MAT 238: Final Project
Introduction: MAT 238: Final Project
For my final project for this course, I decided to make a wine bottle rack that could hold multiple wine bottles.
Step 1: Motivation and Inspiration
For my final project, I wanted to create something that I would be able to use outside of the classroom and related to something I enjoy. While brainstorming final project ideas, I thought about various hobbies that I enjoy and things I do in my free time. I explored the idea of designing a guitar stand, but quickly realized that it require either some sort of press fit kit to be as tall as the guitar, or a wall mounted design that would be able to hold a guitar's weight. Another potential idea was designing a bottle opener, but this required incorporating a lot of physics and leveraging techniques. Because I really wanted to focus on the actual design of my object, I decided against these two ideas and decided on making a wine bottle rack. While exploring some interesting looking wine bottle designs, I found a set of designs that looked like wave-like structures and starting using them as inspiration for my own project design.
Step 2: Preliminary Designs and Experimentation
For some of my preliminary designs, I first explored a simple replicated curve that was connected at its ends. I also measured the diameter of a wine bottle and created a dimensionally accurate cylinder (without the converging top to the bottle cork) to represent my bottle. However, I quickly abandoned this design because I found it hard to creatively develop and expand. I felt as though if I proceeded with this structure, the only way to make it interesting would be to add a parametric surface. Instead of doing this, I decided to restart and see what I could make with a closed curve.
For my next potential design, I first generated a symmetric curve about touching the y-axis. Once I had this design, I mirrored it across the YZ plane and created a nice closed curve. Once I had a singular curve I wanted to explore, I offset, extruded, and duplicated it to create a set of geometries that could fit four wine bottles. Next, I again decided to duplicate this object, but this time, I moved it back along the y-axis and rotated it 90 degrees to be vertical. 668
I thought this structure was interesting, but I again had "writer's block" and couldn't think of ways to develop it further besides duplicating and rotating it. Further, I didn't quite like how the object looked from the Front view, since the horizontal and vertical designs didn't appear symmetric and complimentary from this angle.
Finally, I experimented with a design that would hold bottles from two different ends, connected by a small pipe in the middle. I did this using the Loft functions between a set of displaced circular curves and offsetting the surfaces to create a cup like geometry. Using this as a starting point, I then duplicated, moved, and rotated the object 90 degrees to be able to hold 4 different bottles. However, after some feedback, I realized that this design was too simple in a sense, and did not demonstrate my skillset that I learned throughout the quarter.
Step 3: Wave-Like Structures
After several road blocks in design from my rapid prototyping experimentation, I decided to refocus on the wave-like patterns I used for my wine bottle idea inspiration. With this in mind, I looked into different ways of creating wave-like structures in Grasshopper/Rhino. Throughout my exploration, I found this very neat GH component, CrvWavePoints, that creates a wave like structure on a curve. I spent some time experimenting with the parameters of this component, and was able to generate some very interesting patterns on curves.
In order to tie it back to my wine bottle holder, I first created a list of circles with increasing radii throughout the list. Using this set of circle curves, I then applied the CrvWavePoints component to create waves along each of the circles (and a nice resting spot for a wine bottle). Using these wavey, circular curves, I used the Pipe component to transform the curves into tubes. Once I had this basic wave-like design with pipes, I created some number sliders to see how the waves and object as a whole could be could be changed.
I created sliders that could modify the number of initial circles, the radii of the initial list of circles, the height displacement between two initial circles, the number of periodic waves that were created, the amplitude of the waves, and the radii of the pipes. Using these parameters, I was able to experiment with a bunch of different designs throughout my entire development and debugging phases.
Step 4: Wine Bottle Holder
Once I created a layer of wave-like pipes, I duplicated, moved, and rotated them to create different layers and openings. I ensured the trough of one wave intersected with the peak of another to create the largest possible opening for the holder. 668