Research
I wasn’t sure where to start with this project, as my 2D piece mostly consisted of negative space, so I didn’t think I could really do a direct translation of that into 3D space. I instead decided to try and recreate the principles I went for in the original piece which were movement, rhythm and harmony.
To start my process I made iterations in blender to rapidly go through ideas and find an idea that I liked and wanted to move forward with.
These first three were very different because this was the stage where I wasn’t too sure what to do with the design yet and wanted to try a few random ideas out. I ended up quite liking the third design and wanted to move forward with that.
These next three were ones that I was trying to incorporate more elements of the original piece into, like the circles and rhythmic prisms.
I ended up not really loving the attempts at incorporating the old design, so I decided instead to incorporate the principles of it and make some kind of motion in my piece. At first it was simply the ability to lift up and drop the sphere in the case, but as I continued to iterate I found it better for it to be able to swing instead. I eventually got rid of the side prisms as they really took away from the center piece, and the dimensions changed a lot over the course of the physical construction, but this was the iteration I really went off of for the rest of the project.
I think this was the most important part of my process and what made my final design as successful as it is. I narrowed my design down to one that somewhat resembles the 2D piece while keeping its own unique character in what it is. I loved the perceived simplicity of it even though in practice of construction it would be relatively complicated. I also liked it because it represented the principle I was going for.
My research going into construction consisted of figuring out how to make the sphere, so I watched a few videos and it made it seem super simple, I also watched a few videos on how to properly cut Bristol as I was still struggling a bit in that area.
Production
I printed out a couple templates of parts of the piece from the paper crafts blender plug-in, which gave me an out-of-scale representation of the individual parts.
I started construction by testing the sphere template on printer paper. I printed it, cut it out and then tried folding it and gluing it. It worked well enough, I had something resembling a sphere, but the way blender made the template was really weird, it split the sphere into multiple sections where it didn’t need to be like that.
I took this template into photoshop to just move then arms around to a more usable template, as well as get rid of the unnecessary tabs and ones that were inside of other pieces. This left me with a much more readable template that made more sense to cut out and fold.
I again tested this by cutting it out and folding it and it turned out much better than the other, as it actually made sense to fold. I glued this and used it as the reference for my final sphere.
I started immediately just getting the Bristol sphere out of the way and traced the template I had made onto some Bristol. I cut it out once I had it traced and had all my guidelines down. This proved a bit annoying because of the shape of it, but it came out decently. I scored everything and glued it and it came out to the point I was happy with it being in my piece.
Next I wanted to test the encasing prism. This would be the last thing I tested because I was just going to eyeball the lengths that I would want of the smaller pieces once I had the other bigger pieces built.
I started off way too big, and didn’t test the original template on paper because I trusted that it was simply a prism. I multiplied the dimensions of the small paper template I had printed out by 3.5 and this ended up way too big and I thought this was good and was going to use two sheets of Bristol for just this piece.
After pausing and thinking about it for a while I figured this was way too confusing as a template and decided to shrink the box quite a bit. I instead decided to start off with a controlled variable of 12 cm for the front bottom edge. I used some proportional math to end up with 21 for the height and 7 for the depth. These sizes seemed to work really well and I went along figuring out more of the dimensions and how they would work together on this template. I wanted to do the top and bottom smaller prisms as pegs that fit through the faces of the piece, with the top one able to swing freely in the depth of the box. I marked out the holes for the inside faces as well as the holes for the top peg and hinge strip. After I had the full template and marked out all the measurements I cut this out and scored all the lines and test folded it. I knew I still needed to put in the center piece so I held off on gluing it yet.
I moved on to making the template for the inside faces of the box. I wanted to make it one long piece that just folded up and needed one tab glued but it ended up being too long to do that on one piece of Bristol. I split it up into two pieces, one of three faces, and one of a single square that would be glued to complete the section. I put in the holes for the pegs and cut the piece out to make sure my measurements were right. It turned out well and folded properly into the bigger piece.
I glued these pieces together and ended up with a pretty nice version of the 3D case. I struggled a bit with getting the inner portion into the outer bit, for a minute the tabs didn’t want to fit around the inner piece, most likely due to an issue in my measurement, it did eventually fit though after a few minutes of messing with it.
It was here that I decided to not do the floating prisms on the sides, as they didn’t add too much to the piece and would only end up making the instructions more complicated than they needed to be.
The next step for me was the smaller pegs so I measured out the 2×2 squares and then decided the length I wanted for them by holding up my ruler to the box. I went with 7 cm for the boxes and 3 cm for the pyramid on the very top one. I did the top one first, and as I wanted it to one piece, I figured out how to make the top triangles foldable and how to do the tabs on them. I marked the rest of the prism which was pretty straightforward due to it just being a rectangular prism, and then I marked out the holes for the hinge. It turned out in a similar fashion as the sphere, and it wasn’t too bad to fold. I then marked out the other prism which was the easiest piece of the whole thing, just a simple rectangular prism.
My construction process is detailed in my instruct-able, here:
The few things I had an issue with during this process was fitting in the pegs, I just cut the edges a bit and folded them down to fit them. I changed the template slightly to accommodate for this.
I now had my final piece constructed and just had to make my instructions. My first draft was extremely wordy, as I just described exactly what I did in great detail from what I remembered doing in my construction process. I also included little tips on how to make the templates as I thought it added to it but it was really unnecessary. I ended up scrapping more than half of it in favor of pictures to describe instead. Here’s the draft:
I was under the impression for a time that we needed to draw each step so I started doing that and had the first few steps done but it was taking way too long so I just went the picture route as I already had pictures of each step for documentation for myself. I put these into the cut down post, and made a cover sheet instead of just having a title to make it more interesting. This led me to the final draft of my instructions, which is posted above.
The last thing I did for this project was create the orthographic views sheet. Instead of trying to measure everything out and draw the views, I decided to do this digitally, and went back into blender. I edited the original draft I had of the piece to have all the correct dimensions of the real constructed piece. I did this by inserting reference images into my workspace and moving every point to where it needed to be. I then put a wireframe copy of the piece over the regular one so the edges popped out, and then rendered all 4 views.
I took these renders into photoshop, put all of them on the same sheet and sized them accordingly. I then got rid of the background color from blender, as well as any extra edges that didn’t need to be there. I finished up by just doing some organization and labeling on the sheet.
This was the final piece of my project completed and was the end of this process.
Final project: 2D to 3D Translation