Stacked Slices Model Progress 2

    I decided to change my concept to something that better utilized the stacked slices. Initially, I looked on google images for "stacked slices" and found that most of the results featured laser cut wood animals or else pictures of bread. I wanted to embrace grasshopper's functions, particularly the rotate and random function, so I decided to make a tree that had branches I could rearrange or rotate. I also had the idea of creating a mountain or another nature scene, but I felt that creating a topography was uninspired. 

    I thought about stacking the tree trunk the same direction as the branches, but using the laser cutter to create stacked circles both felt bland, but also felt like it was pointless as the cuts would ultimately be less noticeable. I might as well of bought a thick dowel and trimmed it. To make the rotation on the above animation, the steps on the range were set to 18 to create 19 outputs and the geometry was flattened so that the rotation would be applied to every individual ring of branches.

    Using the random function, I found that I was also able to take each ring of branches and rotate each one individually. This took a lot of trial and error, as I found that the random feature would often apply the same angle change to every single piece. (I did the testing for this before I did the regular rotation animation seen above). Initially, I tried using range between the construct domain and random but I found that no matter what I changed the steps to, each random would be a specific segment of angles. For example, using 18 steps (gave me 19 outputs for my 19 branch layers) would create a range of 0-20 degrees, 21-40, etc. While this is still random I found that it created a more subtle random than I was hoping for, so I directly connected my construct domain (0 - 360 degrees) to the random feature. Seed was the slider I used for the animation and number was the number of slices I had. I found that the animation was choppy and felt less like a gif, so I also animated the trunk through the distance slider (material thickness) to create a consistency for reference. Of course, the rotate axis geometry had to be flattened or else all the branches would collectively be rotated 19 times and overlap to create a weirdly spikey star.

    These are my grasshopper definitions for both the trunk and the tree top. The main difference is that the direction for the branches was set to z and the direction for the trunk was set to y.

For final printing, I am considering filleting the triangles to be more curved to lend a softer look to the overall tree. It would end up looking something like this:

    I decided to put in a few extra hours this week and prep my slices for printing. I made some adjustments to the grid that we made in class, specifically by changing the square grid to a rectangular grid. I noticed that when I would bake my pieces, I'd end up with more slices than my model, and it was because I didn't make a model with slices equal to a perfect square. In my case, I had 19 slices but if I made a grid with 20 nodes on it, I could make it 3 x 4 (it adds one extra intersection in each direction). I also found that I liked the ability to adjust the x and y size separately, which made my pieces nestled closer.

    As you can see in the image above, there is an extra triangle on the bottom left, which is just a duplicate of the top triangle on the tree which was easy enough to delete. Something I also noticed is that the grid arranged my pieces in the same order as the branches from bottom to top. Another change I did was baking the points where the grid lines meet, as I realized it is the center of each triangle. This allowed me to make a circle around one of these points and use the copy command in rhino to duplicate it to each triangle, besides the top and bottom one.

    To assemble the pieces, I want to 3d print a spine that would run through the middle of the object. To make the spine, I just copied an additional circle and extruded it by the multiplication of number of branches (17 in this case subtracting the top and bottom slices) and the thickness of my material, which was 3mm (I already bought my supplies and have a measurement). I figure that if the bottom set of branches was set with the trunk, it would keep everything centered. My plan is to glue the spine to the top slice and the assembled trunk to allow the pieces in between to be rotated freely.

    I nestled everything by hand, but it was not too overwhelming since it was a lot of rotations and simple movements. I considered nestling the edges of the triangles together, but after using intersect, I found that the sides curve in slightly so the cuts wouldn't quite match. For the trunk, I did decide to nestle them directly against each other because they were all straight rectangles. This comes with the benefit of less cut lines, which would speed up the process and create less waste. I also had to explode the curves to delete the overlapping lines between each slice.