Week 16 - Wildcard Week
Assignment
Design and produce something with a digital fabrication process (incorporating computer-aided design and manufacturing) not covered in another assignment, documenting the requirements that your assignment meets, and including everything necessary to reproduce it.
Process
Digitally fabricated origami, kirigami and pop-ups
I always liked origami and various works made out of paper, but was never really good at making them because essentially I’m a bit clumsy and not very prone to arts and crafts, furthermore I always forget the steps to accomplish when I’m midway of folding and cutting. But after checking Astrid Lubsen’s final project I was intrigued by seeing how she achieved certain origami-like works using a laser cutter as if it were a diecutter. This was indeed a very curious way of working both with paper and laser cutter - with many possibilities that we haven’t covered yet in our lab - and I’ve decided to give it a try to see if I was able to produce something unexpected.
Another resource that I found really inspiring and useful is the impressive Origami Simulator by MIT CBA student Amanda Ghassei. This interesting platform provided me plenty of ready-made files to test and a general understanding of how achieve certain results from a plain sheet of paper.
Testing the laser cutter with paper
I had at my disposal a ream of cardboard paper wheighing 250mg/sm and even though it is not the canonical paper used for origami and such I thought it could be very handy for this project. But right before even thinking about what to cut I had to make several test with the laser cutter on this kind of material, to see what could be the best parameter for my experiment.
Just like I would with any other material, I set up several different speed and power settings on our laser cutter control software and drawn a grid of short lines following these different settings.
In this way I was able to test more that a dozen cut at the same time and compare them.
In the end, I figured out that a good bending while mantaining a certain resistance was obtained with the following paratemers:
Power: 20Speed: 10Hz: 1000
There were other values surroundings these ones that also gave seemingly good results and could become the benchmark for future experiments.
To properly test the result of my first cut, I’ve chosen a very simple folding pattern from the Origami Simulator and downloaded its svg file.
Once opened the file in Illustrator, all I did was to resize the lines width to 0.001 mm and changing their color to the one I set up in the machine.
This few steps were enough to slightly cut the surface of the cardbord and make precise traces over it. The result was good enough to get an easy and intuitive to fold piece of paper exactly like the one I wanted.
The paper texture looked nice and the cuts didn’t compromise its strength. It was time to get more ambitious.
Initial results
Still on the Origami Simulator, I found a very interesting pattern called Myamoto Tower. Precisely, it is a kirigami, meaning an object crafted both by bending and cutting the paper, and it was perfect for a new test.
This pattern required a bit more detailed work, but essentially the steps can be summarized as follows:
- 1: I downladed the svg file and opened it on Adobe Illustrator
- 2: I removed all the unnecessary lines (Origami Simulator renders yellow lines for its own purpose that are totally useless for the physical object)
- 3: I colored all the cutting lines with the same hue and all the folding lines with another hue (according to the color specification of the laser cutter control software). This task was heavily simplified by the
Select -> Same Stroke Colorfunction, since the svg file already comes with cutting and folding lines colors sorted (please, note, that some segments’ opacity might not be at 100%. Collectively adjust it or the drawing might not be accepted by the laser cutter). Then I resized all the lines width to0.001 mm.
The file was ready and once flashed to the cutter it was just a matter of folding along the traced lines to get my good-looking paper tower.
If I were to this object all by hand, not only I would have spent a lot of time (the whole cut didn’t require more than a minute) but I’m sure that I would have rip, soiled and badly bent the paper with my unskilled hands.
Driven by enthusiasm, I took another svg - this time of the pop-up drawing of a house - and followed the same step.
In 2 minutes flat I had in my hand a fully functional pop-up house.
Even though these results might be good-looking and astounding, I knew that in fact they were not facing a great challenge from many perspectives. First of all, I was realzing patterns that skilled craftes would deem easy to conceive and and not so difficult to realize, furthermore the laser cutter could achieve much more interesting results if only I used with some more elasticity.
The proof of these supposition arose when I tried to realize a more intricated but still basic origami shape called Frog Base which - as opposed to all the other ones already done - requires to perform non-trivial foldings on both sides of the sheet
Following the same procedure and with result in my hands, it came immediately obvious that without some basic instruction I would never be able to fold the origami the way it was meant and that having the cuts done only on one side of the paper it was almost impossible to intuitively approach the piece of paper and not wearing it a lot.
The lame picture above testifies these procedural flaws that essentially remind of my initial shortcomings in making origamis. There were still few more tricks I could apply in order to get more decent result and prove that this techniques have a bit of validity if properly done.
Improvements and usability
After facing these issues, I realized that the best way to approach this work was to actually consider the techniques involved in paper crafts and thought that the best way to make folds on both sides on the paper was to use the laser cutter on both sides too.
That’s why I divided the drawing in two parts, one for the front and one for the rear, and saved them on two different svg files. This time I used Inskscape instead of Illustrator for no particular reason at all, it was just already open on my pc.
Once again, the Origami Simulator platform came very in handy, since in its exported files it already differentiate front and rear folding lines.
