3D Printed Terrarium and Generative Flowers

For my final project, I wanted to create a piece that is both functional and something I would love to keep. As I love plants, I wanted to create something that incorporated them and settled on creating a terrarium. I was then interested in seeing if I could 3d flowers that could go insider the terrarium as a decorative piece, and it would contrast well with the living plants.

Terrarium:

• black PLA filament
• 1mm acrylic glass
• a portable light
• gorilla glue
• rhino3d

Plants:

• white PLA filament
• glue
• living plants:
• irish moss
• monsteras
• grasshopper

For the terrarium, I wanted a non complex structure as it would make printing and putting the together easier. I found this terrarium in Pinterest that I really loved and decided to use it as a reference for building my own terrarium. I made a few modifications to the design where I put in a bottom base that will hold the dirt and plants and then a detached main frame to allow me to easily access the plants or put in new ones if they need to be replaced. For the top, I really liked the design, but I built a hexagonal holder that would hold the light that will light up my terrarium.

I wanted to keep the hexagonal look to my terrarium and designed my main frame to be hexagonal. Once I had the overall shape I wanted, I created a rectangle that would be one of the six frame panels I would make. I had to create them individually because the frame would outspan the dimensions of the Ender 3 Pro. My first frame was about 7.00x4.00inches with 4mm thickness. I then created an indent on the other side that was 6.0x3.75inches where the 1mm plexiglass would fit. Once the design was completed, I multiplied the frame five times to create the other five frames. I then connected them together, calculating the angles at which the interior angles of a hexagon are. Once they formed the hexagonal shape, I then took the boolean difference of the first frame so that all of the pieces could perfectly fit with each other. And it allowed for an increased surface area in which I could glue them together.

My first print ended up being too tall as I was limited by the number of plexiglass sheets I had, so I went in and resized the frames to be 8.00x4.25inches and the inner indent to be 7.50x4.00inches. I forgot to change the thickness which was at 2mm. This led to a frame that was the perfect size, but too flimsy to have enough support to hold up the top frames. I increased the thickness to 4mm and got the perfect frames! Once I had the frames, I glued in the plexiglass into the indents and then glued together the pieces to create the hexagonal main frame and let that sit,

For the bottom frame, I took the frame I made for the main frame and resized it to 3.75x4.25inches. In my initial design, I was going to print the frame with a slight perturbed bottom where the 3d printed hexagonal based would go. This hexagonal base would be 8.00x8.00inches and have six holes where the water from the plants can be drained from. When I created the hexagonal base and put it into Cura, it turned out to be way too big for the base dimensions. I tried cutting it in half but even then it would have been too big. I didn't want to splice it even more as then the weight of the dirt would be too much for it and it would split. I then redesigned the bottom frame to have a thick perturbed bottom where it will hold a hexagonal plexiglass I would cut out. As the perturbed bottoms overlapped with each other, I had to boolean difference them to make sure they would all fit together nicely. I wanted to add in reinforcement for the main frame too, so I added a little holder on top of the bottom frames where the main frame could fit nicely. I only put in an outer wall as the dirt would push the main frame outwards into it so it would work great!

My initial prints were a part of the initial design so I went and reprinted all of the bottom frames with the new design. Once I had the size frames printed, I put in the plexiglass, added in the bottom and glued the all together. I put the main frame on top of it to check the tolerance of the holder and it fit perfectly! I made the pieces 6mm thick with the extruded outer wall on top 2mm thick.

The top frame has six pyramid frames that create a hexagonal shape at the top where the hexagonal light holder will go. I designed the hexagonal base and then multiplied it to create the hexagonal top. I then connected the two shapes with lines that connected their corners together. I then offset the created shaped to create the inner shapes. Once all of them were created, I extruded each frame by 4mm and the bottom base to create the final models. I put an indent in each one where the plexiglass would go. I extruded the top hexagonal base to created the light holder which I then put in a 1inch indent that is 3.00x3.00inches so that the light could be placed in there.

After printing out all of of the pieces, I saw that I forgot to take the boolean difference for their bases so there was a slight gap in between of the frames. I decided to fix this and I printed out the new frames. I cut out the plexiglass, glued it in and then put all of the frames together. I then glued the light into the hexagonal light holder and placed it on top of the top frames to see if the weight could be supported. The top frames were able to handle it and all of the parts of my terrarium were then printed and completed! They could now be put together!

The end result looks beautiful! Everything is how I wanted it to look so I am very pleased with it! I did have to take out the plexiglass because it became way too dirty to see anything inside and I was not able to clean it. I'll have to cut out new plexiglass once I get more so I won't be able to plant the irish moss inside. The terrarium looks beautiful and I love the way the light light everything up inside!

