Week 6: Clay Tray

I decided to use SketchPath to created a functional 3D clay object that I could eat or drink out of, and I ended up using the tool many different times in order to understand how to use the tool and experiment with types of designs before I ended up choosing my final one to print. Once I finalized my design, I built a base slab by hand and printed my design on top of it in order to get a clay tray. I added finishing touches with carving tools at the end to clean up the design

Above are three examples of ideas I experimented with in SketchPath. My first design consisted of me mostly moving around the mouse (as I did not have a stylus) and pressing buttons and seeing what happened. After seeing my final output, I scrapped it and tried to design a detailed vase with a base and many layers on SketchPath. However, I quickly learned that I wasn't supposed to use SketchPad that way (and my computer crashed too), so I tried a third time to design with the software by going through the dots. That worked slightly, and I kept playing with that design.

I further experimented with layers, height, rotations/scale/transformations, and I began to play with mirroring in order to create more pronounced and symmetric designs. I really enjoyed mirroring since it made the designs, which were mostly freehanded with my mouse, appear cleaner. I also liked that baking a rotation/scale/transformation quickly altered the design and raised the height without creating too much separation from the previous layer, which was an issue I ran into while free-handing.

I eventually ended up with my proposed final vase, but when I showed it to the instructional staff on Friday, we decided not to print it because it was likely the vase would fail since many of the layers were too far from each other (I had done a lot of scaling, and I realized I should have put less gap between layers).

I ended up printing this design, which I made with mirroring and adding a 1 degree rotation every 5 layers, as it was more likely to succeed in the printer since the layers were close together. The design resembles a tray, and I thought it was pretty, so I gave it for printing.

Before I started the print, I created a base for my tray by kneading together clay with water and the rolling pin. I realized when looking at my GCode that my design was very large, so I made sure to create a base slab that would cover basically the whole bed. When I gave my design for printing, it printed well except for the fact that one of my edges of my tray was too close to the edge (so the clay began to fall off). Consequently, we pushed the bed back, and we decided to scrape/smoothen the extra pieces afterward. Once we fixed that, the print ran smoothly and only took a couple of minutes.

Attached are images of my final tray. I used carving tools along with my fingers to smoothen out areas of the tray where clay had piled up. Afterward, I let it dry! I did not like that when I gave a slight bit of pressure to the walls in order to attach a piece of clay to its interior, the walls would lose their line texture. Similarly, when I was cutting out my excess portion of my base, I noticed that the edges of the tray were smooth rather than filled with lines, and I would love to learn how to maintain the same texture throughout when starting a print with a base slab.

I really enjoyed printing with clay since both the design software (SketchPath) and the clay itself were very malleable. I liked that I could quickly prototype many designs with SketchPath and smoothen my clay tray to my liking after it was printed. I would love to experiment more with more complex textures (beyond lines) in the future, but I am curious if SketchPath can be used for that as well (or if it is good for any other outside textures beyond lines). The 1 degree offset came out really pretty, and I would love to further experiment with rotations and geometry in the future.