Ceramic printing wave pattern

Grasshopper
1

Hello all,
I am an architecture student who is interested in ceramic printing. I am trying t create a similar pattern with the image attached

IMG_4300 (1)
IMG_4300 (1)827×797 161 KB

So far I was able to get the curves but unable to join them together. I hope I can get help from y’all

Here is my definition:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1UvnfE9A_KV_KcRD8w6M99YZ1SdO8VJEa?usp=sharing

Thank you for your time

1 Like
2

Hey Le,

Added a few more components to get it to join. When I’ve been working with extruders/robots/3d printers, especially more hands-on ones, I’ve always found it helpful to think of the tool-path not as curves but as a series of A → B points (or planes). Can help with problems like this where you don’t necessarily need to join the curves but just reorder the points…

Anyway, hope that is helpful.

image
image1225×760 38.1 KB

wave_pattern-ns (2).gh (19.5 KB)

1 Like
3

What is the source for your toolpath definition? Non-clay FDM printers generate the end effector tool path by using a slicing program that reads in an STL file definition of the part to be printed and outputs the GCode commands required to print it. That’s what I’d recommend you do, but you’ll have to set your layer height to the thickness of the material stream your end effector emits. Based on your photo it looks like the layer height is slightly less than the diameter of the extruded ceramic material.

Assuming your printer runs from a GCode script, if I were going to print this shape using your printer (it must be a pretty fancy machine) I’d do it like this:

  1. Make a single 2D closed curve that has the number of wiggles you want each horizontal loop to have. (Circle 1, Circle 2 offset from Circle 1 by the distance of a wiggle. divide each by the number of wiggles per loop, make an Interpolated curve C1 by using alternate points from each circle.)
  2. Make C2 by rotating it’s peaks to coincide with the valleys of C1.
  3. Move C2 up by the thickness of your printed layer.
  4. Scale CI & C2 to the various diameters your final shape requires, then move each pair to the appropriate height.
  5. Make a Loft from #4, export that as an STL file, and run it through a slicer specifying Vase Mode and a layer height defined as above.

Of course none of this will work if you have to generate your printer’s motion commands yourself or by some other way.

4

Here is a tutorial we wrote, with a template that can be used directly, specifically for ceramic 3D printing: https://www.eazao.com/blog/ceramic-3d-printing-with-grasshopper/