Prototyping - Tumblr Posts

Upon first glance, this passage seems to describe the Beta Kids’ kernelsprites...

...The pre-entry prototypings that evolve the battlefield and affect enemy characteristics.

Now, the passage seems to be alluding to the components that created Bec Noir, who we all know has wreaked havoc across the kids’ and trolls’ sessions and universes.

But what if the passage is referring to something else?

“Maimed clown”...

“Undead cat”...

“Impaled crow”...

(Davepeta is kind of both the Undead Cat and Impaled Crow combined.)

“Omnipotent dog”...

(Notice how even though Bec Noir and PM have all four prototyping elements, they’re only ever referred to as dogs at this point.)

“These four shall be held in reverence for the eternity they serve to cut short.”

What if this passage has yet to come, and is related to the end of Paradox Space?

Gamzee is obvious in his role, and Bec Noir would be no surprise, either. But others, such as Jasprose, Davepeta, and the Mayor (recall his dream) would be really interesting and unexpected.

i am nowhere near as funny as i think i am

Still seeking input on the price of a hypothetically not-hypothetical field guide! Wisdom of Crowds so far puts it at around twelve dollars for a thirty-ish page hand-assembled chapbook. Does that seem fair to you, the person reading this right now?

Prototyping in paper with scissors and tape. Then I transferred that into a CAD program, cut it out of leather, and stained it. Next comes sewing everything together.

Chandelier Saga Part 1: Conception

A bit over two months ago, I was contacted by someone with whom I used to work, who now works with The Possible Project, a non-profit youth entrepreneurship outreach program thing. They were having a huge fundraiser gala at the beginning of October, and wanted to commission a big hanging chandelier as a focal point for the banquet. They're getting ready to build themselves a maker space, complete with a laser cutter and other tools, so they wanted the piece to show off rapid fabrication in some way, probably by having the piece made largely of laser-cut wood.

I was given pretty free range, with the understanding that I would come in every week or two and show the kids in the program what I was doing, giving them a view at how one might go about making a big project, and getting input from them about the design. The goal was to be able to have them also help with assembly, if possible.

Since I don't especially want to take up too much vertical space on people's feeds, jump the break for the early stages of my design process:

The first thing I did was to stay up for a while one night when I was already kind of punchy and just spew ideas down onto a page. Most of them were laser-cut wood ideas, though a few of them I was less sure about how to actually make them.

Having done that, I crawled the internet for precedents, and gave my first talk to the kids about what sort of things are possible with the medium. When doing something new, I always think it's a good idea to look around and see what sorts of solutions other people have come up with. It's a way of getting some inspiration going, finding ideas that you can riff on, and also get a sense for what sorts of ideas people haven't much tackled yet. (In fact, a large part of why I started working with leather was that, while working at a laser-cutting shop, I was looking around for materials that lasered well but not many people were using. And I ended up with leather.) Here are some of my favorites. Actually, one sentence is not quite enough.

And then I started sketching, both digitally and physically:

There was a major consideration that steered my thinking at this point: size. They wanted the final piece to be just about as big as could be made while still fitting inside someone's car to travel to its final destination. The thing is, the laser cutters I have access to are only so big--18 by 32 inches, to be precise. So anything large has to be constructed of smaller pieces. At the same time, I was told that the heaviest the riggers would hang something for the event was 75 lbs. That meant the ideas that involved big planes of material were right out.

So I decided to try to make it as a surface built up from small units connected together, making a skin that was light and self-supporting, without needing all the pieces to be hung off of a structural skeleton. This also meant that I shouldn't need to construct large structural ribs up out of smaller parts, which I was glad about. I was thinking about going for something built like one of the concepts I prototyped in paper, but with a more expansive and amorphous shape, and possibly with a second layer of skin inside the outer one.

But, everyone loved liked the idea with the overlapping scales and light emanating out from inside. Including me. I was a bit hesitant because I was pretty sure it would take more careful geometry shenanigans and tweaking than the other ideas, and I had only so much time to work on it. But I went for it.

What followed were quite a few rounds of strenuous modeling in Rhino broken up with cutting and assembling prototypes. But I think that's enough for this post. Stay tuned for Part 2!

Chandelier Saga Part 2: CAD

Picking up the story of making this giant lamp, we get to the hardest, most important part, but also the least photogenic. That would be, the computer modeling and prototyping.

Here's what I was going for in terms of structure:

The scales are made of 1/16" thick plywood, linked to their neighbors by bolts. The struts spanning the widths of the scales are there to pull the ends together and make sure the centers bend upwards to let enough light through.

It turned out to take something like 4 full rebuilds of the computer model before I was happy with it. The root of the problem is related to the fact that it's really hard to model how real-life materials will bend. So every few days for a couple weeks I had to re-draw all the geometry with slight differences, head in to the laser shop to cut the pieces out, and assemble them to see what it would look like.

Hit the jump for a bunch of screen shots of the different steps involved in designing the final piece.

Working in Rhino (my 3D Computer Aided Design software of choice/training/convenience), I started with an ideal originator surface, created by revolving a curve. I dropped grid points along it:

Then I drew out the base shape for the scales with points and lines. The tips of the scales are drawn out in space perpendicular to the grid point they're above. Their distance from the surface is proportional to the width of that scale:

Next, turning that into surfaces and mirroring the scales along their center-line. (Also, there were some steps involved in expanding the edges of the scales to accommodate the bolts.)

Next comes a polar array to get them all in place:

And a cut-away view to show the internal structure that would hold the light bulbs in place:

But then (after testing the floppiness of the previous prototype) I decided I should give it a bit more structure to support certain points of the surface. Figuring out the geometry for that was a pain:

With that done, time to flatten the scales:

...and lay out the sheets that I would be laser-cutting:

Then I just have to cut twelve copies of each of these sheets, plus a half dozen or so more sheets for the internal structure.

And that mostly wraps it up for the CAD part of this story. I'm intentionally glossing over a lot of the geometry headaches, because you don't want to think about it. Trust me.

Next up will be photos of construction! Though I foolishly forgot to take any photos of actually laser-cutting the scales.

I'll leave you with the front view of that prototype I showed at the beginning:

Got a friend to help me make a duct tape dummy of my torso! Gonna make a breastplate type item for a @magicmeatmarch costume, then I'll probably try to pull a corset pattern off of it.

I haven’t really decided what aesthetic I’m gonna go for though. Current thought is wide at the shoulders, maybe with attached pauldrons, then some big scales/plates overlapping down the center and tapering down to the crotch, with straps/buckles at the sides. I might try for a boob/pec-window sort of thing, but I haven’t had many ideas about how to integrate that idea with other pieces I’ve done so far.

You can tell it is a game board because there’s a cat on it, ready to mess with any components.

This is the prototype game board for my RPG hybrid board game Roar of Alliance.

A significant design revision makes a lot of tolerances tighter, includes allowances for a few more of the lens and mounting flange's dimensions, and includes pre-formed holes for the mounting bolts to avoid the trouble with drilling through 3d-printed plastic (which is possible, but not usually recommended, as heat from the drill bit can melt the plastic).

Spent an evening designing a lens board to hold my 1850 Voigtlander & Sohn Petzval lens in my 4x5 camera. Based on caliper measurements of the lens board mount and the lens, it should hug the barrel of the lens at the back within the camera body, and have enough material to allow me to drill holes to bolt the mounting flange to.