For the terrarium, I would have designed some parts differently. I would have designed the whole terrarium first as that would have saved me a lot of redesigns in getting all of the pieces to fit perfectly with each other. Getting the dimensions right for all of the frames took a bit of time to do and a lot of trial and error in printing as can be seen by the unused frames. The black PLA filament was a bit difficult to work with as it wasn't extruding or it was too stringy in its print. Through testing, I got the temperatures 210 degrees celsius for the nozzle and 50 degrees celsius for the bed.

For the 3d printed flowers, I really loved the work of Joshua Harker and his Floral Filigree Series. I wanted to print flowers that were parametrically designed using grasshopper. That would give them a unique and amazing look. I wanted to create three variations of the flower themselves. For the stem, I wanted to generatively design them and I was referred to using the L system algorithm to create them. I was given the work of Lingdong Huang's Nonflower as a reference as well. I really liked the look of them and decided to try to create them.

In doing research in how to implement the L system in grasshopper, I saw that writing recursion code in Python in grasshopper isn't easy. That's when I found a grasshopper extension called Rabbit that handles the recursion portion of the L system algorithm and it allows you to write in the parameters from which the L system needs to follow. I followed this paper by morphocode to see how the rules worked and create my own rules. And then it turns out that Rabbit doesn't work with my mac. I then found Hoopsnake which allows for feedback loops. That way I only needed to work on creating the code that needs to be looped. The grasshopper code that was used is shown. After creating the grasshopper code, I saw that when it generated the loop, it would not retain the previous renderings. This created a disconnect from my main branch and the generated branches. I was not able to find the cause of this. Even if I did, I didn't really end up liking the loop of the branches the L system created. I then tried a different approach that would give me a more lifelike rendering.

I used a different approach to generate more life like stems. This system was creating a cube of points from which a given number of points were connected to form a stem like structure. The created lines were then using as rails for which the pipes could be swept. This created a much more lifelike structure for the stem that I really loved. I could use the number sliders to generate a variation of these structures to create complex and amazing structures.

Once they were printed, I didn't really like them as much as I thought. I thought that as the flower petals and leaves will have a voronoi design on them, the design of the stems made it look overcrowded. Additionally, these were really small and took a long time to print as they had to be printed with supports. I then decided to take a different approach.

Using the pipe, I created a few branches. I wanted to make them look a bit more life like so I made the ends varying radii. Once I had the stems created, I put them into Cura to be sliced and printed.

Although not as exciting as the L system or the other stems, I really loved how these stems turned out. I placed them against the flowers I printed out and the contrast between the complexity of the voronoi petals and the stem looked beautiful. I printed a couple more for the plants.

In grasshopper, I created a petal that I could manipulate and multiply. Once the petal was created, I modified the number sliders to look at all the parametric flowers I could create. I then tried to apply a voronoi design to it using Weaver, but I had a lot of difficulty in doing that. The voronoi design would only generate for a few of the petals and not the entire flower. I tried looking it up online on how to fix this but I was not able to find a fix. I didn't want to leave the grasshopper code unused, so I decided to use the code to create the pistil for the flowers. I printed those out and they turned out better than I expected!

For the petals, as I was facing issues with applying the voronoi design to the flower, I decided to apply the voronoi design to one petal and then multiply it. After implementing the grasshopper code, a parametric voronoi petal that I could manipulate was generated. Once I had a design I liked, I brought it into Cura where I multiplied it and created a flower base. I did the same thing for the leaves. For the voronois design, I had to make it thicker than I would have liked as the petals and leaves were a bit too thin for Cura to print with the initial design.

I printed out a few variations of the flower base I created and then glued them together to create the three dimensional flowers. I attached a cylinder to the leaves so that I could connect them to the stems. I remember in our project review that one of my classmates talked about how she took her 3d printed bracelet and put it around her wrist right when it was done printing so that it would be curled when it cooled off. I thought this was a great idea for my petals and leaves so that I didn't have to print them with support. After the leaves and petals were printed, I heated up the bed to 60 degrees celsius to make the plastic warm. I then quickly took them off the bed and curled them using my hands to give them a more lifelike look to them. This worked great! I then glued the pistil inside the flowers!

I knew that the flowers I printed were not going to look as amazing as Joshua Harker's, but I really loved the way they turned out. It was great trying to test ways in which I could generate the voronoi petals and leaves and using unconventional ways like curling them after they were printed was a lot of fun! As I printed the flowers in parts, I didn't know how they would turn out, but after gluing them together I really loved them!

The stems took the longest to create as I went to using an L system to a 3d population system to using pipes. I didn't know exactly how I wanted them to look like so it took some renderings and printing to find a design that I really loved and that worked with the designs of the flowers and leaves. The voronoi design on the petals and leaves took a bit of time to figure out as well as I wasn't sure how to apply it to curved surfaces. Once everything was printed out and put together, I thought it looked amazing and I love having it by my bedside!

As my terrarium wasn't put together with the plexiglass, I couldn't plant the moss in there in which the 3d printed flowers would be held by. I placed them in the voronoi pot I printed earlier and thought it looked really nice with it so it worked out.