tuesday vivian street

Firstly after speaking to Hannah today I think there could be a solution to my rendering dilemma... watch this space: there is a render of all 81 iterations from our first project coming up later this week.

Now onto the next project.

I have been toying with a few options for fabricating my object:

I started out with the layered idea last week (see here) which is the most obvious and could be done with my hero except that is seems too easy. I have been working on slicing and sectioned it off to that end:

layers created using 31 sections as per Sunny's technique 21/08/12

I have also thought about sectioning it off into pieces that can be assembled  (I would use SolidWorks to assemble it first for this - kind of interesting). Here are a couple of pieces I sectioned off and took into Illustrator:

sections exported into SolidWorks then Illustrator

Sunny and I have talked about (ironically) a latticework version what could be assembled and then thread wrapped around it like a skin. Love this idea. Am a bit scared of the intricacy involved.
Here is the precedent for the idea:

Source

We exported the beast out of 3ds Max as a .dxf file (after Prooptimising down to 1% and adding a Push modifier) into Sketchup and Sunny created a latticework around the object so that we can explode the box form then delete the outer part of the box (i.e. the non-creature parts) so that all we are left with is a latticework form of the thread beast. I could lay them out into an A4 sized plane in Sketchup and then transfer them into Illustrator (making sure they are all carefully numbered so as to facilitate the construction phase) How cool is this? Things that concern me are: how small will this need to be so that I can fit it all onto one A4 piece of acrylic; I need to build slots into this so that the pieces all fit together... I am concerned I am going to mess up with calculating the tolerance. I understand the laser cutting process destroys 0.2 of a millimetre. I have to factor this in when drawing in the slots.

Sketchup file prior to removing non-beast parts

I also had thought about the idea of doing almost the reverse of this where I layer the exterior space into a box so that the beast is actually a void inside the box and I could paint the edges in the blacks and reds of the original two 3ds Max objects.I know Sunny had concerns that this might not work so well in that the object might not be visible but I have two strong/dark colours to work with - I feel like it could work quite well and I like the idea of the creature becoming like specimen preserved in a box. Here's a mock-up of how it might look (minus the planes created by the acrylic layers) rendered in 3ds Max:

Render of beast in an acrylic box