Semester in Review

Measuring Tape Ring

I have AuDHD, so naturally my hobby is collecting hobbies (kidding, but not really). One of those hobbies is sewing, and I sometimes find myself misplacing my measuring tape or my rulers in the chaos when I'm pattern drafting or cutting fabric. (I swear I place them on the table in front of me and all of a sudden it's like it fell down a wormhole and reappeared in the pantry.) So when I was thinking of ideas for "out-of-the-box" rings, I came to the idea of making a wearable, retractable measuRING tape :) The other idea I had was for a mini retractable bo staff hidden inside something like a class ring/signet ring purely because it'd be hilarious as a conversation starter if I could just whip out a little bo staff mid-conversation. For the measuring tape, I actually ended up reverse engineering one of my small measuring tapes, which, yay call back to the previous project! I studied the main components it had, mainly the parts used to retract the tape, and did my best to translate it into fitting inside a ring casing. This is something I want to continue refining because I would really, really love to make this into a reality.

Reverse Engineered Object pt. 3

Finished Object (in Rhino)

Here she is! My finished object. It was honestly so gratifying to see this project come to fruition. The process was incredibly fun and, although there were times where I struggled, the overall experience was positive. The parts where I had difficulties proved to be interesting challenges I had fun solving. It did take me longer because I'm pretty sure I spent more time on the details for certain parts of my object but still, I think I came out of it with a better understanding of my own process and also of Rhino. I remember the first time I viewed this through rendered mode and just felt so incredibly happy and proud, I ended up video calling my family on Messenger to make them look at it too. ♡

Reverse Engineered Object pt. 2

Process Update

It's about a week into the project and I've been building my object (ladybug desk vacuum) in stages from top to bottom. Here, I was working on the filter, which was mostly reusing the curves I had for the main body. It never fails to make me feel like a kid in a candy shop whenever I use the shell tool because it's just so cool! I think apart from the rotate tool (still my favorite one by far) I like to use the shell tool whenever I can just because. At this point of building the geometries for my object, I also noticed I use the boolean tools a lot more often, especially the boolean split and union mostly to create openings around a curved surface (because Rhino gets mad if I use makeHole and it's not a planar curve :( ). The only problem is, using the boolean tools give me weird edge splits I don't realize are there until I'm trying to create a surface using edges and my edges are all messed up. I have to find a way to stop that from happening lol

Reverse Engineered Object pt. 1

Picking an Object

For our reverse engineered object project, we were first tasked to find three objects that we could easily disassemble and put back together. My three things were a lego Pokemon figure, a small ladybug themed desk vacuum, and my monitor stand. I picked those three because I thought they'd be interesting to recreate on Rhino plus I thought they might be challenging to do :) Also, I just enjoyed looking at the first two things--the monitor arm not so much, perhaps--especially the ladybug desk vacuum, which I ultimately ended up going with.

Pokemon Lego Figure (Fuecoco, my fave starter for SV!)