2d
I tried drawing in Inkscape. The idea was to try to prepare something I could lazercut next week.
first I wanted to make a frame that could wrap around the outer edges of an ipad. I found the measurements
and deceided to set up a grid of rulers to use as drawing guides. That went fine exept that it is not possible to move the Y-axis rulers zero from its default possition. I left the design unfinished but it was a proof of concept
Next up I thougt I'd try to manualy trace an bitmap image. The idea as befor was to try to prepare something I could lazercut next week. I want to make a puzzle pieces out of an M.C. Escher Artwork. I found a suitable picture as it only comprised of two elements wich stay in scale instead of spiraling out and imploding to infinity.
Paste in place gave me problems. First off when I copied and pasted a curve to a new layer, my good old 2006 Macbook turned the curve into a bitmap along with a backgroundpiece from an hidden layer.
Then Paste in place pasted my curves to the upper lefthand corner of the canvas. Thank you Inkscape for declaring your own place, this put me in just the right frame of mind so I could start meticulously arranging the puzzle on the canvas via edit => clone => "Create Tiled Clones" command
I tweaked Rows and columbs, X & Y, back and forth and hit create after each time. This is probably easy as baking a pie if you understand the algorithm Escher worked from, but I dont so I kept on tweaking. I did this for about 30 minuts. Then I went out for a walk, screamed at some trees, then came back and opened Adobe Illustrator.
In Illustrator I traced the outline of the bird this time instead of the fish, the fish staired at me the whole time. Allowing me the freedome to hit Cmd+Z to delete only the previously laid down vertex instead of the whole curve as happens in Inkscape. I then saved the vectors as symbols so I could create linked copies(clones) and then applied a Transform modifier to arrange the symbols diagonaly by the eye rather easily as I had a live preview of what I was tweaking everytime a changed a value of a box. I then dublicated the transform modifier twice and set them to create a whole pattern.
This was process was repeated for the inlay of the fish. The fish was pleased.
I went back to Inkscape a day later, i needed to make a 65mm spindle mount for my Shapeoko 3 CNC machine, I found a mount I could use as reference and then designed my own with the help of Arrange Object and Union features. My instructor pointed out to me that designing with using Fill rather than stroke, gives you the exact design rather than making an path that the endmill centers on.
Rhino
I followed a beginners tutorial in Rhino, the UI seemed awfully cluttered and there wasn't a singe mention of a keyboard shortcut in the tutorial. Anyway I extruted a curve I made and then did some boolians. What splendor.
Fusion 360
I installed and followed a tutorial making a few chess pieces in Fusion 360, I was amazed by the power and simplicity of basic parametric modeling. The UI workflow made sence and its learning curve doesn't seem too steep. This is something I will definitly get deeper into in the future. Here are some Chesspieces I made:
Blender 3D
Blender is the awesomest FOSS software ever, its new Booltools Addon is a very strong boolean feature, and Sverchok is a parametric addon that is promising. Although precision modeling is very possible in Blender its definetly not its strongest side.
I've been teaching myself Blender 3d over the years. So I wanted to make a small animation to refresh my knowlegde of its various features. For creative modeling I made a low-poly looking animation based on this tutorial
As soon as I got started more ideas came to me than I could tackle, but as an experiment I made Rain with an Particle system, I used a bezier curve to make rope, and tried an ocean simulator. This was rendered with the Blender Internal Render Engine. The resulting Video can be seen on the top of my Final Project site.
workfile
had more idea, time moving much
