3D Printed Jewelry: Inspired by Brain Activities

This project is created as a course assignment at the California State University, Long Beach; taught by Behnaz Farahi: DESN 551: Materials, Tools, and Techniques of Prototype.

Creating neurons connections in brain is the way our memories get produced. Each connection becomes stronger or weaker based on our interactions with the outside world. This dynamic and smart part of human’s body is very fascinating. The higher our interactions are in one area, the stronger the neurons connections. In my 3D model I tried to emphasize this concept using colors and thickness. It is interesting to realize that since no one has the exact same interactions during her or his life, each one of us has a unique connectome. The 3D printed jewelry tries to show this uniqueness by potentially creating the object personalized to its owner.

• Midjourney AI
• Photoshop
• Rhino / Grasshopper
• PolyJet Multicolor 3D printer

Midjourney is an interesting AI system that gets sentences as the input and gives 4 image options as the output. Then the user can choose to have different iterations from those 4 images. In the first step, I came up with several different prompts as the input for Midjourney AI. The prompt needed to be carefully put together to give a satisfying result. After a few tries I chose this image as my final output.

Then I took the image to Photoshop and cleaned it up. I also needed to change the image size and know the exact value of height and width for the next step.

After that I used the photo as a source to create a 3D surface based on the different gradients of black and white that was in the picture. I used an image sampler and created a height map. The darker the color, the higher the surface.

In addition to that, I used grasshopper to add color to the mesh. I gave a sharp color to the higher parts and a lighter color to the lower parts of the surface.

Because I wanted to use this piece as earrings, I added small loops to one side of the piece to have space too add the earring hooks to it later.

After that, I changed the surface to a mesh and exported my file as an OBJ file.

For the last step, I sent my OBJ file for print. The prints were ready in a day and I picked them up and added the earring hooks to them.