Flowershroom

 

Flowershroom

    The premise of this project was to create a hollow 3d form that we were eventually to print out using a 3d printer. My partner and I decided to go for a more organic form that we could incorporate both our ideas in. We thought of organic in a literal and figurative sense as we created mushrooms growing out of a flower base.

This was once of my designs for the prep, I was playing with stacking and rotating circles to create this pillars and just circular forms in general. This form was the one that worked best with my partners form as it had a softer feel with the circle motif. 

Here are the sketches I used to explain or hash out the ideas of how we were going to approach this piece. My partner's form was like a tulip as seen on the top left so we decided to use the same idea of a flower that would hold in the forms that I created which we decided on mushrooms at that point. We didn't have a whole lot to hash out as they only had one form so we had to work with what we had. We decided that the form with the randomized circles would be the best option out of my pieces as this would give us the more organic feel we were going for. We decided on the tulip as the 'container' basically for the mushrooms, because this would be still true to the original forms and their purposes. In the beginning stages we talked about possibly having vines that would wrap around the base to give it more texture however we thought about the hollow form and decided that probably wouldn't print how we intended it to. We also thought about the number if petals and mushrooms, deciding that odd numbers were the way to go, using three mushrooms and five petals. The purpose of this object wasn't overly thought about as it was more of a conceptual piece. 

More of my first few ideas.

A view of how I decided to play with the forms using shapes then lofting them together to create a large form. This is the same technique I used to create the mushrooms.

First mushroom made

Revisions.

Here I decided to add some texture in Meshmixer to make the mushrooms read better than just noodle forms. I used the pincher tool to achieve this look.

Then I went in with RobustSmooth to smooth out the grooves so it wasn't as harsh. 

Then I decided to add bumps using the Inflate tool to make then read even better as mushrooms. Looking back now, I would've changed the shape a bit so they would print better and not leave gaps.

The Final mushrooms after they were all finished in Meshmixer, after this I sent them to me partner and they added them to their flower base. We had some trouble however with the base as it was originally not printing in PrusaSlicer.

During the printing process, some issues in one of the mushrooms was the curve was slightly too steep and the printer went straight across leaving a gap. This also happened in the tops of the mushrooms, however I think next time a second layer would be helpful to prevent this from happening. Possibly also better design choices like testing them more frequently to make sure they would print out better. 

This also happened with the base as there were parts that were missing spots, and I think a solution would be a second laser to prevent this in the future.

I think we could've gone through some more revisions to make it seem more like a hybrid, and integrate the parts better. I am happy that we decided to take some risks and although they didn't turn out exactly how we wanted I believe it was a success. Overall though it was fun to experiment with a partner to compromise and come up with ideas and to use the 3d printer for the first time.