On the rear, I also added the final cutting line.
Still inspired by the origami techniques, I also decided to add to front side of the sheet a series of full and broken lines in correspondence of the frontward and backword folds (in the lingo, they’re called respectively Mountain and Valley folds).
In my intention this lines would assist even more the preparation of the origami and costed me less than five minutes to prepare a new svg file and make a test with the laser cutter for the proper engraving parameters
Since I was dealing with different cuts on the same material I had to use a simple trick in order to align all the operations accordingly. First of all I made a light pencil mark on the center of my sheet, then I would locate the reference laser spot of the machine over it. At the same time, on the laser cutter control software I would align the center of my drawing on the indicator of the laser spot.
After the first cut, I re-aligned the laser spot and the drawing center once again and in in this way, I was sure that my first two cuts would be precisely overlapped.
For the rear cut, I did the same thing. I marked the center of the sheet and aligned the cutter and drawing on it, resulting in a cut perfectly matched with the one on the front.
After cutting its border, the resulting piece of paper was lovely to see and practical to handle.
Result
It was really easy and intuitive to fold properly the origami, without following any precise instruction or step, making me think that this kind of preparation could be really useful both for people origami-agnostic like me or people with motor-fineness impairment.
The final result was both robust and practical without renouncing to the typical elegance of origamis.
In the following links it’s possible to download the SVG files used to preparee it:
Gist & Further development
Finding a proper technique can make every product easy to understand and accessibile. Origamis, kirigamis and pop-ups will always have a degree of manual and intellectual complexity, but in my intentions there was no urge to debunk such aspects (which actually are what the masters of this arts love to face) and actually I just wanted to find a way to make them more interesting and easy to approach.
Again, all that I’ve done is limited to really easy examples and my techniques surely should be adapted and stretched in order to get more complex patterns. However, dealing with digital fabrication, I can easily figure out ways to implement even more articulated results by involving other techniques such as electronics, inflatables and programming.
Tools and software used
- Adobe Illustrator
- Inkscape
- 250mg/m2 paper
- JobControl
- Trotect Speedy400
- My own hands
Update 19/06/2018
My instructor suggested that I could use the same technique for something more complicated and meaningful, like the papercrafts made through softwares such as Pepakura Designer.
Actually, I had in my pocket something useful for this task since some time. Once I gifted to my son a papercraft mask made by graphic designer Steve Wintercroft. These are models made to look similar to low polygons 3D renderings.
The mask I bought came bundled with few PDFs of other compositions and I never found the time or the fancy to print them, cut them and assemble them (and, again: I’m a bit clumsy with arts and crafts and always feared to glue my hands together or something).
This was the perfect occasion to test the diecutting skill of the laser cutter, so I started to adapt the pdf of a velociraptor head mask to what I what I needed.
I fed the laser cutter with the svg files of the first piece over the same kind of paper and the result seemed promising.
Wintercroft goes to an extra-length and in all of its creations puts numbers, mountain and valley lines, and other graphical fiducials. I opted to leave them in the result as engravings since they would have indeed helped me in the production of the mask.
The mask I chose consisted of elements arranged over 11 A4 sheets. Adapting all of them was indeed a much more demanding work, but once done it is here to stay.
The only cautions I had to foresee were given by the fact that the image were not symmetrical and center-aligned, so for each page I had to consider carefully the offset from front to rear otherwise the result would have been compromised.
After some redesigning and cutting, I had in front of me all the necessary pieces to craft my raptor head.
After 30-ish minutes of folding and glueing this was the result…
… ready to be used for pre-historical re-enactments, fancy parties and gorgeous show bust customizations.
Unfortunately, I cannot publish the working file for the laser cutter since the original template are protected by copyright and, although modified, posting my versions would result in a violation.
Update 30/06/2018
Prompted to make and craft my own design I came up with the idea of rendering something I modeled some time ago. I wanted to recreate a LEGO lookalike of the iconic helmet by the band Devo, called Energy Dome. So I realized a proportion-correct replica on OnShape with the size apt for a LEGO figure and printed it, but since it was a really small object I never obtained good results.
Here’s the link to the OnShape model:
I thought of trying to make a papercraft one, so I adapted the model and exported it as an STL with a Coarse resolution setting. This is because the Energy Dome is essentially a round shape, hence difficult to reproduce on papercraft, so lowering the number of polygons of the model I would obtain a more suitable file.
I automatically generated a DXF file from the STL with the help of the software Pepakura Designer, which automatically creates papercraft models complete with tabs and differentiated folding lines.
On Adobe Illustrator I adapted the design to my laser cutter setting and flashed it to the machine.
The result was not so astounding, because I resized improperly the DXF file generating very small lines of cut (the overall dimensions are less that few cm). The result is precise and complete, but almost impossible to work with since the tabs are too small and my hands too clumsy.
I’ll surely try to make new one with the design resized and arranged over several sheets, but before I have to buy more cardboard paper…
Here’s the link to the working files:
