Day 4- actually going to finish this mousetrap and render it and do everything.

     Okay. It is the final day, day 4, and I am going to finish this mousetrap and render it if it is the last thing that I do before decomposing into dirt.

    It's a bit like a vicious cycle where I stay up late working on it and then get out of bed even later every day which leads to me starting later and therefore staying up even more.

    Last night after finishing and taking my dog around the block I actually worked on it a little more, and rebuilt the spring. However, when moving it into position I accidentally did something weird and complicated to a control point and rhino got super confused and had to load and think for a long time. After like 10 minutes of that I  just went to bed. It seems to have fixed itself overnight.

    Once I managed to get the spring in position, I decided to just mirror it over to keep it in the right place.

Except this was a lie. It was really hard to get the spring to have the hook fit over the square and have both ends not go through the square or the base of the mousetrap. I redid the spring like 4 or 5 times but I finally got it.

Now I actually got to just mirror the spring. That was much easier because the side I put the spring on second the square metal part was lower so it had a much easier time with the parts not going through each other.

Somehow with a lot of rotating and messing around (and rebuilding the spring once again) I managed to get it assembled in both the set and unset position. Once again my dog is frustrated that I have not taken him to the park yet. I guess I'd better do that. Then he won't be pestering me when I go and try to take nice renders which I honestly kind of fear because even though I am getting better at it, moving around in rhino space in the perspective mode is honestly still super frustrating.

Okay, I am back now and hopefully just literally going to pump this out with enough time left over to take a shower before bed. My dream tbh.

I decided to use an image of a hardwood floor to place the mousetraps on because that is kind of where they would live. I also tried making the atmos-sphere  a William Morris wallpaper because those could potentially be on old houses with mice. I wiggled around the setting with the light too to make it a little less harsh but show the shadows more. I also made the light a yellowish color to reflect what would be in a house. I also tried putting in a second spotlight for some of the photos, why not.

an here are my beautiful renders!

I don't care, I am going to put every single one of my renders in here because I worked so hard on this silly thing that you'll just have to look at them.

Its totally possible that I do not have the quality up on these? However, I imagine once I do a lil repost once I fix the problem with the treat holder thing I can render it again! Rendering it is kind of fun. It's like the computer equivalent of opening the kiln and seeing your gazed stuff.

For the exploded one, I put it in a kind of teal grey plastic box. I had been playing around with materials and I liked the idea that it had fallen into a pool and had fallen apart. Kind of a creepy liminal space feel, abandoned rat infested pool.

Day 3/4 of making this digital mousetrap (not for computer mice)

     Okay! It is dawn of the third day and here I am once again uploading a real object to the cyber world the way Grimes wants to upload her brain.

    I started by tracing just the outline of the little metal treat holder, and then decided to work on the little kinda m shaped bent bit that holds the danger snack. I started by measuring the sides including the longest and shortest points of the M shape. I then connected the points of the curved end and filleted them and trimmed the lines that I was using to measure the long and short points. 

I realized that since the M shape is kind of punched out, that I would have to loft it then delete parts but since the bottom part goes down 2.7mm that the part that had been pushed down under the cut out would be 2.7 mm shorter. So I copied my shape, exploded it, moved the one edge over 2.7mm. The shape left over looked too small, so maybe the metal stretched? So I remeasured that part and just went with the width of the new measurement- I only wound up moving it over 0.6mm.

 It looks good but it won't let me select those surfaces to shell?? Rude. Time to google the answer. Maybe it isn't joined? I'm not sure. Another frustrating thing is that Rhino is not letting me zoom in on my perspective one very far- I want to get up close and look all around it! Maybe I need to save, turn off my computer, and take my dog to the park. I was going to save that for in between this piece and the next  but this is being dumb and my dog is being antsy. 

Back from the walk, thankfully it was below freezing so my dog is not all muddy like the last few days.

Turning on my computer, I still seem to be having the same problems. I was able to zoom in the way I wanted after changing the view to top and them back to perspective. I also changed the color to a grey metal instead of the white plaster and now I can see that the shape is not even capping, the must be why the whole shell thing wasn't working. I think I need to go back and check the tutorial about lofting and figure out what is going on. I must be missing something.

Before I went to do that I copied over the curves and lofted it again. It worked, I capped it and shelled it. Huh. I can't just delete the walls I want gone. Guess I'll have to make some chunky object and use it to boolean slice it up. It seems to think that the walls that were made when I lofted this object are one thing. Hm slicey it is.

I extruded the bigger curve of this lofted shape and capped it and I've tried moving it over the parts of the shape that I want to chop out with the boolean difference and it isn't working? Like this is a real object, please cut my thing. I've checked in all the perspective windows and yes, the object is all on top of the other object. I also tried just making a big honking rectangle, and that wouldn't do the boolean thing. So rude. Maybe it's because I filleted my curves? Literally no idea. Also like I wouldn't know exactly where to look for the answer. 

