Sami Lee Woolhiser: Crystal Installation Process

The digital segment for this project required four programs including Maya, Pepakura, Illustrator and Rhino.

Maya: I designed the elements in Maya simply by creating a cube, extruding faces and continually manipulating the shape via control points and corners.  This was the fun part.
One problem I had with the original test models was that the faces were warped in the digital world and when I laser cut them out of eflute they weren't meant to bend. To solve this I simply cut all of the polygons into triangles so that the three points would create a flat surface, this was a full proof way to make sure I didn't run into that problem again when actually fabricating the pieces.

Maya

Pepakura: An amazing program, also a fun part. Here I unfolded all of the structures.

Pepakura

Illustrator: This can be a tricky step. It is crucial to make sure that all of your lines are expanded so that they are individual segments or the laser will read them as one line and not cut the dashed mountain valley lines. It is also important at this stage to convert everything into a hairline at .001 pt thick so that the laser only cuts each dash once.

Illustrator

Rhino: The not so fun part, make sure that there are no duplicates at this stage. Explode all block instances until all that remains are curves.

Rhino

Devin Thompson working Pepakura magic!

Anne Mason

Ty Derousseau

only about half of the pieces made

Transporting them! 

In the warehouse 

Pre-Fashion Show, raining!

So this project came together really quickly, I only had a week to design, laser cut and fabricate this installation. I just want to thank Professor Kelley McClung for the opportunity and Professor Andrew F. Scott for all of his support and the knowledge about digital fabrication that he has passed on to me.

I had a tremendous amount of help with the digital elements from Devin Thompson, another talented  Sculptor. When it came to actually fabricating the works I had a ton of help from my friends Audrey Dakin, Ty Derousseau, Devin Thompson, Daniella Zeman and Anne Mason! Also the Gulfstream Lab was awesome for accommodating this project. And the SCAD Physical Resources department was incredible in their dedication to this event and their willingness to help with anything and everything!