Today I am trying to prepare my file for cutting my first big project! I want to do basically what I was going to do for my test piece (before it was like whoops I went too hard and that is actually way too complicated) only with inlaying different types of wood. As someone who sometimes struggles to make their own imagery I'm like actually super into this whole abstraction of art I like so I am going to continue on the same route with the same pattern. I have bought some supplies in preparation:
For instance this sweet iridescent acrylic (though you can get much nicer stuff this arrived quick)
I also went to Black Forest Wood and bought some nice 3mm strips of wood (as well as the plywood from the bookstore because... cheap.)
I originally wanted some of the inlays to be the iridescent acrylic with the wood because I saw it online and it looked super sweet, however maybe it's my bias because I work in glass but the acrylic looks super cheap next to this super nice wood (bubinga!) So I might just save it for something else. I'm sure it will come in handy... just like all my craft supplies I hoard in the basement.
I opened a new rhino file as well as the old one basically to clear up any clutter and have a free working space assuming I can copy and paste bits between the two files at the same time, and made sure the scale was good for me- one little square being a millimetre and a large square every centimetre. This just makes sense in my head.
First to determine size I am looking at the plywood from the bookstore. It is 60x30 cm. I would like this to be used as the base of the piece to glue everything on. However I do not want it to be visible from the side so I would like to put a small border of the black walnut around it. I think that 6mm is still very thin for a piece so complex, so I will use both halves of the plywood to make a base of two layers.
I changed my grid setup to be a limit of 300 lines, therefore being a max of 30 cm, the size of the plywood that can be cut. However, I realized that I could snap the circle form that I was making to the center and specify 300 units in diameter, so I changed the grid size back to 400 lines. Then I thought wait- just in case there's a tolerance issue I should go to 29 cm to be safe.
I want to figure out how to place the black walnut on the outside, so I drew a 5mm offset of the circle- just enough to go on the outside and make the plywood invisible. I'm realizing now that I need to actually just hold off on that and anchor that first circle down and start arranging my object within it to see how I'd like it- I'm getting a bit ahead of myself.
I copied the image that I had used just for etching in my last project into the new rhino file and wow, it seemed much bigger than I remembered! I also copied in a bit that was much smaller from the old file just to check that everything was scaled alright and yup, that was tiny. I know that I don't want to make the file any smaller since it had such intricate small bits already, and I can't really bear to take off anything from my design, so perhaps it will just be larger and I will be cutting the plywood base into puzzle pieces to fit underneath it. From my experience in laminating and fitting parts together as accurately as possible, I know that lining bits up accurately can be very frustrating, especially when glue and/or any small pieces are involved, So I am hoping to make this as puzzle-like as possible. I also have a small piece of 1/4 inch acrylic that I may make small guide cuts in to use as an outside piece to hold and line edge bits up when I am combining them. Making sure everything can indeed be lined up has been something low key stressing me out and running through my mind the last week, as I have laminated many pieces of glass and always wind up with an overhang that needs to be sawed off later.
However, I realized that even though it was in my locker at school, there was absolutely no way that the form that I cut out before was over 30 cm, that's like a whole ruler, and that is crazy.
I scaled the image down to fit in the circle that I had made, and now I plan to repeat it in a golden ratio spiral because I believe that will be the most visually appealing. Looking at the center of a sunflower, it is a pretty dizzying yet mathematical structure that winds up being fairly circular. I am going to look into these degrees and angles and figure out how to mimic this now.
A page on the "Math is Fun" website is giving me the information that each turn of a new row of sunflower seeds is the Golden Ratio (1.61803...) but also that I can ignore the 1 in front because that is a full rotation. So I will try rotating my image until it fills up everywhere using this number.
However, this does not work as I believe this goes as .6ect degrees or 1.6ect degrees. Therefore I will recalculate it is 1.61803 times going around a circle completely: 360x0.61803= 222.5. Therefore I will rotate the image that many degrees each time.
Okay, this looks fine, however now I must cut out where this object intersects to make it a more background image. I attempted to use boolean union, but maybe it doesn't like my image because it is not 3D. I suppose I will just use trim then. I delete anywhere that the lines intersect so that my first image is in the foreground. Maybe I will have to trim more if the image gets unreasonably complicated later.
