Melissa March: Laser Cutting - Exercises

Goal: to explore the possibilities of the laser cutting by finding form through planar layers or serial construction.

Exercise One: Waffles
Create a surface form and construct it with a waffle structure. In class, Professor Scott showed us how to create a waffle structure using a grasshopper script. I created a surface by drawing several curves and lofting between them. The script did most of the work in creating the waffle structure, but it was customized by asking for input on material thickness and notching, etc. After going through this process, I laid it out for the laser cutter and cut my waffle structure out of cardboard.

Attempt One: the problem with this is that the form is a little too crazy. It would have worked better if I had more struts.


Attempt Two: this one worked much better, but when you run the script remember to save it because you will need to refer to it when assembling. I tried to assemble it without referencing it, and it was very frustrating and didn't turn out right. Lesson learned: use script to assemble.


Exercise Two: Connection pieces
This exercise consisted of first exploring forms with the pieces that professor Scott had created. After getting a feel for how it worked, he challenged us to create our own pieces. These are the pieces that I came up with.



And here are some forms that I generated with those pieces.