Week Ten Assignments1/2

Design Process:

I teamed up with Annie and we decided to make wood 3D puzzles in animal figure (as shown in the following pictures as example)

We planned that Annie and I would each make two animals. Annie chose seal and lion and I chose raccoon and cat.

Firstly, we started from 2D design. I found a cute raccoon image and a cat image on canva.com and purchased them to do the template.

As a 3D design, I want them to stand up with a supporter that has a hole to attach to the body part. Therefore I copy the back feet part of the body and add a slot on it.

Then I was stuck by a question that how should I make a slot on the feet part to make the body "stand up" - how wide the slot is and where should it be?

Then I met up with Annie on Tuesday after in Things space and tried to figure out the width of the slot. After several try out, we finally got the width of 3.225mm, a number that can help the supporter hold the body (but not that tightly, we still need glue to hold them together).

As a real beginner to Ai and laser cut, I had no idea to what should I do to prepare the design. Annie told me I first need to prepare the engraving, which is making animals into greyscale. I found a quick website that can complete greyscale in 1s. (https://pinetools.com/grayscale-image)

Then in order to make sure the animal can be cut out, I need to draw the black outline of the cartoon character with 0.01 stroke. I tried so many brushes and pens to make the outline tidy and clean and finally I figured out how to use pen in Ai. The process is exhausting TOT

Annie successfully cut out her seal with ball, but unfortunately we do not have enough time for cutting all the animal. We would continue the work at Wednesday evening and bring what we have to the class. 

Update 11/14:

We made it this afternoon!!!

One thing we messed up a little bit is we made the slot too tiny to hold the body. Instead of repeating doing the body part, we tried to use sand paper to rub the slot to be a bit bigger. After a couple of minutes rubbing, sand paper worked and the slots were big enough to hold the body part.

The process is fun, even though it also took us sanity. There is always something unexpected happen, like the wood width is different from piece to piece that we need to calculate all the time, and the old version Ai in the lab sometimes did not work as the way new version did (not complaining). Anyway, the important thing is we learned a lot from this laser-cutting experience - about how to manipulate Ai and the machine and how to learn something I am not familiar with.