Okay so I tried just not even doing the whole shell part and just making a big rectangle and cutting the whole chunk out. That worked. I guess my shortcut wasn't that short anyways.

For the weird little tube divit thing I started just making the outline and using some circles for the edges. it seems kind of stamped in so I don't think I need to use curve control things. Oh great, now it doesn't want to loft. amazing (not). This is such a silly inconsequential part! Ugh. I just made a pipe with rounded edges and boolean difference it out with a square.

Okay I've been making shapes and tubes and booleaning everything and it has been seeming okay. However, now I have the piece that is like at a 90 degree angle from the main part of the silver treat holder and it won't boolean union. I don't know why not. It has been made by literally cutting parts out of each other and copying and cutting the reverse parts out and then moved back together using grid snap so they are perfectly aligned. I tried looking online a bit but it seems like everyone else has shapes that are way more complicated than mine and need some more extreme serious help. I think I just need to group these bits together for now because I have spent enough time on them.

Hopefully this thing joins to the bigger part. Plus I need to still chamfer it and make it all nice? Ugh. Maybe I won't be able to do anything else tomorrow, I bet that will give me some grief for sure if it is not connected.

Yup, I can't get those bits to boolean union. I am afraid to chamfer the edges in case it interferes with my ability to fix it later- so I am just going to make it a group and deal with it later. I feel disappointed. I mean it looks pretty good rendered, but I know it isn't. I know it must be a super duper easy fix that dummies could do in their sleep, so I'm sure if I ask I can get help and re-finish the assignment and hand it in again.

Okay. Springs, sticker, assemble, render. I got this.

for the spring part, I figure I will make the spring part and then just extend the wire how it wants to go. I thought this would be the most complicated part but honestly I'm thinking that the part that I just did probably was so hopefully this isn't the worst thing in the world.

since the width of the spring was 5.1mm, but the actual width of the wire was 0.8mm, I am making a cylinder to make my helix in with a diameter of 4.3 because I am going to pipe this and then add the other bits to it. The ends came out of the spring at 0 degrees and 110 degrees, so I drew two lines and rotated them and moved them to where they were coming out of the spring. The angle of the little hook on the longer end of the wire appears to be bent at 60 degrees, so I will draw it and overshoot it. I had to explode it to rotate it as well before joining it back on.

Piped it, added a texture, and mirrored it for the spring on the other side. Oh my goodness. That was soooo much faster than the treat holder. Now I guess I can just make the sticker really quick and assemble it!

I'm going to just take a picture of the sticker to put it into rhino because i am not sure about the font or really much about font related things. It will be easy to scale since i marked the edges of the sticker with pen.

I figured that stickers kind of have a super tiny depth, so I made the text 0.01 thick. then i made the edges of the text also curves that i extruded larger so that I could lower them down like little cookie cutters into the black sticker part. Letters that had multiple layers like an onion such as the o and the r in the corner I just extruded each layer more and more for boolean cookie cuttering.

Okay. I  changed the textures but I have to go find a mouse trap to look at to see how it goes together again.

Now I am assembling it and the dumb thing I didn't think about is how when the springs are on the mousetrap they are tense so therefore the ends of then springs are not open at 110 or 120 or whatever it was, they are almost flat open and now my spring ends are going through the board arrgh!!!

I tried just kinda fixing it a bit by splitting it and putting it back together but it was super janky. I guess I will just have to remake the spring. I think I will do that tomorrow, it's like 1:30. I am kind of sad because I wanted to go do other fun work tomorrow.

Day 2/4 of trying to put an object into Rhino (it's just a mousetrap now because I don't want to die)

     Okay. Now that I have all my equipment ready I am going to move onto the harder parts of making this mousetrap. I guess I am moving from easiest to hardest. I mean, I will have to put the sticker on the base, but I can do that later.

    Right now I am going to do the little staples that hold the two sides of the spring as well as the little hook that precariously holds everything in place. I have three of these so thankfully I can just copy them once I make them! However, I have noticed that the staples have bent a bit near the bottom- I would imagine that is from maybe something that was underneath the wooden board when it was stapled, or  maybe things getting pushed and shoved around while being transported from wherever this thing was made in its plastic wrapper with more mousetraps to its final destination. Since the ends of the staples being bent I do not believe is part of the design and if I was to recreate it using...whatever... in a more close fitting mechanical way they would not be bent I will render them like that. 

The nice part about the mousetrap having three of these staples is that even though I lost one, I can still straighten one out and have one left over. Since the total length of the staple is 30mm, I am thinking that I will make a line that is 15mm, curve it and mirror it. Let's see how this works.