It seemed to work fine. Now I am going to just keep rotating the first image, but 222.5^n for how many times I have done it- so the second rotation was 222.5 x 2 = 445 degrees.
However, as I progress, I realize that I am cutting the same parts of the object out over and over, so I will stick with just rotating the last copy 222.5 degrees.
I am noticing with the trimming that it does not want me to cut out the extra little circles! maybe because they are not connected? So I guess I have to draw lines through them? Ugh so frustrating.
I was getting very tired of trimming every teeny tiny line then messing up and having to do it again, so I tried extruding the object so that I could use the boolean difference function. Unfortunately that just made everything even more complicated and didn't even work, so nevermind.
I wound up drawing a curve on another layer and using that as a template to get rid of most of the stuff that I had to trim as that was easier when I could only see the layers that I needed to get rid of. I think I will get rid of all of the little circles that are around the flower petals. Even though they are cute I think their small size is going to be very difficult to resolve when putting together the final piece. I imagine I will also delete other cuts in an attempt to simplify this.
I think I am way in over my head, however, sunk cost fallacy.
I became extremely frustrated and realized that perhaps I should start again and simplify due to the complexity of the pattern- and also make it larger since the pattern didn't looks right without the tiny dots.
I had to take my dog to the park because he was getting antsy. I stopped by the school to grab my laser test just so I could double check the sizes.
It showed that my original piece was 15.5cm tall and 12 wide.
Honestly now I am hating my idea. I like doing mathematical things to images to make them confusing, however like now I'm looking at all the layered wood things and that looks cool- but I really wanted to try the inlay because that would most likely be what I am doing with glass once we get the waterjet cutter. Though I guess it could just be tack fusing things in 3d that are waterjet cut! Ugh. I think I just have to start rearranging the image again and see now anything turns out.
I tried mirroring the image over a square the size of the plywood board, but it just doesn't look right. Then i tried rotating and copying it, with 5 points. one way looked better than the other, but now it is massive. there's so many little parts. Oh my goodness.
Now my computer is overwhelmed because I accidentally extruded something. this bodes very well for the future of basically everything.
Okay, that seems fixed. But I think I need to start over. This is extremely stressful. Why did I buy so many nice woods? They are so nice though, and I was afraid that I would not have time to go to the nice wood store again. I do not feel like I had the time or energy to work on this project earlier this week but I wish I had. I cannot find the tutorials on sharepoint. I want to barf.
Maybe I will just try having the image i made before i mirrored it be the one that i repeat instead of the whole thing. I copied in one of the halves from my old document, but then it was hard to line it up to be the same size as my other one especailly since it was rotated and had much less of a clear center than the one that was mirrored. thankfully i was able to match up a corner, rotate it until it matched, and then scaled that corner to the other one.
Maybe I will try a golden ratio thing again. what if instead of 222.5 degrees i just subtracted that to get the opposite? Then I won't have to do a whole spiral and I can make my image larger. I'll try rotating the half-image by 137.5 degrees then.
Now I have 6 mirrored and rotated little guys- they have all been rotated in multiples of 137.5 degrees.is that enough? too much?
I decided when trying to organize them to look nice to just go back to the 222.5 degree rotation. I wound up going to 8 rotations with each consecutive layer being out underneath. I managed to simplify how complicated it was by making a curve through the edges of the old sections then turning off their visibility so that i could trim away any of the new layer that intersected. I will try taking out any sections that seem too small now.
Okay, I took out a lot. it still is a million little parts and it is scary as heck.
Now I have made a copy (because I am responsible?) before ungrouping the whole entire thing. so scary!
I'm at a point where I have to decide what to do. It is 1am and I have been doing this since about 11am besides my dog park walk. I checked when my appointment is and... I can't find it? Outlook is so weird. Now I am kinda worried about making a new one in case I have too many and they cancel them. I guess I can make another one but hopefully they don't cancel it! I could just power through but maybe sleeping on it will help me figure out what to do next? Maybe just sleeping is actually the best.
I have made another appointment for 5pm tomorrow. I do not know if I will wind up actually cutting this, or just do some tolerance tests. I will actually make a tolerance test vector though! (I think). I do have an obligation in the morning but we will see how many brain cells I have left to finish as much of this as I can tomorrow!
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