Unfortunately last week I realized that I didn't account for the thickness of the chipboard that I was going to use when laser cutting each of the layers, and I had to restart the whole process to make it accurate. This process of restarting encouraged me to rethink my design of the waffle for the cube, though. I decided to explore the difference in the design of the cube if the contours were taken horizontally and vertically, versus at perpendicular diagonals. Although I am more intrigued by the design on the right, with the diagonals, I see problems that would arise while building the cube. For example, the extrusion is not from the diagonal surface, but instead to the CPlane. In addition, there are pieces that would be very difficult to connect, because of their shapes. Nonetheless, I am going to choose the cube on the left, with the horizontal and vertical contours, and experiment with the spacing between layers.

This week I have been working with the cube to create specific contour cuts that I will be laser cutting. As you can see in the bottom view of the first picture, I created an irregular waffle pattern. Instead of it being consistent throughout, the slices gradually get further apart towards one corner, and closer together in the opposite corner. In the second image, you can see some of the center contour slices that are slices with the notches for the two sets of directional slices to be put together.

The Cube project was a learning process that helped understand the basic tools of Rhino. Throughout each iteration of the cube, I connected the sides to make a continuous piece. Overall, I used what I learned through this exercise to create a cube that had an angular and rounded shapes on each side, connected through holes piercing multiple sides.

Exercise using the Solid Tools

E02_Rhino to Illustrator

To make these shapes, I started with making cubes in Rhino. Then, I experimented with the boolean difference and intersecting unique shapes to make these resulting figures. In that process, I practiced using the pipe command as well as making different scaled shapes. Finally, I exported the shapes as 2D graphics into Illustrator. Unfortunately, I really struggled with trying to figure out how to use line weights.