Computational Couture

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Assignment

Develop or use an existing parametric model in order to design and rapid prototype your geometries using a digital fabrication method of your choice.

How will it be evaluated?

(Done) Student can build a parametric model using Grasshopper3D
(Done) Student has 3D printed the model
(Done) Student has tried a combination of the techniques presented

All the files created for this assignment can be downloaded by clicking on the link bellow:

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The first thing I did was to design a shoe in Rhinoceros. For that, I imported a foot on rhinoceros and draw some curves in the form of a shoe around it; then I extrude the base of the shoe and finally, added a surface to it by using the option surface from curve network.

Then I oppened grasshopper, draged a brep block and assigned it to the shoe I made on Rhinoceros; after that I transformed the brep to a mesh and increased the size of the rectangles that compounded it, I changed the smoothness of the mesh with the weavebird plugin and changed it to a triangular mesh; after that, I got the polylines from the mesh; and with the dispatch function and some vector operationsI separed the polygons that had a surface with no more than 30 degrees with respect to the horizontal plane; I pulled the remaining polylines to the mesh surface and used this projections to make triangular holes in the shoe by spliting the surface with the polylines and added thickness to the splited surface; Then, I used the other polylines for creating cones pointing upwards on the center of each of them. Finally, I joined the generated cones to the shoe with triangular holes and baked the resulting body. The process done can be seen on the images bellow:

Finally, I exported the body from Rhinoceros as an STL file.

Because of the form of the shoe, I needed to use supports at the inside of it, so I decided to use a solvent filament for the supprots so that it would be easier to take them off. The printer I used was a BCN3D. So I created a profile for printing with the solvent filament and PLA, and then I imported the stl file into the Cura software, I added supports everywere and sent the model to print. Once I got the printed shoe, I plunged it on water until the supports got dissolved. At a beggining, I was going to use Ninja Flex for getting a flexible structure but, the filament never got sticked to the bed, so I had to use PLA instead and finished with a rigid structure.