Silhouettes and Stained-Glass (26.4.12)

Today I worked on creating the pieces of our pop-up, while Erin and Kelsey worked on designing the circuits for our flashing lights.  Once again  Bézier curves saved the day, making it almost effortless to design silhouettes of Harry and Voldemort.

The snapshop below shows the completed Harry figure and the beginning of Voldemort.

I start by creating a bunch of straight Bézier curves in a rough outline of what I want the figure to look like.  Then I make each node curved and make the curves on the left and right of each node independent from each other.

We decided to add a scar and the outline of glasses on Harry and added an eye on Voldemort.  After that, we cut the design out of card stock with the laser cutter.  We changed the power to 10%, the velocity to 130, and made the frequency of the laser 1000 instead of 10000, which is it's usual setting.  The first try only engraved the paper, so we upped the power to 20% and came out with these two figures below:

[ I leaned them against my computer screen. That's Erin and I in the background :) ]

Our final figures will probably be cut from black card stock so that they better resemble silhouettes, but for now, creating these prototypes was exciting!  This weekend I will be designing a Hogwarts castle and will begin engineering the other elements of our pop-up.

In addition, I was working on a side project to create a stained-glass inspired window decoration to give as a gift for a good friend.  I used an axonometric grid and Bézier curves once again, and used layers to make a preliminary sketch and a final product, which is shown below.

Cutting it was a little difficult because not all the pieces came out cleanly, but after some carefully placed pressure on the pieces and some clean-up work with the filer (we don't have sand paper in the lab, oddly enough), I'm fairly pleased with the result (and hopefully my friend be will too!).