Program jumping - 01 revised

The next phase of the project involved re interpreting the existing panel. After photographing the first panel and talking with Matias, it seemed the project could address the issues of structure and light with the idea that one side of the panel would be perforated to influence the articulation of the surface conditions on the other side. After watching countless processing tutorials I stumbled upon a script that would interpret the pixels in an image based on their color value. I photographed the first panel and inverted the image to reverse the conditions of light on the what was already milled.

The processing script, which I apparently cannot post because 2.0 doesn't support libraries or produce an applet when exported, reads white as high and black as low. As you move your mouse in the y direction down your screen the more drastic the pixels pop or push away from you. Basically an interactive height field. Here is a rhino screen shot of the meshes extracted from the processing script from the pixels.

Once I had these meshes I extracted the points and used rhino to make a mesh. It was quite jagged...

So I took it into Maya to smooth it out. This created some errors in the mesh and made the mesh enormous. So I then took it to Magics, which I had never used before and is quite nice. Fixed it up, brought it back into rhino and ran a drape to give me the final surface. I used a grasshopper script to generate a series of points based on the inverted image's dark areas. I then milled the final surface.

I used a 1/2" ball bit to smooth out the surface even more...on second thought maybe I could have just done that with the original surface that was jagged and smoothed it out that way. Whoops. Maybe mastercam wouldn't have accepted the file, I'm just going to think that. Some pictures of the finished surface. Pretty ugly and fascinating.