Project 3 - EVERYTHING

 Test Print

For the test print, I made a relatively simple shape, copying a vessel design I found on Pinterest. 

I did this by laying out a larger circle and arranging smaller circles around said larger circle. To make sure that the circles were in contact I scaled up one circle using a rig, to touch the curves of the two circles it layed in between.

I then extruded and shelled the object out, and scaled the object down to the project requirements.

after setting up the Pursa Slicer to work with the school's printers, the printing process was really quite painless, due to the object being straight and upright. the only issue I found in the print was a straight line up the side of the print where each layer of plastic ended.

Building my Guys

Planning:

after conducting some research on artists' work that caught my eye, I found that I was intrigued by interesting colors and coral-like designs. This led to me deciding to make a coral and sea-based chess set. 

I started out with some base sketches.

I thought the pawn would work well as a rock, seeing as it can change as coral grows on them and a pawn is capable of changing into a queen. The bishop I knew needed to be something pointy to follow suit with classical designs, thus a shell. For the knight, I couldn't think of any other coral form to signify its function, but a sea horse was close enough and got the message across. I decided to go with a faceless tail for the design, due to its simplicity for the coming busy weeks of the end of the semester. The design had a similar bend to classical knight designs and still felt like part of the set with its sea horse ridges. For the king and the queen, I thought to use a pearl for the headdresses and have the stand be a mussel of sorts. to differentiate between king and queen, the king would have a special pearl. For the rook, I thought I could use a grasshopper file to make a coral-like block, but if that wouldn't be possible I could shift to the Roman pillar design.

Building:

Rook:

My first Idea for the rook didn't work. The grasshopper file, on my computer, didn't work and the premade lines that were sent to me would have taken too long to apply to the block. So I went with the pillar design. 

Starting out by making a base shape out of arrayed triangles, extruding, and then creating a block on an angle to remove from the extruded shape.

I then added some starfish to the top and added some tweaked (scaled in funky ways) copies of my pawn design to the base. I felt that the pillar alone wasn't enough to tie it into the set, and adding some aspects that are already present in it could do so.

this is later scaled to be thinner, to fit with the rest of the pieces.

Pawns:

The pawn consists of two polygons that are lofted and caped together, the top polygon has its points randomly altered and is placed on a slight angle.

To generate the divot on the side of the rock, I took the original piece and shrunk it down, spun it around, and booleaned it to the original.

I then gave it a little star.

Knight:

the knight consists of multiple ovals placed on different angles and at varying sizes, to provide a skeleton for lofting the outside.

I did end up having to fix one of the ovals, as the shape I had made didn't meet the requirements for printing, as one of the ovals I had edited by moving its points. so I had to go through and make sure that each loft section was not making any extra faces.

King & Queen:

Their bases consisted of a revolved stem and base, with a lofted flower shape. To create the top divots I took the flower shape, copied a second smaller and higher one, lofted the two curves, extruded the surface into a shape, cut that shape from the revolved stem, and then deleted the excess.

the divot process:

in making the additional pearl for the king, I rebuilt a sphere and altered some points to give it some divots, booleaned the spheres together, and added a fillet where they meet to make it smoother

this be the result:

Bishop:

this one was pretty mean to me. It took me a while to find a spiral that worked and could be booleaned with other objects, and even then it looks a bit weird because of it being unable to be larger on the bottom and smaller on the top.

to make the top pointy I exploded the pipe and took the cap's wire frame, and used it to generate a pointed cap I could replace it with. I experienced issues joining my new cap to the spiral but after a class, I found that I had forgotten to remove the original caps and could just join the surfaces together.

the base was built similarly to the king and queen's, though the shape of the flower's loft is different with the addition of a bulb.

Rendering

First Renders:

these ones I did without knowing how to make a beach scene, so I settled for a basic table render.

I made a board by lining out some squares and extruding them into different layers, as well as a border to those squares to contain them.

to color my chess pieces I exploded them and then joined them back together by color section and separated the pieces into different layers. In this one, the pieces are relatively made up of different colors and roughnesses of plaster, excluding the rocks which are a metal with little specks for texture, though I should've made these a bit bigger to be picked up in the photos.

the ground consisted of a single large surface, with a wood flooring texture applied to its layer.

the lighting consists of three sources: an overhead light, the sun, and a front-facing light. In the render shots the sun is used in the close-ups while the overhead light is removed, and in the board shot the sun is removed and the overhead light is used.

I didn't really like these ones due to the setting not really being my first choice, and there being a lack of shadows. The lack of shadows being due to my not knowing of the render button.

Second Renders:

with my second run at the renders, I added a wallpaper and attempted to make a sand environment. Applying the wallpaper was as easy as downloading an image of a beach and placing it under the wallpaper section of properties. 

I made the sand environment by taking a large flat surface, giving it a bounding box, and then messing with the points in slight ways to create an uneven floor.

I then downloaded a sand PBR texture, specifically "wavy-sand-ue", and applied said texture to the altered surface.

Because my file is so large, when I started to work again on the file, it was missing my pink pieces from a crash. So I had to remake them, but I was on edge with the pink so I swapped it out for a green. Regarding lighting, I didn't really change much aside from changing the color of the front-facing light to blue and altering the intensity and time placement of the sun. I also changed all materials to metal to give them a bit of shine, alternating their roughness, pearl being the shiniest.

2D sheet

I made a layout for 8.5"x11" letter size and made 2Ds out of the front, side, and isometric views. then made a legend for each of the pieces, a title, and a blown-up isometric view. 

Printing the Guys

Setting up in Slicer:

setting it all up in the slicer was pretty simple. after turning all my models into separate STL files, I placed them into the slicer and set up each of their scales by setting the largest piece, the king, at 60mm height. Then using the king's width, I applied the same measurement to each piece except for the knight, the knight I had to eyeball.

I also tweaked up a bit of my settings. I changed the seam position to random, and applied organic style supports to my models. Happily, only the bishop needed the printing assistance.

Final Prints:

prints went well. I did notice that because of the slight angles I used there were a lot of ridges in the layering. I found that there were certain points on the model that I had to sand down a little bit, due to it being too sharp. I also gave the random release option a try and I'm not too happy with the final result because of it, it just feels a bit messy. When I eventually use the 3D printer again I'll try the spiral option to see if that could help. I also found that the organic supports made them much easier to remove