Madison Ashby, Ashley Chan, Amanda Nepo & Abriana Stewart
PRESENTATION LINK: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1yILDqU-fBE9SzLFbl7QTu-UORov_qbjHIKjSQZkU6PM/edit?usp=sharing
Our Ideation Process:
From the start, we were thinking about transforming and iterating a flower into something new. We came across the idea to do flower furniture through Tinker Bell/Pixie Hollow, and we thought that it would be visually appealing to have a living room setup (table, chair, lamp) that was fully made of flowers. Also, Amanda had discovered a tree near the USC bookstore that had orange trumpet flowers that could be interesting to manipulate in Blender, so we decided to go for it.
Inspired by Disney and the fantasy world of fairies, we manipulated trumpet flowers to create a classic living room scene.
Process:
Ashley: To create the table stand, I watched a Youtube tutorial on how to create noodles in Blender. I used the concepts I learned from that video and applied it so that I could create petal/leaf-like table legs that were organic but functional. I also laser cut a piece of clear acrylic (5×5) for the table top.
Madison: To create the lamp, I had watched a few youtube videos on how to twist “stem” (main tube) of the lamp to see if it would give it a more organic quality. I faced some difficulties with figuring out how to bend and curve the petals using modifiers. I ended up forgoing the idea of having smaller pieces coming off of the stem, and instead worked with the flower petals as the main lampshade. I also increased the size of the flower to make the new lampshade.
Abriana: I took these steps to create the flower chair. There was a lot of trial and error, but these are the steps that were successful and used for the final model:
1) Decimated geometry to simplify faces as much as possible → extruded all the top faces of the flower to make it a printable thickness (since solidify and inflate modifiers were unsuccessful).
2) Filled in missing faces/smoothed transitions between faces.
3) Layered smaller flowers around perimeter of main flower (duplicated/mirrored, scaled, rotated, separated objects with lasso tool + wireframe viewport, applied Boolean Modifier to bridge faces).
4) Extruded bottom of large flower to create base, added and triangulated face of base, and leveled bottom.
5) Joined all objects into one, cleaned up with delete loose, make planar faces, merge by distance, and fill holes functions under mesh tab.
Amanda: Initially my blender had all of the pieces together, and although I thickened the flower…. It wasn’t enough.
For my next iteration I decided to separate the stand from the hooks so there would be less issues with the printing.
Printing:
Final Touches:
Final Product:
Reflections:
Madison: I think that some of the successes I had were figuring out how to make the tube of the lamp twist in blender. Something that I did encounter was the expectation that more of my rhino knowledge would transfer to using blender. Though some concepts did translate, I found that handling the new user-interface and commands was a challenge. I think I did get adjusted to it semi-well for the time that I had. I did end up needing to reprint the tube and the base of the lamp to better support the flower shade. As a solution for some of my modeling problems, I did bring the models into rhino to make a few final tweaks. I am excited to continue working with blender in the future, as I hope to use it for my architecture studio projects and other art projects in the future.
Ashley: I would consider our ideation process to be a success; I am a huge fan of the use of trumpet flowers to put a spin on the traditional living room. I also think laser cutting a clear acrylic table top was a good call. However, I found it incredibly challenging to manipulate the flower scan in Blender because of the incredible number of vertices and faces in the petals. I also thought that the learning curve for Blender was high; it took me at least two hours to learn the basics of the software and took me even longer to be able to create the curves necessary for my table legs.
Abriana: I enjoyed learning about the process of 3D scanning and printing, and our group collaborated effectively in the ideation process. However, I would not have chosen to scan so thin an object with such complex faces/edges/vertices due to its organic, curvy form had I know what I know about facial the process of editing geometry in Blender and printing time. The only way I was able to make the flower thick enough to print was by clicking on and extruding all the faces individually, which was incredibly tedious given the number of faces(like 5-6 hrs just to get the thickness). This frequently caused my program to crash, often losing some of my work in the process. Having had no prior 3D modeling experience, the learning curve for the software was also pretty steep for me personally. I watched many tutorials and sought extra help from Eman and students working in the XR lab. While 3D scanning is a cool feature, I think it would only make sense for non-organic shapes or objects that are almost impossible to create from scratch (such as identical face or body scans). I definitely had to adapt my imagined designed based on my own capabilities with Bender and the pre-existing geometric complexity.
Amanda: It was cool learning about Blender but honestly I had a lot of trouble even doing basic things like putting 2 objects on the same plane. I know I can do a lot with Blender, but I didn’t really know how to start and youtube videos were difficult to understand for what I specifically needed. It was cool to understand how the 3d printers worked here. The support systems were different then what I have seen before. Since I had to print my object twice, I have a better understanding of the software to send prints over to the makerspace now.