Module 3 - Fabrication

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Module 3 Fabrication

Kevin Zhang - 639878

ENVS10008

NATURAL PROCESS & IDEATION

The natural process which my lantern is based on is the spiral pattern found in nautilus shells.

From the paper model, the idea of an ascending spiral emerged which would be a prominant feature in my lantern.

My initial design was modelled to fit the natural curvature of the arm, which was narrow on the wrist and the upper arm and wider around the elbow and the forearm area.

My lantern would be worn as a sleeve.

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PRECEDENTS

LEFT: RMIT ON A BECKETT STREET I really enjoyed the rectangular style panelling on the windows, which provides shade to the residents inside as well as projecting an aesthetic shadow pattern on the window. However I found the pattern would be too repetitive if it was repeated throughout the whole of my lantern. I did really like the rectangular panels, but I decided that another panel would have to be incorporated into my lantern in order to give it more variety, without it becoming too repetitive.

RIGHT: RMIT ON SWANSTON STREET The RMIT building on Swanston Street featured triangular styl panelling, which I really enjoyed and thought would go well on my lantern. I also found that the repeating triangular patterns went the exact same direction all throughout the outside of the building, making it very structured and orderly. As my lantern already had a very structured shape, I thought about how changing the direction of the triangular pattern would give my lantern an element of irregularity.

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RE-DESIGN & CHANGE IN BASE PATTERN

Bare lantern shape Base pattern

I was not satisfied with how my design turned out in Rhino. So I basically scrapped my previous design and started anew. I started off with my form. I then developed 3D rectangular and triangular base patterns, inspired by the RMIT buildings in the CBD. However, I made the trangular patterns face towards each other, rather than all facing the same way. This was to create a level of irregularity to my very structured shape. To create these base patterns, I used meshes in Rhino to triangulate every surface of the pattern.

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REVISED PANELLING

Variation 1

Variation 2

I played around with the base panels, making the holes in one panel smaller than the other panel, and these are the resulting lantern variations. For the 1st variation, I didn’t change anything with the base patterns. The rectangular panels were spiralling around the lantern in an upwards fashion, although it was not too obvious in this variation. Because the spiral is meant be very apparent in my design, I decided to make one of the base panels smaller, to accentuate the spiral.

Variation 3

Variation 4

Variations 2 and 3 is what I got by doing this. Although the spiral is more apparent now, I did not like how it look and I was worried about the lighting not being strong enough if the holes were too small.

For my last variation, I made the triangular panels only slightly smaller, and made them follow the spiral. Although the spiral is not too obvious in the resulting shape, I ultimately liked how it looked and decided to have my LED lights follow the spiral as well to make it clearer and more noticeable.

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REVISED AND FINAL DESIGN I found that my final design made better use of the capabilities of Rhino. I bascially was not happy at all with my previous design, which prompted a complete redesign of my panelling. I found that my previous design simply did not have a complex or interesting design, and the panelling was too uniform to create any interesting lighting effects, which resulted in an unaesthetic model.

Although there is no difference in shape between my previous model and my final model, the use of custom 3D panels and having a secondary spiral feature ultimately makes my final model more interesting and aesthetic. Also, the variation in panelling gave variety in the lighting effects, which I found to be quite desirable.

Perspective View

Previous design Top View

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1ST PROTOTYPE - UNROLLING & CONSTRUCTION

This was the first prototype that I made.

Basically, there turned out to be countless problems with the model.However, I did learn a lot from the mistakes.

As I did not know exactly what the rights step were to optimise my model for fabrication, I started with unrolling each of the pieces. There was no ordering or separation with the unrolled segments, which meant I had to manually sort them out later, which was very tedious.

I used the ‘makeTabs‘ Grasshopper plugin to automatically generate the tabs and score lines..

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PROBLEMS OF 1ST PROTOTYPE

LEFT: SCORE LINES & TABS

All the fold lines in this prototype were score lines. I quickly realised that score lines were insufficient in producing the desired shapes as the lines needed to be folded both ways.

