6. COMPUTATIONAL COUTURE#

Finally pieces started falling into its place and I started working in lingerie. The proposal this time is to replace the common structure with 3D printing.

So first, let´s see what has been done.

Brigitte Kock has developped a personalizable and sewless model by the name of Perflex

it´s important to understand the Anatomy of a Bra, because of the short time, in this exercise I focused in the Cup, but it is very interesting to get deep in the construction and evolution.

Bra cups are can be rigid or soft and are designed to enclose and hold the breast tissue and also to help shape the breasts. The breasts are shaped by the curvature and placement of the seam lines and the directionality of the stretch of the fabric.

Experimentation#

Curving Textiles#

During the experimentation, I analyzed the pattern of the triangular cup and I thought if I follow the lines of its construction in my design, the 3D printed cup shape will obey the same rules. Apparently it was a good observation as it was the one that worked best in the first experimentation.

About my previous experience in lingerie design, I thought it was important to measure the elasticity of the fabric, in order to obtain the shape and size you want to get.

A lot of learning came out from this experimentation.

First I tried to do a rapid prototyping with liquid silicone which wasn´t fast at all, super messy and didn’t work as you can see. Apparently something was wrong in the formula and it never dried but I just think silicone doesn’t like me haha

Second I tried with hot silicone gun which was way faster and cleaner, thought, not perfect as you can´t control the outcome of the glue and it varys the thickness while you apply it. Anyway I would recommend it if you want to explore the possible outcomes before you model in 3D.

The natural next step once you understand how the elasticity works and you find a design you like is to model it in rhino.

The mistake I made, as you can see below is that I put a frame around without thinking every line you 3D print will change the shape, for this reason and for saving some time and material I just remove the frame with some scissors and it worked completely fine!

You can see some other shapes you can create here

Self-forming structures by Grasshopper#

Picture by Nervous System

Then as I was exploring, I found the work by Nervous System and I thought this is also a good way to adapt the fabric to the shape of the body without using seams and it matched perfect with the Grasshopper module.

I tried to record grasshopper next to Rhino so you can watch in parallel the functions with the results but for some reason I wasn’t able to do it, so I leave you beneath the Grasshopper map and the video of the process I did to get into the results below. .

First I create my curve in Rhino and then I open Grasshopper, click in the curve function and with the right button I put select one curve, went back to Rhino and select it. From this point we with be working everything in Grasshopper.

I create a BOUNDARY SURFACE from the curve and then used SURFACE DIVIDE to extract some points out of the surface, after this I created POLYGONS out of the previous points and adjust RADIUS and SEGMENTS.

After I generate a SCALE, and used REMAP to adjust the values from the scale after this, I create another BOUNDARY SURFACE out of the polygons and finally I extrude the surfaces.

The materials I´ve used were filaflex and elastic fabrics commonly used in lingerie as meshes, lycra and cotton-lycra, the one that worked better was the mesh that is actually used for corsets because of its firmness.

Thin lingerie mesh

Cotton-lycra fabric

Corset mesh

The result I like best was with hexagons. To save you some time I leave the file below.

Hexagonal Cup by anasanroman on Sketchfab

Keywords for next experimentation#