Introduction: UCSB MAT Computational Fabrication - Nesting Cups

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This is a documentation of my process for Dr. Jennifer Jacobs' Computational Fabrication course at UCSB. It shows how I went from calibration and experimentation to nested cups.

Step 1: Calibration Cube

My first step was to level my print bed and print a calibration cube. I lucked out and my first print seemed to be quite good and within tolerance. Using calipers, I was able to measure exactly.

  • x = 19.81
  • y = 19.82
  • z = 19.97

Step 2: Experimentation

After getting our code for affine transforms to work, I was enamored with the shape of a cube intersecting another transformed cube, so I performed a union of two shapes and made a tiny print.

Step 3: Nesting Bowls

Using our offset transform code, I was able to design a very simple and clean bowl.

I'm still getting accustomed to designing at proper scale in Rhino, so I ended up using Ultimaker Cura to scale it to 5 centimeters in diameter.

The print took 2 hours and 45 minutes. I experimented with various settings to get the print time down, but in the end nothing I did changed the time significantly enough to merit deviating from settings I know work well.

Step 4: Nesting With Size Variation and Aligning Bottoms

The next step of the process involved creating 3 nested bowls that varied in size and allowed the bowls to be placed inside of one another.

There were a few "nuts and bolts" things I was struggling with in Rhino, so I decided to keep things very simple to ensure I understood what i was doing. Here are some of the things I had trouble with:

  1. How to ensure geometry was aligned with a single surface. In my case I needed the bottoms of my cups to be directly at the x axis. The bottom of my cups were concave, so this was a bit of a challenge.
  2. How to work with scale properly from the start so that I understood what size I was actually making things.
  3. How to move things in a precise way and target specific points in geometry to be the center of my transform.

All of these issues were solved by working through a tutorial on LinkedIn Learning which was very in depth. I feel much more comfortable with Rhino now.

Step 5: Completed Nesting Bowls

The nesting bowls completed.

The biggest learning stumble for me in this project was learning to align objects with a plane in Rhino, but once I got that down it was easy and prepping my objects for the build platform was easy.