Week 8

Big Scale Production with CNC Machining

This week we’ve had access to a big CNC milling machine. We could basically only make 2.5D shapes using it so I was looking for some vector ornaments to make with it. At first I was searching for some ornaments made from wood, but everything I’ve found was either very booring or very “antique” looking, so in the end I’ve decided to search for stylish, modern 2D vector silhouettes. In the end, I’ve decided to draw inspiration from here:

Grid Art Concepts

After looking online for how to make art like that, I found that it’s really simple, if you use Adobe Illustrator. The dimensions of the board to cut were 400x500mm and after maybe 10 minutes I had the design with all the dimensions of the board.

Final Project Design

Even though I wanted to cut only the square at first, later I’ve decided to leave that 10 cm block in place.

After that, I thought, if we can draw a “3D” shape using a grid like that, what stops me from drawing something more complex than 3 hills and a coule valleys? I chose to try to draw a head of a ram using this method. But after trying for 3 hours to make it myself or to make a grid wrap around a 3D object in Fusion and then projecting the lines onto a plane, and even after trying to do a cloth simulation in Blender I still couldn’t do it. So I started to to transfer the 2D model into Fusion. In the end I had this:

Board Design

Here are some photos from the machining process:

Machining

Final product

Regarding that piece ta the bottom. I once saw this artist called nisheink(inst: @nisheink, site: nisheink), and that orange piece in particular. I would like to do something like that with my board. Coloring the main part with the grid and adding some symbols and small details at the “canvas” below. Don’t have time now, so that’s most likely to happen during summer holidays, and given that I don’t have pretty much any experience with coloring and drawing.

Board Piece Inspiration

Particular Inspiration