Midterm Project: The Screem

Feb 25, 2016

Phase 1: Idea

The idea of this project is to make a 3D version of those old oil painting in wood and we decided to start with "The Scream" by Edvard Munch.

We traced the original oil painting in Illustrator. Here is the draft showing how we will divide the layers.

Phase 2: Prototype

However, we soon realized that the lines of the draft is too rough and they cannot be cut as whole pieces because many of they are closed separately. So later we spent a lot of time on modifying the lines in order to make them smoother and make sure they are all connected to each other.

Our fist prototype was done in card paper by vinyl cutter. It has three hollow layers with a background box on the bottom.

In our first version, we had the face of the man on a separate layer. It was very hard to adhere them to the head, especially for the nose. In fact, it looks better if we just cut off the face from the head. We made our second version.

Card paper is an excellent material for prototyping. It is cheap and quick to put together. It also makes easier to "debug" the design. Especially when we were tearing the paper from the cutting mat, we were able to tell which part of the paper is weak, so that we can go back to our design and make the lines thicker.

Phase 3: Laser Cutting

After finish the paper prototype, we switch the material to wood board and start to work on the laser cutter.

During the process of making our first wooden version, we found several challenging point on our material.

The wood board we got from Prince Lumber is not as thick as it labelled, which caused the vertical pieces unable to stand. We need to manually measure the thickness and change the size of the holes.

We noticed that some part of the board couldn’t get cut through even if we do double cut for every line. And we found that’s because the board is flat and even if we tape the wood board to the bed, it still pops up a little bit in the middle. Therefore the laser beam is not always focused on the material, which is pretty frustrating.

Wood version one looks like this.

Later, we started to etch the textures to the wood. We made different texture to every single layer, so it gives you a slight difference depends on the perspective you are looking from.

We tested the different settings for raster etching, and it seems brighten works better than standard for our project.

We also learned that 600dpi takes a significant amount of time to etch. (However it deserves for better result!)

CNC?

Ideally we want our project to be CNCed with a thicker board, and the texture to have a depth. Like this ↓ ↓

However, for some reason our model file can not be recognized successfully by MasterCam and we ran out of time. We will try it again in future projects.

Final Phase: the Product

Some minor changes from the previous one:
Refined the lines and textures for each layer, especially for those parts that are easy to break.
Changed the holes on the frame to left and right in order to make it stands better.
All pieces are glue together by wood glue.

It does look like a framed painting!

Ideas for future versions

Moving pieces; Mechanism; Colored textures; Lighting and staging