Vigil

cults3d

A bit of background on this project: the model itself is my first ever attempt at 3D printing. The assembly of the original was done by hand, but that's the only step that resembled traditional non-printing. I wrote a basic model slicing tool in college one afternoon; then realized I could put it to work in a sculpture class I was taking at the time. The assignment was simply "here are two big sheets of polystyrene; go crazy." I finished the project in a few days, whereas two weeks were allotted for the assignment. For your enjoyment, I've included a picture of my original prints. I'm going to decline releasing my code right now, as it's an understatement to say that it's rough around the edges and reflects my poor understanding of best practice at the time. Yeah, I know, everyone uses "but my code is ugly" as an excuse, but trust me, using a shell script to generate a C++ header from an .obj file (for obscure performance reasons, didn't know of a good library to use, and didn't want to spend the rest of the afternoon researching one) and re-adapting a program I wrote to demonstrate shader programs to facilitate slicing stuff... oh, and don't forget, the GUI for operating the slicer (adapted from the demo program) is a Python program. More embarrassing than the run-on sentence I just wrote. Time constraints and using what I knew at the time won out over researching best practice. I do have plans to remake the slicing tool now that I'm older and wiser, since it enabled something resembling 3D printing for persons with no budget. It also enables working in pretty much any scale you like without concern for overhangs. Such a remake I would definitely open-source or make public domain. Oh, almost forgot; this piece is an abstraction of an alligator vertebra.