave.” (4) Then we proceed with bending the subweave for it to achieve the desired shape and apply the radial array dynamism once more (5) to create a weave in the form of a dome-like structure. Since we in our project are exploring possible ways of realizing a structure through the means of ceramic 3D printing, in order to extract elements from the overall structure possible of being 3D printed, several slicing operations need to be done following the procedural transformations of the dynamisms. The various dynamisms weave the threads together, causing several self-intersections in the overall structure. These are generally a problem since the boolean operations used to cut the structure into bricks require a geometry with one continuous, unbroken surface. The solution was to keep the information of each thread after the structure had been generated, and use “for each”-loops for each individual thread in the weave when performing the necessary slicing operations. One of the first slicing procedures implies “skinning” the whole structure (6).

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