JOURNAL WEEK FIVE: VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENTSMODULE 2: DESIGN Kim Nguyen

PROTOTYPING

DIGITAL MODELLINGOPTION 1The first panelling design is the applied design from the week four panelling task. The pattern is based on a six sided pyramid which meets at an elevated point which is repeated, scaled and rotated to fit the shape. Since there is no back surface, an inversed version of the pattern is displayed on the flip side of the surface.

This middle image displays two different strips which have been used for unrolling . For this model, it was easier to choose strips of the pattern which went from the top to the bottom rather than horizontally due to the complex nature of the individual geometry boundaries. These boundaries were easier to define vertically than horizontally.

This last image displays the two previous sections of the model unrolled into their respective strips. Tabs were made using grasshopper and some overlap-ping tabs were edited using polylines.

DIGITAL MODELLING OPTION 2

This is the second pattern considered for unrolling which (as seen below) con-sists of the same six sided hexagon but instead of meeting at a vertex, form a similar hexagon shape. This pattern, like the previous one, also has no bottom surface in the pattern so the underside of the pattern has its own shapes and forms. However, I wanted to include an element of overlap into the design to create different depths of light and while this pattern does have different heights of extrusion, there is no overlap. With this pattern it may be harder to create a light contrast.

Another problem with this pattern was the amount of space that one indi-vidual section of the pattern would take up - this meant that there had to be a large amount of grid points on the surface and if the surface is to be more complex than a curved sheet, the amount of points could prove to be un-necessarily confusing.

DIGITAL MODELLING OPTION 3The third pattern, the one which I have decided to further explore during this project, most accurately portrays my recipe and also is able to achieve the different effects I was aiming for. As all the others, the pattern is based on a six sided geometry but this time the extruded 2D form is not tapered to reach any higher vertex and is not angled unless the surface it is applied to forces it to. The flat, unan-gled surfaces also means that there will be a lot of overlap-ping surfaces which can create differing depths of light in the lantern.

This pattern is very reminiscent of my paper model from Module 1 - however this time the exact sizes and angles of each piece can be carefully calculated so the exact curve shaped can be created without spaces and gaps.

I also found it very interesting how on one side, the model can appear to be totally flat and brick-like while on the other side, a completely different array of surfaces can be seen, The ability of the pattern to rotate along curvature also allows for more variety in ways the two different pat-terns can be exposed.

UNRO

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As shown in the picture on the left, when I took apart the first row of my model to unroll, the seperate pieces remained seperate and would not connect together as a whole strip. Even when faces were joined and the strip was one whole piece the individual unrolled pieces would never connect. This proved to be a huge set-back in my work and meant that I had to spend a lot of additional time unrolling each seperate hexagon in the strip and then piece together the seperate elements to make a complete strip. As well as that, many of the faces simply would not unroll or would unroll with the face on the surface of the model itself. Regardless of the settings in the unroll command I could not join the pieces automatically so I had no choice at the moment other than cutting each piece individually.

Another unfortunate problem which was solely due to the original geometry of the pattern was that there was a huge amount of overlapping layers which would often mean that it was difficult to select faces uesd to unroll and if the faces were not selected prop-erly, many unnecessary, extra unrolled surfaces would appear. To combat this, the surfaces which had duplicates had to be removed and the overlapping had to be achieved with the tabs on each piece.

The picture above (right) shows firstly the blue strip with unrolled sections and then the purple strip with unrolled sections. The missing sixth section of the blue strip is due to one of hexagonal faces not unrolling and therefore I had to eliminate it from the group.

CARD-CUTTER AND FABLAB

Before using the card cutter tool, each of the pieces had to be properly formatted and nested onto the printing area with the lines to be cut in one colour and lines to be scored in a different colour. For my pieces, black indicated a score and red indicated a cut. The next time I repeat this pro-cess, I will most likely include labels into the drawing - this first time I had un-derestimated the difficulty involved in joining pieces particularly because many different surfaces had the same length so it was diffiicult to be sure of which pieces connected with which sides. The paper size marked on the drawing was also incorrect as when the page loaded onto the Fab-Lab printing system, the window area and the magenta area in my draw-ing were different, thus my pieces came out smaller than I had intended.

After the paper has been cut by the machine it will have this look to it: the top layer is the first strip with all the pieces cut out and the second layer is the second strip with the pieces still attached by the end scoring of the tabs. At this stage i was starting to realise the amount of unneces-sary inconvenience that was added when I had decided to unroll each strip piece by piece. Glueing together each individual piece proved to be very difficult as the thick paper meant that it was not easily manipulated and often tried to spring back into its original shape. The small size of the tabs also meant that it was easy for each piece to come apart without an adequate amount of area providing resistance to the shear force pulling the paper apart. As well as that, each individual piece had to be then glued together into the strip and many pieces would collapse under their own weight. I will definitely have to reconsider many factors of this design including material and tab size.

After the first few pieces, I begun to better understand the material I was using and how to manipulate it so that it was easier to glue and connect. For example, if the score lines were not fully folded back before glueing the paper had a tendency to fall apart a lot more easily.

I also began to get a better understanding of which tabs were redun-dant and had to be eliminated - these redundant tabs will need to be marked on the computer drawing so that time will not be wasted cutting them off manually.

However the shape still could not hold together very well once differ-ent pieces began to come together and eventually tape was used to reinforce the bonds between shared surfaces. A different, lighter, material may need to be considered so that the form can support itself as well as maintain structural integrity.

FORMING CARD-CUTTER PIECES

After cutting out all the seperate pieces, then glueing them into their respective strips, the two strips were glued together to form the start of a sheet. Looking back at the paper form, another thing I had noticed was the additional structural stability adding more pieces had given the form. Initially, with a small amount of pieces, the form would easily fall apart but with many other pieces added to it, the individual components would help to support the others. This isn’t the say that the problem of the pieces breaking off was gone - there were still many cells which would still fall apart from the main form very easily.

As well as that, the double curve was beginning to become more noticable and with that, some of the difficulties that come with using paper with such curvature. This par-ticularly thick paper was much easier to keep flat than to curve so when the curve began to change direction, the face of the cell would twist and the naturally flat paper opposed this. Some more subtle curves have been lost because of this which makes the form lose some of its wavy effect.

The bottom picture is one of a smaller set of pieces that I joined together with the same materials and shapes but the double curve is much more noticable in the smaller piece. When creating the final piece, scale of each individual cell is impor-tant as the smaller the cell, the seemingly more effective the curves will be.

CREATING A SECTION PROTOTYPE