Also, when unrolling, I left the tabs on the hole, which were unnecessary as they did not have anything to glue to.

RIGHT: TRIANGULAR PATTERNS

One of the largest issues with this prototype was that the trangular panels simply did not fold into the desired shape, and this would not fit into the rest of the model. I had to fix the actual base panel in Rhino to fix this.

LEFT: TABS

I found that I had made the tabs extremely small.

This meant it was harder to assemble and became very messy to fold. Additionally, it was very hard to glue the tabs together because the tabs were so small.

RIGHT: GLUEING & JOINS

Because the tabs were made so small, it became increasingly difficult to glue them together. I would be using a lot of glue on small joints. Also, I held the joint together while the glued dried. I found that this caused very messy glue joints as the human hand would constantly be shaking and vibrating.

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EXPLODED AXONOMETRIC VIEW

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2ND PROTOTYPE

For this prototype, I increased the scale from my previous model as I realised it was too small to act as a sleeve.

I also made all my fold lines to be dashed so I could fold it both ways.

The tabs were also doubled in size.

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2ND PROTOTYPE CONSTRUCTION I used mini bulldog clips to hold the joins together as the glue dried. I found this to give much cleaner results.

The dashed lines meant that I could fold the pieces into the desired shape and I found that the larger tabs made it so much easier to work with.

Initially, I started making the prototype with normal PVA glue. However, I found that it would take very long to dry and even after drying, the joins were not held strongly enough by the glue. I therefore switched to using UHU All-Purpose Adhesive which gave stronger and faster results.

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2ND PROTOTYPE LIGHTING TESTS I quite liked the lighting effect for my 2nd prototype. I found the detail in the shadows from an internal LED source as well as an external light source quite complex and intriguing. I had aimed for a complex shadow pattern as it would provoke thought when people observe it. I wanted the shadows and lighting effects to be thought-provoking to reflect my original pattern, the Fibonacci spirlal, as it is also thought-provoking.

However, I did feel that the spiral effect was not evident enough in the lighting arrangement. I realised that the spiralling panels would have to be further emphasised in order for observers to notice it. I then thought about arranging the LED lights in conjuction with the spiralling triangular panels so as to accentuate the spiral.

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ISSUES WITH THE 2ND PROTOTYPE

There were a few problems that were identified when the prototype was completed. Because I only used the default setting of having 4 dashed lines for every fold lines, the completed model was very rough (above photo) and the dashed lines clearly subtracted from the elegance of the overall lantern. Also, the force settings used on the card cutter were too low, resulting in some of the dashed lines not fully cutting through (top right). This meant that it became harder to fold the pieces into the desired shape.

Because of both the coarseness of using only 4 dashed lines for each fold line as well as the dashed lines not cutting all the way through, I found that there were very large holes where the pieces joined together (centre right). The last problem was that I unintentionally left the top open (bottom right). I realised that if the lights were to be placed inside, the top would have to be capped so that people would not be able to see the wires inside.

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FINAL MODEL

With my final model, I went back to Rhino and tweaked and adjusted my cutting file layout. I adjusted it so that only the inside lines were dashed lines, while the fold lines for the tabs were score lines. I also increased the number of dashed lines for each fold line to 10 dashes. These adjustments would ultimately lead to a cleaner, and smoother model.

Additionally, I rearranged the positions of each piece to make all the pieces fit into two A1 sized sheets, which meant I only needed to use two pieces of ivory card. This saved significantly more paper than the previous prototype, as I used three sheets for my prototype.

I also found that with my previous prototype, it felt very uniform, almost too structured and consistent. I felt that my lantern needed a little more variety to it. Therefore I decided that for my final model, I would use two different types of card for my model. For the first sheet, I used normal plain white ivory card and for the second sheet, I used a light cream ivory card. This way, the top half would be a cream colour while the bottom half would be plain white.

This would give the model a sense of variety and irregularity to a very structured shape. Although the two different types of card do look very similar as I do not want the two halves to contrast with each other too much.

