The mechanics for this week were generally trivial. I mostly struggled with coming up with a unique design that I felt would have some real-world appeal. I played around with a pendant incorporated the Fibonacci curve. I eventually scrapped that as the base when I found it too troublesome to integrate other geometric shapes into the curve without distorting them. I then shifted to the notion of creating an earring or pendant that would appeal to geek culture and settled on a replication of the 1st level of the Donkey Kong arcade game:
Going through the various steps of preparing the 3d printer file was somewhat new to me as I haven’t used photoshop for this specific purpose.
Learning where the settings to define the depth and what the exported file format took a little time to find and get set up correctly.
Finally exporting the image to a format that can be properly rendered by external sources was pretty straight forward
This was my first experience using an external vendor for 3d printing. I found it very straight forward and easy to use.
My experience to date with these type of systems comes from my previous experience in drafting and Autocad design. I never went down any deeper than basic architectural design I enjoyed the construction of objects and the structural design aspects of the field but found other design-related fields captured my attention more.
Once everything is rendered out I noticed the scale of the final product was not exactly conducive to the amount of detail in the original design. These types of conflicts may not be apparent at the outset. Ensuring you understand the scale of your project at the outset and how much detail you can include within that scale is obviously extremely critical when working in this medium.