VOBJECTS

Machine learning image I generated using Midjourney . A berry helpful idea generation strategy. When I started thinking of chess set ideas I was looking at one of my pineapple planters that I designed  and decided that I wanted to create something with a fruit theme. My partner even suggested fruits vs veggies. I ended on settling on something more specific. Berries. They are fun because there are some fruits considered berries that we don't typically expect. All of the following concept images are  generated using Midjourney v4  with a variety of prompts from myself. Queen King Bishop Knight Rook Pawn The major way this whole process helped me was realize that I didn't want each piece to look exactly like a specific berry but more that each piece could just be inspired by a berry, loosely taking on some of it's qualities. I imagine very few of my pieces will look much like these images but they were quite helpful.

Reverse Engineering Final Renders After finishing the last few parts of my reverse engineered French press I got started on the final renders. That was a lot of work. Very finicky detailed work. I can't say I particularly enjoyed the process but I'm happy with how it all turned out. The rendering process was quite satisfying and it's made more satisfying by the realism and accuracy of the models. Now please enjoy the following renders I spent so much time on. And now for something I've never done before. A Rhino video animation! It was a bit weird to wrap my head around initially but I figured it out.

Reverse Engineering Progress Update Two Continuing with my work on the French press, I decided to take a break of tiny finicky pieces and make the container. It had it's own intricate parts, like the handle having the slightest arc as well as merging the two wall vertical section with the the single wall lip. To get the brushed steel texture I just altered the Rhino "Grit Bump Texture" to be stretch drastically in one direction making the X size 8.0 and the Y size 10000.0. I'm pretty happy with the final look of the container, maybe if there's extra time at the end I'll play with the surface design to add the wear and tear. Here are the parts I've completed so far. And here's a little experiment I did with a hybrid display of the parts.

Digital to Physical Starting the process of converting to digital to physical. A progress video showing the process of converting the design to grayscale. From just removing to all saturation, to tweaking the levels of which areas are darker and then the cut lines. Then, we put it in the laser cutter and saw how it turned out. Peter's experience and knowledge meant he could tell with just one look that I was too subtle with how I used the blacks and greys and they they wouldn't come out with quite the same range of value on the wood. He was right. Although I did it on wood, that was sort of a backup. What I really wanted to do was etch the design into glass. It was inspired by sea creatures so clear glass felt more fitting. We turned off the cut lines and then just did a small experiment, because if the values were too subtle for wood they would be far to nuanced for glass. New Design So I came up with a new design, limiting myself to only 4 steps of value. #000, #555, #aaa and