Assignment 6: Lamp
For this assignment, I began by sketching out some ideas the previous week. I liked the concept of involving a humanoid, but it was difficult to pick something that stood out to me.
Another idea I had was to incorporate some of the pottery/ceramics I work on. I tried some concepts, but the issue was that the ceramics were not ready for usage, and would shrink after being put in the kiln, so that felt too variable to manufacture a 3D part for.
While trying to figure out what to create, I stumbled upon a beautiful lamp with a fun glass cover. While I had no intention to make a floor lamp, I liked the glass piece, and thought it would be the perfect base.
I started measuring the glass shade, and tested out the glow of the light through the glass, which I liked.
So I started measuring the dimensions of the lamp, and sketched out a model of what I imagined it could look like, somewhat inspired by those cakes with the barbie inside them I thought I could utilize same concept and give a body and face to the lamp.
Online, I found a great low-poly STL of Venus de Milo on thingiverse, which I thought would be a great topper for the lamp.
I uploaded it to Rhino, and began by scaling it so the base matched the size of the top of my glass, ~44cm, and cut off excess using an extruded rectangle and "MeshBooleanDifference".
Following this, I knew I wanted to use a screw mechanism, so went to thingiverse and found a bottle with screw cap which looked simple enough to cut and join to my mesh. It also had a corresponding cap which made it easy to design since the only constraint I'd have was ensuring their scale was adequate.
Note: When scaling things that will perfectly fit together, make sure you scale them at the same time so you don't have to worry about it later.
I used "MeshBooleanDifference" to trim off the screw top from the bottle, and aligned it to my top character. Then I used an extruded circle, turned mesh, to fill in the gaps of the bottle hole and did a boolean union on all 3 pieces.
I also took the cap, and made an extruded cylinder and "MeshBooleanDifference"d out the base so the lamp can fit.
I finalized my pieces and exported them seperately to Cura. I adjusted the way it prints so there is 0 infill. This is key so that the lamp can easily fit. I did include support since there were various parts that required complete support.
Final Result
After 15 hours of printing, the piece was complete. However, due to the amount of structure I included, the base broke apart. I decided not to print out the remaining piece since I was determined to use the sculpture part.
I attached the sculture piece to the lamp base, and it wasn't flush like I hope it would be, so I ended up considering a new project. I looked online, found a great youtube video on making lamps with Grasshopper, and tried that out instead.
Here's what I ended up making in Rhino.
After another 7 hours of overnight printing, I checked on my print and saw it didn't work as intended... I didn't add adequate support, which I should have.
I stopped printing, and removed it. It didn't go as intended, but I liked the pattern it created. I used it to pair with my sculpture and liked how it ended up looking!
