Crashing CAD Candy Castle

I really twisted and filleted myself into a corner on this one. 

Beware the complex geometry introduced by Twist and FilletEdge

Of course using those commands in a reasonable manner shouldn't cause any problems but I used FilletEdge on all the crisscrosses of the wafer, on all the edges of the Oreos and in several other instances. Then, adding several copies of that object to the file when it became too much. Working with the file for the most part was fast but creating more of each version was slower and slower. Saving is a nightmare on this ~4GB file now. Which meant I saved less and on a couple occasions lost quite a bit of work.

Inspiration and Research

Of course, all that was by far the biggest challenge of the process. Well, that and I was stubborn and wanted to keep all that geometry because I liked it and I'd worked so hard on it.

The whole idea for a candy castle started from this doodle I did in last weeks class.

It gave me candy vibes and that's what sparked the idea.

This project involved some odd research because unfortunately I don't seem to have much candy around lately.

Parts

Oreo

One of the most satisfying commands for me in Rhino is ArrayPolar and I used it quite a bit in the making of the Oreo. Some key commands were also Taper and Circle AroundCurve.

Twizzler

Next came the Twizzler, where Twist was the big command as well as Scale2d.

Oof ... you defintely don't want to see that many black lines in Wireframe view if you want an effecient file ...

Nib

Then the Nib, it was easy to make but of course I also used FilletEdge on all the edges here which isn't a big deal but I just kept adding them up. I also used Fillet on the corners of the semi circle.

Wafer

Then came the wafer. I thought it would be satisfying to make. And it was. It was not satisfying to work with though ...

Not a hard edge to be found on that mighty wafer. Oof. Were this being done in a parametric way I would happily have just removed all those soft edges but alas, that's next semester. 

Skittle

And of course the Skittle which was just a squished sphere. Oh the simplicity.

Castle

Thankfully I decided to organize my files with one where I built all the candy and separate one for construction. Assembly was painfully slow. Simply copying a wafer to the clipboard to a minute, copying a wall of wafers took sever.

As you can imagine documenting a process like that was tedious and most of my mental power was focused on not getting too frustrated. I have this one of using Array to create the Oreo towers. Setting 2 for x direction, 2 for why direction and 7 for z direction.

I used Mirror quite a bit as well and Rotate3D was useful too. Bend was how I created the arch using the Twizzler, which required a fair amount of guide curves so I could get it just right.

Rendering

Now, my computer would happily do the actually rendering of all the complex materials etc but adding the meshes to the renderer crashed it. So had to use ViewCaptureToFile with the creative view settings to capture this.

Initially this was all I could manage to add to the render scene for a proper render.

I then decided to try another trial of V-Ray for Rhino, and it worked! V-Ray saves me again.