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  The first idea I had was to model the pieces after the Platonic Solids, incorporating the elemental attributes given to them by Plato, Fire, Earth, Air, and Water. Here are two of my initial sketches for the pawn and the bishop. I think for the pawn I will only use the lower half, maybe something like the bent pyramid of Sneferu. and all the other pieces will be taller as they are  more powerful. TBC.......... Dec. 1st: Finished Concepts

 The object I chose to reproduce is called a Veritas pocket plane. It is used to trim wood surfaces, and is made of cast and machined stainless steel. This post shows the final renders of my weeks long progress reproducing its eight parts using digital photos, scans, and calipers. The lighting is a sunny mountain day from the Rhino render library, and the plane is sitting on a a black glass base. In these exploded views, you can see the four different materials that make up the eight parts of the plane. The lever cap was created using a layer assigned with polished stainless steel. The blade has been constructed in a layer assigned with matte steel, and the adjustment nuts and bolts with satin stainless steel. The plane body consists of parts created on three separate layers using matte, satin, and burnished stainless steel from the Rhino materials  library. The plane body and the lever cap were the hardest parts to model due to their complexity. Also I didn't have an outside ...

  This pocket plane lever cap is the next piece that I am attempting to recreate in Rhino. I only made a small amount of progress this week, as I modelled the outer shell using the Network Surface command three times before I settled on the shape. The material it is made from is polished stainless steel. Problems I was having at first was drawing too many curves which was confusing Rhino. Once I simplified it to six curves everything went smoothly.

 My cup is based on the cup I use for coffee every morning. I applied a blue glaze to the handle, and the bowl of the cup is porcelain in the render.

I started this portion of the surface design project by converting the Hydra tile to grey scale. Shown here is the original colour tile surface design and the grey scale side by side. I chose to cut out the centre portion and the corner triangles. As my tile is multi coloured I was inspired to make my own plywood out of 11 layers of dyed veneer, and white glue. I wanted to see if I could get the laser cutter to cut away the different layers and expose individual coloured veneers for part of my tile. My first appointment was an hour with Jessica and we ran my program three times as the pattern was not producing the depth or exposing the coloured layers as I had envisioned. After this session Jessica told me that there were ways to manually adjust settings for the intensity and the speed of the laser and that through trial and error we could probably find a combination that would work. Two additional appointments and 1 hour and 45 mins later Peter and I found a combination of settings we...