2. Digital bodies¶
Research & Ideation¶
New week, new Project. This week I learnt a looooooooot of new tools to design and create! I am extremely happy because what I thought it that it would be the program it is being happening. Digital bodies… When I arrived to Fabriacademy lab, I saw all these bodies, structures and shapes and I said to my self: WOOOW it will be amazing to do this kind of stuff, well, this week I did it! The week started with the lecture of Anastasia which really inspired me and gave me a many examples and ideas of what is being done in the world in terms of body and fashion. She gave some interesting facts like: before, clothes were taylor made, then clothes were industrialized and democratized, and now the trend is going back to personalization. Also, she introduced actual trends like: Shudu, the world’s first digital supermodel and the emerging of NFT – Digital fashion.
Finally she concluded her presentation with the introduction of the topic of the week with the following phrase: “The human body is a canvas”
Laser Cut¶
This technique is amazing! I had never seen it before and it is extremely useful. Petra explained us the principles of laser cutting and afterwards we went to the lab to see the actual machine working. For me, the most impressive fact, was that we could do different cuts and engravings depending on the material that we were using. For the demonstration we used cardboard and wood and the results were incredible: excellent precision, perfect shapes and a nice engraving of a cat in wood :)
It took me around 25 minutes to cut all the pieces of my skull! Three cardborad sheets of 1000mm x 600mm
At the end, I learnt that the following steps should be followed for laser cutting:
- Measure thinckness, close the window
- Use paper tape to grab your material to the machine
- Make sure there are no other layers
- Make sure where the Laser starts to cut in order to save material
- Place the material
- Extraction shall be turned ON
- Focus the laser – with the little plastic bar and moving the surface towards the laser
- Close the cutter
- Set process (cut, engrave) -> power, speed and freqiuemcy depending on the material database
Rhino¶
Amazing tool! I loved it. It is interesting and fascinating all the things that you can create in this program. At the beginning we were familiarized with the program and then we started to use it for heightfield, and to Boolean solids.
Rhino is a great tool for visualising designs, illustrations and realistic renderings. In our particular case, this will be our usefool tool to create all our design to Laser Cut and 3D Print. For this software below are some useful commands:
- Solid tools, create solid: Creates a solid with the intersection of surfaces
- Filet edges: Round the edges of a Volume
- Trim: Boolean Union, Boolean Difference, Boolean Intersection. Cuts undesired lines between two objects.
- Extrude: Extrude a point so it creates a line. Extrude a line so it creates a surface and Extrude a surface so it creates a volume -Polyline: Creatrs a line formed by points. Polyline can be controlled in different planes -Shift+control: you can select different faces of a surface -Properties: you can control the layers and properties of your objects -Calculators: Unit settings: milimeters -SelDuP: Selects points, lines, surfaces or volumes that are duplicated -Join: Group into 1 object different objects selected -Distance: Helps measure the distance between two objects (line, point, volume)
Makehuman¶
It is a program that provides customized models of huans in order to export these figures to Rhino. You can set different poses, shapes, sizes, almost everything! It is a good tool to play with to obtain an accurate representation of the human body.
Slicer for Fusion360¶
The best tool ever! I could not imagine how easy it is to use it and the incredible results you obtain with. Thanks to this tool I was able to design my project and the layers for laser cut were properly exported from here.
The first step is to import the file and set the units to milimeters:
Then in Construction technique select "Stacked Slices"
Then select your prefered direction to Slice your object (You have two possible angles to select)
Finally, you can see the assembly steps and get the Plans of your object. Further to this step, you can optimize your material by stacking manually the pieces in Rhino to save space of you material when laser cutting
Human Scanning¶
Customized technology to the service of Humanity! This activity was amaaazing! We used a giant robotic arm with 6 degrees of freedom, 1 turning base, and a Kinect accessory from Xbox to create a 3D model of us! The Kinect measured depth with infrared technology collecting points and generating our digital silhouette with this data.
While we stood up in a fixed pose, some one was controlling the robotic arm and scanned us for 3 minutes approximately and the results were amazing:
S-cool: Underneath all the skin, we are all the same¶
My project. It took me a lot of time to get to this idea. At the beginning I was stuck looking for inspiration and Ana helped me guiding me. We were discussing about a neutral gender mannequin, we discussed about some possible ideas, and at the end, I reached to a final idea that I have seen previously in social networks: Underneath all the skin, we are all the same. Then, I took some measurements about my head and with this scratch Idea I started modeling in Rhino in the same way that Greek Kouros 700 B.C.
I worked for several hours in my Rhino Program and when I was about to finish, I noticed I could not save my work because my license was not connected to my program ☹ . . . . . Tears… . . . . . Then, considering that I have only one day left to present my project, I started looking for possible available open source skull model and I found it! I was on the track again (fire) I imported the file into Slicer for Fusion360 and started to see which was the most suitable pattern to create my 3D model. Afterwards I optimized the space of pieces in the cardboards to save material.
parameters for laser cut - 4mm Cardboard
Power: 85, Speed: 1 and PPI/Hz: 1000.
It was very useful that Slicer for Fusion360 marked the number of the pieces with a little thin line that allowed me to follow where was the exact position of each piece.
But the fun did not stop there. When we were setting the planes in Rhino to laser cut, we started to print my first sheet of pieces and unfortunately it was Friday 19:10 and it was time to leave the laboratory. I waited until Monday to complete the laser cut and finally I was able to produce an amazing project for Digital Bodies!
I am really proud of my final work and I want to thank specially to Ana and Petra because without their help, this project would not have been possible😊
Fabrication files¶
File: Laser cut sheets
File: Skull model