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CONSTRUCTION OF FINAL MODEL

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FINAL MODEL

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FINAL MODEL I found that the final model was much smoother and detailed than my previous prototypes. The increase in dashes and the addition of score lines reduced the roughness of the model and made it more elegant and stylish.

However, I did notice that because each piece had more dashes and score lines, the final model was reduced in structural integrity compared to my previous prototype. I realised that although my final model was better aesthetically and was more elegant, it was also weaker and could be compressed much more easily.

This related back to the week 7 lecture where Ben Gilbert stated that engineering took out the elegance of architecture and that there was a trade off between the elegance and the durability of a structure. I decided that the elegance-integrity trade off was a compromise that I had to make.

Also, the difference in material between the top half and bottom half was not visibly distinguishable under normal light from an external source.

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FINAL MODEL LIGHTING

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FINAL MODEL LIGHTING Six LED lights were arranged on the inside of the lantern. The lights were arranged in a parallel circuit and connected to two 3V batteries. The lights were placed to follow the triangular panels on the lantern.

I observed that the difference in material was much more visible when the lantern is lit. There is a distinct difference in colour between the top and the bottom. This means that the variety and the irregularity that the two materials provide is more visible in the dark and when the lantern is lit. Therefore the features and effects of the lantern can be fully experienced when the lantern is acting soley on its LED lights.

Overall, I enjoyed the kaleidoscope patterns generated by the lighting effects.

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RESPONSE TO READINGS/REFLECTION KOLAREVIC - DESIGN & MANUFACTURING List constrains and opportunities provided for you through the use of CNC card cutter or laser cutter?

CNC cutting have many strengths. One of which is that complex geometries are describes precisely using NURBS curves and surfaces and thus, computationally possible, means that their construction is attainable from CNC cutting.

It also provides the opportunity of creating very clean and accurate cuts, as well as very straight cut and score lines, which would not be attainable through other processes such as hand-making the model. As well as this, dashed cuts can be made using CNC cutting, which would not normally be possible with other processes.

However, CNC cutting does have limitations such as the choice of material is dramatically reduced, as each CNC cutter has a specific list of materials which it can cut. Also, the materials in the CNC cutter generally must be fairly thick as the cutter uses a considerable amount of force. This means that the material will not be able to bend easily and is ill suited for structures with curves surfaces.

IWAMOTO - DIGITAL FABRICATIONS Describe one aspect of the recent shift in the use of digital technology from design to fabrication. How does the fabrication process affect the construction of your lantern?

REFLECTION Module 3 was quite tedious for me as it simply consisted of making prototype after prototype. THe general procedure was to built a prototype, find mistakes, change the cutting layout and rebuild. However, I did find this process necessary as it helped me identify the problems and ways of improvements of each prototype. Even though the prototyping stage was very tedious and time and material consuming, it allowed for the development of ideas in the lantern.

In the end, I realised that I eventually had to get out of the prototyping phase and develop my final model. THe deadline and the issue of time was also a factor during the fabrication of my lantern.

Module 3 also gave me a practical side of design. The KOLAREVIC reading stated that because of digital fabrication, architects are now much more involved with the building process, and this was what module 3 entailed. Building each prototype helped to find problems and test out different solutions. Not only was the aesthetic of my model a concern, but also the structural integrity and the viability of my design.

I found that building the prototypes and my final model provided me, the designer, a different view of my design and was a source of inspiration to modify it.

Folding is a technique that turns a flat surface into a three dimensional shape.

When folds are introduced to a flat object, the material gains stiffness and rigidity,Subtle and complex geometric modulations are enabled through digital tools. Digitization also allows for the structural stiffness to be produced from the introduction of folds into the material, which is a significant advantage.

Folding is definitely an advantageous fabrication process for the construction of my lantern. The structural stiffness is, of course, desired so the lantern will be able to support its own structure. Another advantage of folding is that folding arguably gives the greatest potential for variety, as it is capable of manifesting a wide range of forms. The flexibility offered by folding is desired in my lantern as the final three-dimensional shapes that constitute the lantern are generated from a variety of different creases, that only folding can generate.

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