Wait now I am like... instead of offsetting it the width of the staple, perhaps it makes more sense to draw in the outer lines and offset those so that they are the middle of the staple width so that I can pipe it later. 1.2/2 is 0.6, so I'll try that.

I tried moving a line to right in the middle in hopes that I could just drag a control point over to it but that doesn't seem to work because it stays straight. Trying to join them just made a triangle. Hmm. 

The staple seems to start bending near the .... nose? when there is 2.9mm left. subtract the .6 for width and that is 2.3mm. If the entire length of it in its folder form is is 13.2mm, (12.6 when adjusted for tolerance) then therefore 12.6-2.3 is 10.3mm is straight on both sides.  So if both sides are 10.3 then I just need a curve at connects them that somehow has a length of 9.4mm. I guess it wouldn't be that long though, because of counting the thickness of the staple.... so a length of about 8.8mm. 

I drew a line at where the length of the middle of the staple would end and one right in between my two straight staple edges, then drew a curve from the ends of the lines. The curve was too small so I played around with moving the control points around until it worked, however now I need to smooth it out. I tried filleting the corners, but it doesn't seem smooth enough.

 I think I have to back to the kettle video because I seem to remember him doing something somewhere to make things even more seamless- of course I totally forget to what part of the kettle. Thankfully I kinda skipped to it right away, the curvature blends part.

I used the curve blend tool and held shift for symmetry. That seemed to do the trick and it looks more natural now. Though, is this staple the right length? It must be? The one I straightened out was still a little crooked after everything, but if its the right length long and across, it's gotta be right, right? I guess we will see if it fits in the holes. 

I love adding the little  textures so I found an image of some nickel... but it was low res and didn't look good. I just used the preset aluminum one. 

Now I'm back to my ugh why I am using an object that is not amazingly in shape- I want to fillet the edges of the staple but they are beat up. I looked that some images of curved staples online- some are pointy and some are cut at an angle. I was trying to fillet them and it wasn't looking quite right. 

Finding pictures of these things online is kind of silly because they are so small so they are not good resolution a lot of the time.

 Maybe just cut at an angle for the last 1.6mm? I guess I will try to make a cylinder then rotate it at an angle so that the length of the face that is cutting is a line that goes from 1.6mm up the side to the bottom corner of the staple. I made the cylinder just some arbitrary long length, and also added a line in a different color that was 1.6mm long to see where I have to go. I rotated the cylinder, moved it into position, then put on planar and copied it to the other end of the staple as well. I then used the boolean difference to cut it and it looks perfect! Haha too perfect.

Now how the heck do I get them in the holes properly? I rotated them so that they were standing up, however I think that some of the holes are a little wonky. I will play with them a bit.

Once again I run across the issue with having a soft organic parts object. The staples obviously pushed wood apart and the hole that they made is not a perfect replica of the staple shape from wear as they were jiggling around in there a few tenths of a mm. Sawing the board of the mousetrap apart to micromeasure every little bit of the hole to perfectly render it would be a bit silly. I decided to position the staples the way I assumed they would've been in the hole if say, they had kept their shape, but not counting the wood that probably was just smooshed to the side. I do not know, I am not a wood machinist? Wood physics scientist? If it was all before it was put together, there would be no holes. If we were making it better I suppose the ends of the staples would be threaded with tiny nuts on the end. If there is a problem with this I suppose I could drag the control points of the holes through the board to fit the staple perfectly but I also do not know how accurate that would be. I guess it is a judgement call, and I am going to attempt to err on the side of not overdoing it (but am definitely not opposed to changing it later to improve my mark later if that's an issue/ 

option!)

Changing object visibility temporarily while copying and lining up the staples in the assembled vs not assembled render has been super helpful so that I am not getting confused.

For the staple that was in a bit crooked, I found it helpful to draw a line between the centers of the holes and then line the center line of the staple up with it.

Now that I had multiple parts, I made a copy that I shifted down 100mm. I then moved the staples up into the air (maybe on the z axis? it was z to me) 20 mm. Wow it looks so nice rendered.

Now I just have: Long sticky part, springs (but yay! They are each other mirrored!) the square part, and the part that the lil danger snack goes on.  I am going to have a lil snack for a treat.

Okay after some curry I am now ready to tackle the next part: the little square thing that snaps down and is actually the weapon of murder here. I measured the edges as long as possible, but then realized that I have to subtract the width of the metal pipe from it because once again I will have to do just a bunch of lines that turn into a pipe.

I started with the edge with the hook because that was the most complicated so that made sense to me. I wanted to get the positioning of the hook part properly and figured that I could use the curvature blend thing that worked good for the staples. I drew some lines on a different layer so that they would be a different color that correspond to points that my curves should hit. I thought it was beautiful but then I noted the front view was all wonky! 

I moved everything down to the same height on the z axis and did it again. 

