What I had hoped to do with this project was share with you how we create one of our box construction metal sculptures and journal my thoughts along the way.  Clearly I got ahead of myself and a lot of work has already occured to get to this point. No matter, let’s just go back to the beginning.  It will probably take a few posts to catch up so please bear with me. 

If you’ve been following us you’ve already seen the renderings of Shapely Two Jennifer posted last fall.  They were generated from the 3D CAD data I created in Rhino 4.0 using Jennifer’s original design sketch as a guide.

We scanned Jennifer’s sketch into Photoshop and saved it as a JPEG image.  Then I pulled that image into Rhino as a background and traced several profiles .  Once I had the profiles Jennifer and I sat down and she shared with me her thoughts on the third dimension. That information combined with the previously mentioned profiles enabled the genetation of the 3D surfaces. After several iterations we came up with a basic shape.  Next we spent multiple iterations refining the color scheme which naturally lead to additional tweaks to the geometry.  After several weeks we finalized the design you see here.

At this point the art is 90% complete.  We are now ready for the craft.

The next step was to make patterns for all the exterior surfaces. This is where we gain significant benefits from using CAD. Having the design digitally captured allows us to use that data to have panels accurately produced for us.  Rhino has a really nice feature which unrolls developed surfaces (in otherwords, flattens out the curves) and automatically generates patterns.

These data files were then sent off to our laser cutter and 3 days later we had these.

Time to begin fabricating.  Stay tuned.