Assignment 8: Laser-Cut Paper Vessel

 Hannah Mhairi

    I have some upcoming markets and I make a lot of jewelry and small things like marbles and ornaments. I wanted to make a small box that would be a little bit more exciting than regular box, and more on brand with me. I quickly came up with the idea for a coffin shaped boxed, I got to work right away as I didn't feel as though I needed to sketch it. 

Here is the basic idea in  Rhino.

I had some issues with automatically unrollsrf command not unrolling the surfaces how I wanted it to so I had to do it similar to how you stated you did it; explode, rotate2d, join, unrollsrf. This screenshot below is from when I, for the life of me, could not figure out why command make2d was not getting rid of isocurves. I discovered it was making a new model out of my view that did actually get rid of the isocurves.

I ended up using polylines to make my own triangular shaped tabs, other than at the very bottom where I used polygon<3>. One thing I ran into, when I used trim, I had to go back and input another line. Instead of it leaving a line where it was trimmed, it would be open. Not sure if that's normal or not, looking back at the guide I'm thinking it's possibly because I skipped the offset step? Something there I think, though it wasn't a huge deal as I just had to add back 2 small lines.

Finally, here's the coffin with all the cut and score lines colour coded and layered.

I want to be able to print these at home on my cricut machine, so the following will go over me learning how to do that. First, I learnt I would have to export my files as .SVG files. So I did that and uploaded the designs into cricut design space, where it grouped my two "layers" (score/cut) together, but they were still seperate entities. Though my object uploaded into cricut with perforated lines, it did not recognize it was a score, but a cut, and I had to manually change it to score. When I did my test print, it actually scored the perforated lines as you would see them in Rhino. I went back to rhino, I kept the colours seperate but I set the line to be solid again. I redid my print in cricut, and everything was all good, it scored a solid line.

forgot to take pictures when i took it off the matt and started folding but I got a picture while gluing.

and here is the prototype finished, I didn't like the dimensions though at this point.

So I made some adjustments to the height, width, and length of both the top and bottom of the box and was a lot happier here. Aside from aesthetics, the lid also fit a lot better now.

I wanted to get it even more on brand. Recently, I learnt my cricut machine can write, and I taught myself how to import my own digital drawings for it to work with. I've been playing around with making business cards and card stands and things like that with the drawing and cut feature. So I added a little sketch and some words via the cricut as well.

and finally, because I make a lot of necklaces, I thought it would be really cute to add a necklace card inside the box to display the necklaces better.

There is an anatomical heart pendant I made inside the box with the necklace card. Going forward I might make the holes smaller but overall I'm very happy with the result and I'm super excited to use it at markets. I will also get different colour/design cardstock to make it even more exciting. I also only now just considered I could make different shapes inserts for different items, such as marbles.

I really enjoyed this project and am very glad we did it. Early in the semester, I had heard you were thinking of getting rid of the paper craft project, and I was disappointed as it seemed like lots of fun. Safe to say it was quite fun, it's made me feel more competent in rhino and see the capabilities beyond 3d printing. This was a very fun project for me.