Cellular Planter / Lamp

myminifactory

I created a Cellular Planter / Lamp for the SelfCAD / MyMiniFactory design competition. The original concept was to have a Voronoi-inspired lamp with a suspended container at the top holding a succulent. I generated 50 random points and lines, making cells equidistant apart using a Voronoi generator from http://alexbeutel.com/webgl/voronoi.html. Once I had the pattern I liked, I printed it out, traced over the image with a sharpie on a blank piece of paper to get the branches of the cells. After getting the outlines drawn, I took another piece of paper and traced the insides, giving some thickness that would eventually be the structure of the vase. Once I had the pattern drawn, I scanned it, cleaned up the image in Photoshop, and applied several smoothing techniques to correct the hand-drawing before bringing it into SelfCAD. I also colored in the cells so they would be negatives when brought into SelfCAD. After converting the image to 3D in SelfCAD, I bent the surface 120 degrees, copied the piece twice, and merged the cylinder. I then tapered the model several times and stretched until I got the form I liked. Next, I created the suspended holder for the succulent by generating a cone and subtracting a copy of itself. I actually printed this model upside down to eliminate support materials. If I were to adjust print settings further, I would suggest slowing down the print speed and adjusting retraction settings because I got considerable stringing when the extruder jumped from each "branch" of the structure. Check out my YouTube video for a more detailed explanation! https://youtu.be/RySA3am7AX8 Free music in video from www.bensound.com