Model Making Week 8 – 3D printing

This week was another technical session, and also slightly disappointing for me as it was much less hands on. We looked at the basics of 3D print design on a programme called Rhino, playing around with shapes and basic techniques.

I started to create a model of a virus, which is a horrible freaky little creature, as seen in this close up picture. I thought that the insectoid alienness of it was fun (and reminiscent of the creepy Shadows in Babylon 5), but also it seems to be built up of these little geometric shapes so I felt that it might be appropriate for designing in a digital environment.

Here are some images of the process. Unfortunately, this was just an introduction to the techniques and processes and I didn’t get time to finish it, completing only the legs, and sadly we didn’t get to print out our inventions, which really was a disappointment.

This computer Virus shall remain forever a conceptual monster stuck in digital limbo, a haunting memory only, drifting around among the specks of dust in the hopeless voids of the Cabinet of Monsters.

I am not sure that 3D printing is for me anyway, I have much more enjoyed the physical process of creating things with my hands. The next two weeks of model making are about developing our own project, so I really need to get thinking about what that is going to be.