Assignment 5 Part 1: Reverse Engineered Object

 And here it begins. The progress, the great work.

I don't have a lot of deconstructable items in my home. The ones that are deconstructable are usually valuable to me or my parents, so I spent a lot of time trying to find unique items that also weren't too complex or too simple. I am pretty indecisive even for simple choices so it took a bit of hemming and hawing before I finally decided on just modelling... a pen.

Admittedly it is a pretty nice pen.

Initially, I was cowed by the prospect of making an entire pen model, especially when I was late on the project in general. Nevertheless, I knew it was my duty to sit down and finish the work. It wasn't especially complicated, I told myself; it was just a matter of figuring out the tools I had to use.



So, I began work by making simple shapes. I measured my pen components, and prepared tubes that would act as the base of shapes for the parts...


And then it occurred to me. Why was I making tubes when I could just use the Revolve tool?

Immediately I jumped into another course of action; making pictures that could be traced! And then this didn't work because I realized I was working in a file using centimetres, not millimetres, which really would have been more appropriate. But lo and behold, as soon as I moved into working in millimetres, my project became much easier.


Above is the "inner connector" between the point of the pen and the rest of the body, and the polyline I used to revolve it. From there, I created a cylinder shape with very specific measurements to use Boolean difference on the insides of the connector. I also did this with the cap and the connector between the inkwell and nib.

Oddly, the most painful part of the modelling process was the pen's nib cap. Rhino's Taper tool is not very good, and seems to struggle to allow your cursor to settle on anywhere near the spine of a cylindrical shape. Thus, the nib cap possesses a slight curvature, until I can figure out a smarter way to model it.



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