The entire model was modelled with grasshopper and sliced into individual pieces in rhino. Big thanks to @Quan_Li for helping me with the model! The top part of the sphere has a flat piece with a hole that fits the lamp socket.
The spike sphere was 3D printed with a BambuLab P1P, PLA filament, 0.2mm layer height. I managed to print 6 of the spikes per plate, each plate taking around 5h to print.
The individual “spikes” are connected via 5mm diameter wood pins that fit tightly into the small holes on the sides. No gluing necessary.
I don’t have a tutorial on how to do it. This was one of the first project I did in rhino & grasshopper, so I’m not really capable of doing a tutorial myself at this stage.
But the general idea is to create a simple mesh (in my case a dodecahedron) and convert the mesh to sub-d. So quite simple actually. I presume you could also use any other catmull-clark subdivision component instead of the sub-d conversion (i.e. the one from weaverbird) to get this “smooth” form.
Here is the dodecahedron mesh with the added spikes, which are just triangular pipes:
Make sure the mesh is valid before trying to convert it to sub-d, otherwise the conversion will not work. To check if the mesh is valid, you can bake it and then use the check command in rhino.
. Really glad to see something I am part of becomes reality! Thank you!
