Adventures of Flaskay & CAD

So far I have completed two of the simpler parts of the object. They have been pretty simple - mainly extruding 2D circles into cylinders and creating different topographies/curves with the loft tool. Now I am working on the most complicated section and have used BooleanDifference to get the accurate hole in it. As you can see I have the base completed and I plan to add the rest of the piece using more boolean commands :) 

Man oh man I definitely learned a lot doing this project. I knew it was going to be an experience just because I wanted to do the project so big, but I didn't know just how stressful - and rewarding - the whole process would be.   DAY  1 In the beginning I made a smaller copy to see how I would do the whole process as a test before I did the big one. I only had enough material to do my actual project once so I wanted to MAKE SURE I had the process down.  I made one that fit in my sketchbook and I thought it went pretty well. I'm happy that I did it because I had a loose idea on how to start the bigger project and it ended up being a really good reference in the future. I started off feeding the first length of vinyl through the plotter.  I made the measurements slightly smaller just to add any room for error - WHICH I AM SO GLAD I DID. The length of the first design ended up being just over 97 inches long so we had to make sure that 100 inches could run thro

Here are my original sketches - I did import them into rhino using PictureFrame so I could have it as a handy reference image while I was creating the curves drawing of my eye! Time to draw it out! I definitely had to keep scale in mind as I was sizing the image because it's gonna be so big. I bought 20 ft of my own vinyl so my project had to fit within that size. I'm gonna have to use the registration process of tiling multiple strips of the vinyl's design on top of each other seamlessly so everything has to be exact! As you can see in the photos down below, on top of making the hatched and curved versions, I had to section them off into strips. Originally I used 7 strips, but when I calculated the amount of vinyl I needed, I would have had to use more than I had which wasn't going to happen because all I can afford is 20 ft. So I had to make some adjustments with the scale and now it'll only take me 20 feet! So then I had

 I have selected a mechanical eraser!   I chose this object because it is fairly easy to dissect and put back together. Some of the components on the inside are more complex - as seen in the photos - and I feel like it would be complicated enough to give me a challenge but wouldn't be too outrageous.  There's a combination of text, repetitive patterns and circular parts; I can start to guess what kind of tools I would use to make it if I extrapolated from what I learned with the previous projects (extrude, revolve, array, polylines, boolean union/difference, etc)