Caliper Duplication & Twisted Object – Tyler

For the object I duplicated using calipers I chose a thumbstick/joystick, since I’ve been working with them in designing arcade interfaces.  To model this in Rhino, I translated the important measured points from one half of the outline onto the X,Y axes.  I placed the points by manually entering their positions on the command line, and then drew lines to connect them.

After that, I joined the line and revolved it 360 degrees to create the solid.

joystickjoystick_model

Unfortunately at the end of printing, the filament got twisted on the spool and stopped feeding into the nozzle, which is why it’s missing the top few layers.  I had thought there would be more issues with the overhang, but these weren’t very bad.

print

 

For the twisted object, I wanted to replace a toilet flush handle with something unexpected.  I decided to add a human hand to the handle so you could low five your toilet as you flush.
I first took the handle off my toilet and measured it with calipers.

toilet_handletoilet_handle_2

I spent hours in Rhino trying to figure out how to form this shape.  It wasn’t easy as it’s so organic, and I wanted it to be as close as possible. I started by outlining the size of the handle and main measurements with rectangles and points.  Then I created base of the shape as a few curves, which I joined together.  Then I created a number of vertical curves that spanned the width of the base curve.  Eventually I had the shape together.

I had a lot of trouble figuring out how to make the shape into a solid though.  Eventually I landed on the Polysurface from Network of Curves tool.  But as I tried this tool I realized I needed to cut up the curves into smaller sections and create numerous polysurfaces one at a time.

I had the shape of the toilet handle, and then looked on Thingiverse for a hand form to use with it, since I wanted to use something natural.  I found one and imported it as a mesh and integrated it with the handle.  I split the mesh using the polysurface to remove the parts that weren’t showing.  I tried to join the mesh with the polysurface but couldn’t figure out how to get that to work.  I also tried turning the polysurface into a mesh and using Booleans to join them, but that also wasn’t working.

Unfortunately, when I got to the 3D printing lab I found that there was an issue with the model and it wouldn’t load correctly in the MakerBot software, so I couldn’t print it.  I tried to check for naked edges and found a few, but couldn’t figure out how to solve them with the complexity of the shape.

So I decided to print the joystick model instead.

low_five_1  low_five_2 low_five_3

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