Then I made the rest of the square but since they kind of interconnect I was trying to figure out the best way to make and connect all these bits without the ends that hooked together causing each other trouble. 

For fitting the end of the square in the loop, I wound up drawing a line the same height as the widest part, and marking the middle section with an intersecting line at the midpoint, and then i rotated that line that was going through the loop with the center of rotation being where it connected to the line parallel to the one with the hook and made it so that it lined up with the center of the hole.

Now I just have to move and add a material to it. I chose a screenshot of some zinc chromate because that seems to be what the material is- however, it just doesn't want to look like anything but plaster. I can't quite figure it out. I even tried just changing it to yellow metallic in the color settings as well as the plywood that I had used for the base of the mousetrap but it just still isn't doing it. However, this is not a part that I can assemble into my quite yet, as it needs other parts that hold it in place, I can just leave it for now. Oh wait when I was turning off the layer visibility they were still visible? but i swear I tried changing their layer a few times. Oh well, whatever, it's all good now.

The bends in the long part were kind of complicated, so I basically decided that I was just going to take a picture and scale it and then draw over top of it- if it was good enough for Daniel, it's good enough for me.

I did the whole overshooting the lines thing that he did and I think it went pretty well. I joined the curves that were opposite sides of the loop and filleted them because they seemed pretty equal. Then I exploded them so that I could fillet the bend in the stem part that happened later one differently. I couldn't tell that they were being filleted by the preview because it was so small! so I had to zoom in. 

I also apparently stopped taking screenshots at this point for whatever reason, who knows.

I tried to use the curve blend again for the loopey curve, but it definitely does not joining bits that run away from each other at obtuse angles. I wound up making a circle and trimming both the lines and the circle then joining them with the continuous curve tool again and piped it. Beautiful!

I am trying to draw out the little silver metal thing that holds the danger treat but I keep drawing my diagram super small? In fact I redrew it larger, but then when I went to draw it from another angle I made it small again! what is wrong with me?? I think I should actually just go to bed. I feel okay with what I've done today- just the rest of this little treat thing, the springs (ugh, the hardest part) then putting it together and making the sticker part for it! I think maybe I can finish it tomorrow then go have fun with pottery Sunday. 

It's unhappy rendering it for some reason, and I realized that I will need to find a still together mousetrap to remember how to assemble it.

Day one of four of going hard trying to put this iPod into Rhino.

     Okay. It's time to do this. I have four days. Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. I took yesterday (the day after the kettle fiasco) off to work on other stuff- though the nature of that means I am down two bowls in ceramics that now rest in my reclaim bucket. However- yay! Learning! I am also happy to report that the guy from the kettle building video has not appeared in my dreams and I think by this point I am safe from that.

lets do this!

    Wow, this is absolute lies. I bought this digital caliper and it says that the battery is included, but it does NOT have a battery! This is extremely crappy. Now I need to go to Wal-Mart, even though I literally just had a shower and have my comfy clothes on and am all set up for success. I don't want to put on real pants!

Micheals, you are a house of LIES! ... but I mean the 40% off coupon I had more than covers the cost of batteries...

So I packed up my dog and went all the way to Wal-Mart, because it said they had the right batteries online. They were out though, so I just bought some ice cream and celery. The Wal-mart man said to go to Dollarama, and I got the batteries there. The fact that button batteries have different names for different brands unlike say, AA batteries is super annoying.

Then I got home and opened up the iPod and looked inside. It was more complicated than I remembered them being so I laughed to myself and closed it again. Mousetrap it is!

I was all like, oh yeah I've totally seen inside one of these before tis not that complicated! But I am crazy apparently.

It's a thing!

It's a thing in a  million pieces!

I made the wood parts of the base pretty quickly, and even added textures of plywood to make the layers look different. I decided that due to the nature of this quick and cheaply made object I would be designing the "ideal" mousetrap. So scuffs, little discrepancies for the ways for instance holes are punched through wood by staples, would be made round and nice. I think this seems fair, as it was most likely the designers intent.

Ooh. Ahh. Wood layers.

I've decided that the best way to make these lil holes for the staples is to make a cone out of the lofted measurements of the size of the hole and the top and the hole at the bottom of the bottom of the base of the mousetrap. Then I set the circle (cone?) at the bottom corner, so that I can copy and move it the mm to where it was measured from the side.

I love when I can just type in some numbers and things move accurately.

Since I would need many of these but was using the typing in move amount tool thingy I made copies of this cone and moved it using grid snap down so that it was easily accessible and I could move another one to the corner and move that copy into position. I boolean differenced those holes right in there and it looks pretty cool. I'm sure this is just the easy part but I think that is enough for today, especially given all the dumb hiccups I have had getting started. I am going to get a pretty good-ish nights sleep and GO HARD tomorrow!!