Evelyne SetionoStudent no: 579870 Semester 2/2012 Group 3

This week’s lecture give me insights on the project that I’m working on now. The guest lecturer, Alex Selenitsch, presented about design spaces and the concept of composition which can be form or matter. Form can be represented as a geometrical shape, while mat-ter, such as solid, liquid, gas, is something external or independent from us. I was impressed by the way the lecturer can manipulate materials into designed objects which are very use-ful for everyday life. I also learned that design doesn’t have to be very complicated, but it can be a representation or a set of instructions which can be used by other people. Based on my reading of “Lost in Parameter Space?” by Scheurer, F and Stehling, H, design has been much accessible and easier with the help of technology, for example us-ing CAD (Computer Aided Design). The authors introduce the concept of abstraction and reduction where abstraction means reducing the complexity of the real world into a model which can represent that complexity and with as little description as possible, while reduc-tion means finding the optimal way to transport the information without altering the content, for example eliminating redundancies. These concepts are related to module 1 because I need to take a natural process from the real world and abstract it into a model without alter-ing the process itself. Algorithms and computer programs often help in designing. They act as tools that set accuracy and precision of the model in mathematical approach. They can make the design outcomes limited and also broader depend on the design parameter or boundary set between the artistic and logical solutions.

Lecture and Reading Response

Contouring Process

Front view

side view

top view

I started working on my final model in Rhino. I never used Rhino before so I didn’t have the slightest idea of using it. Therefore, first of all, I watched some tutorials on the LMS and browsed through the internet and some past examples of other students’ project. After that, I started to make some experiments based on those examples, however they all failed. Finally, after tens of trials, I managed to make the form in Rhino, however, it didn’t turn up great.

Firstly, I drew some contour lines on my clay model using pencil. The interval between each line is 10 mm. I took some pictures of elevation of the clay model which include front, side and top view.

Contouring Process

After drawing some contour lines, I cut the clay model based on the contour lines into sections. I labeled each section with numbers so that I know the order to from the shape. I placed them on the grid paper and I lined them in sequence.

Digitalization

Outlines of the sections Close-up view

The next thing to do is to star the digitalization using Rhino. This is very challenging because it is time consuming and I have to be careful and scrupulous to arrange the sections into a form or shape. The first thing to do is to input the picture using “pictureframe” comment and adjust the size. After that, using curve tool, I outline the shape of each section. Some of the shapes are difficult to outline, therefore I manipulated some of these shapes into simpler shapes. After all the shapes are outlined, I stacked the sections one by one starting from section “1” as the base. I put each section with interval of 5 mm. However, it turned out too broad and it didn’t represent a curve like the original clay model.

Digitalization

For the second attempt, I made use the elevation pho-tos to scale the model. I made a picture box like the image on the left and tried to put the sections inside the box. However, because they have different scale, they couldn’t fit in the box. Therefore, I have to re-scale the sections to fit the image. A lot of work were done to the sections, for example re-scaling, rotating, ordering, etc. Finally it was done, but it was not perfect as there were some parts of the model which couldn’t be imitated perfectly. The result can be seen below.

Wireframe view of the model

Digitalization

Shaded loft Rendered loft

After I re-ordered the sections into the form I desired, I applied “loft” com-ment on Rhino and the result can be seen on the pictures on the left. The shape was not smooth enough and it wasn’t round. This was my first at-tempt and there will be some refine-ments later on during the process of digitalization.

This was my other model which I experiment with. This model was quite simplistic as it was formed from diferent sizes of sphere.