Joinery Precedents

I've had a good look at joinery methods to find a good way of holding my model together, and I found a couple of good techniques used in wood joinery:

The Dowelling Joint / Mortise & Tenon Joint

This is a very versatile joint used in plenty of wooden furniture, and it depends greatly on the accuracy of the holes you drill with a known diameter of dowelling. I know that the laser cutter is a very accurate tool, though I'm wondering whether there is enough strength and compressibility in the acrylic to let me use this method. I've bought a sheet so that I can do some tests, as the Mortise & Tenon joint (A rectangular version of the joint above) would be just what I need.

Gothic Joining

The joint on the side of this table is the traditional way of joining Furniture in the Gothic Period, and is a very sturdy way of ensuring that what you've built isn't going anywhere. I know that this method works when using wood (especially hardwoods), but I'm curious to see whether it would work with acrylic too or whether that would be to brittle a material. I'll definately test this concept as well. Maybe I can get a combination of these two methods?

Testing the Unwrapped Model

I've printed out the model I "unwrapped" from 3DS Max, and attempted to put it together to see if all the dimensions were adding up.

Close, very close, but no cigar. Well, not just yet! I used this model to put dimensions directly on to that I could translate over to the digital copy on illustrator. There are heaps of red marks all over this one, so I'm glad I did this out of paper to save me a lot of effort instead of using the cardboard. Though I imagine there will be some dimensioning difficulties once I get to using a thicker material too.... One step at a time.

In the background of this image I've also started thinking about how I'm going to connect the other pieces together, and as crude as it looks I really think a rod of some sort is the best way to go here. I will have to have a look into some methods that don't involve turning my acrylic model into a shish kebab though

The Unwrapped Model

Here I have one of my sketch models that I have spent most of my time aligning the dimensions of the pieces relative to each other using the line and ruler tools in Illustrator

It's a little hard to see, but it's there alright. This was probably the most painstaking part of the project so far, and it's especially hard not knowing whether it's even the right thing to do or not but I guess that's part of the fun! Just imagine if this works....

Half of these parts were drawn freehand with a lot of educated guesswork drawing straight from the 3DS Max model, and most of the dimensioning I did was only estimates for as far as I can see Illustrator hasn't managed to work out how to measure curved lines. Nevertheless! I have confidence that these parts will work, even if they don't perfectly fit each other. I guess the only way to find out is to try!

Unrwapping the 3D Model from 3DS Max

I decided I would take the model I had in 3DS Max and attempt to unwrap it into a mesh that would be kind of like unfolding a cube. At least I thought it would be that easy, but after all the messing around making 81 models the UV mappings for my model looked like a scrunched up piece of paper. Well, even that's a understatement - it's not that hard unwrapping a scrunched up piece of paper. This was a nightmare.

So instead I've opted to segment the model into the pieces I want by selecting the individual polygons and breaking them away from the whole model and then rendering them individually in a render setup that remains consistent so that I don't lose the scale of the pieces in relation to each other

I then imported these renders into Illustrator and Live Traced them, but they again ended up looking like a dogs breakfast. This is when I realised I had another hurdle - in 3DS Max these parts that were rendered were still 3-Dimensional, so whilst I had the birds-eye-views of all the parts I had lost the depths of them all. There was no telling what scaling issues I would have in building this into a 3D model.....

To combat this, I scaled out a lot of the horizontal axis, but in the end there was really nothing I could do to get out perfect sections into Illustrator (and believe me, I tried my very best). This was always going to be a trial and error process.

Stacking Model

So I've put together my first model! This is my first attempt at a stacking model that came from the Illustrator file from the last post:

I ended up putting this model together with super glue and copper wire, as I wanted to see the form of the model I was creating without having to worry too much about how I was going to connect it - I figured if it worked this way then I could begin investigations into the connection issues later.

I'm really impressed that it came out so well, and I think it actually looks really good. Unfortunately because a lot of the pieces of this model aren't horizontal such that they could fit on the slice planes or perpendicular so that they could stack up, there were a bunch of pieces that simply couldn't attach to anything. I suppose they could be expendable, but I'd much rather have my model in it's entirety so I think I'm going to have a look at other methods of putting this model together.

Creating Slicing Paths in Illustrator

I've never used Illustrator before, and I had the disillusioned belief that it would be almost exactly the same as Photoshop. It really isn't. But thankfully it doesn't take too much getting used to!

Here I've started importing the sections from 3DS Max and Live Tracing them to get these outlines.

Original Model

Second Model

I'm quite suprised by how nice there turned out! I was expecting a big mess of polygons spewed out of 3DS Max, but I can actually see how this came out of my model, though this is still looking a bit rough for the laser cutter, so if I choose to use the stacking method I'll have to clean it up a bit. But for now this will do to cut out into paper or cardboard to test whether it is a viable endeavour to improve this stacking file or find another method of assembly

Slicing and Sizing in 3DS Max

After swapping the model I'm going to be using for this project, I had to dimension the model for slicing in 3DS Max with a dimension cube I imported from Solidworks. I then later discovered that you could actually directly dimension your model in 3DS Max, but hey, what's wrong with being a little cautious?

This model was dimensioned for the slicing model I intend to make, which consists of 27 sections. And as they're all supposed to fit on an A4 page, you can imagine they're quite small

Here is the final sliced model, ready for exporting into Illustrator for tracing. So pleased you can export directly from 3DS Max to a .AI file, else this would be a reeaaaaally tedious process setting up and rendering each slice