2d-to-3D-orthographic

During Zach’s demonstration, I remembered trying to make a cube out of tissue paper for an experiment in high school chemistry. It was very, very far from perfect, but I hoped the sturdier paper would make this project easier (it did).

I made three cubes.  The first two were in a t-shape and I made them both in one sitting.  On the first one, I didn’t make enough tabs and my cuts were not very straight at all.  On the second one, I added another tab in the planning process but accidentally cut a different one off, so still ended up with too few tabs.  I also used too much pressure when scoring a fold, causing a total separation between the faces. I used a small piece of paper as a brush to apply the tacky glue to the tabs. Since the first two were practice, I didn’t worry so much about smudges, but I brought a rag when making the final cube which helped eliminate smudges and clean up tacky glue.

THE FIRST TWO:

THE FINAL CUBE:

When I made my final cube, I used a different design that I thought would make putting it together easier:

After I began putting it together, I realized that two of the tabs would overlap, so I cut off the one on the middle right and it worked well.

Since I had some issues with scoring on the last cube, I decided to use a scrap piece of paper to practice before I scored the actual cube, and I think it helped. One problem that I had in every cube was the last step, folding the top down, because it never fit quite right and usually had one corner sticking out a little bit.  On the last cube, I was able to fit it in pretty well and wasn’t able to tell at the end.

ORDER

In our critique, my group members pointed out that I included only pyramidal/triangular-based structures and that I could think about other types of forms.  I also realized that iteration #2 was not viable because there were visible face changes that were not present in the original plan view/square design. Design #3 from bold also made me think about inverting some parts of the structure, rather than having everything raised. The design that I ended up using for my order structure (left) was not one of my original iterations.

 

 

 

BOLD

I chose to use the first design, although I also enjoyed design #3.  However, I noticed that my other two pieces involved structures increasing by height, width, and length at the same time and I felt that design #1 would make the overall project more cohesive.

 

 

 

 

INCREASE

I also did not use one of my original iterations for this design.  After seeing an example in class (left), I really liked the idea of having the shapes protruding from each other and created a new design.

PRACTICE

We practiced orthographic drawing in class with the following exercise:

The “L” shape configuration of the top, front, and left views helped bring everything together and make it easy to visualize because everything lined up.  This was helpful when making my own orthographics because I knew how to set it up, and I knew that the top and front, and front and side views should line up.  Instead of having to remeasure certain proportions, I could just base the front view off of the top view (my original square design), and then the side view off of the front view.

 

APPLICATION

I used the same “L” configuration as in the the practice worksheets so that everything would line up easily. The first orthographic has many dotted lines because of the asymmetrical arrangement of the cubes, so there are a lot of hidden edges depending on the view.  The other two were much easier to create because they were more symmetrical and lined up better.  I also used these drawings to measure all the dimensions of the structures.  Since the plan views came from the last project and were not made with the intention of building, many of the length and width measurements were not ideal and in 32nds or even 64ths of an inch, which made building rather difficult.

I ended up creating a different design for order and made a new orthographic:

PLANS

I used Notability on my iPad to create the building plans for each of my structures because it was easier and faster to be precise and accurate.

ORDER

BOLD

INCREASE

 

EDITING

After I began building, I edited my plans based off of any issues that I had; most issues were related to flap placement.  I had to revise my order plans the most because the notch made them very difficult to create; I had to use two separate pieces of paper to create the structures in order to cover the area of the notch.  After the first try, I realized what would work better in terms of which faces needed to go on which of the two separate parts in order to fit together well, and after revising the process was easier.

The other major issue I had was with increase: I attached the second prism to the first upside down, throwing off the orientation.  I didn’t realize until long after the glue had set, so I knew that I would have to remake the entire thing.  I tried to use my knife to remove the second prism so I could fix it just to see what it was supposed to look like, but some of the paper ended up ripping and I decided to just leave it.

 

 

 

FINAL MODELS

I remade increase in the correct orientation, and I also remade bold to fix the gaps at the seams.