Alright so after the first few weeks of this class and finally understanding what Prof Scott meant by "speaking Chinese," with a little help I conquered the first part of the milling project. I had no knowledge of what was possible as far as design goes, and even when I had decided what I was going to do, trying to get there was the next step. Out of curiosity I started exploring images of Brain Coral and the variations of patters that each coral has. So I saved a few Images of those.
After I found my image, I went through the steps that we talked about in class where we had to change the picture to black and white, if it was in color, and alter the contrast of the image in Photoshop. Once I did that, I saved it as a JPEG and opened it in Illustrator. Did an image trace and adjusted the image so that it was only three colors. I went through that a number of times and came out with a few images.
^ This was from right after the image trace, but before I put it into Photoshop to change it to black and white.
^This image is from after I altered the contrast levels in Photoshop and after Image Tracing it.
^ These two are the 6 color layer one that I started out with.
^From there I scaled it down to 3 colors, but that was even a lot to work with.
Once I loaded those images into Rhino, they were way to complicated to work with and had a million different parts to sort through so I had to scale it down a bit. But even this wasn't scaled down enough for a beginner Rhino user to work with.
So I settled on this image and decided to upload it into Rhino as a DXF so that I could explode it and create layers out of the three different color fields.
From there I began to extrude the curves in the image and pull the curves from each color layer up to create depth.
That wasn't exactly what I was looking for so I ended up deleted the curves and just pulling up the surfaces to create a slightly different effect.
Rhino didn't exactly like all the tiny pieces that were intricately placed in between some of my layers so I had to start to explode the surfaces and create poly-surfaces. Then I used the Boolean tool to attach all the pieces together and add a rectangular box to the bottom to create a platform for the layers to sit on. I had to individually Boolean each island piece because Rhino didn't like to Boolean them all at once. After all that work was done, I added the measurements to my final file so that it was in the proper format to start milling.
Once it's milled, the real fun begins...
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