Hello and welcome to the Art Fabrication (ArtFab) Facilities at Carnegie Mellon University.
ArtFab is located in the D-level of Doherty Hall (DH). ArtFab supports artistic research and creation with digital fabrication, electronics, interactivity, kinetics, textiles, and sound. The studio consists of a Shop and a Lab. ArtFab Shop (DH D200) is a 2500-square-foot studio for fabrication tools with mixed media. The Shop includes a CNC Router, welding and plasma cutting facilities, metal working tools, steam bending, mold making and casting. ArtFab Lab (DH C300) is a 700-square-foot physical computing studio with tools and materials for robotics, sound installation and soft sculpture.
We propose a complete system for designing, simulating, and fabricating surfaces with shading due to self-occlusion that induce desired input images. Our work is based on a simple observation. Consider a cylindrical hole (a pit) in a planar surface. As the depth of the hole increases, the radiance emitted from the surface patch that contains the hole decreases. This is because more light is trapped and absorbed in the hole. First, we propose a measurement-based approach that derives a mapping between average albedo of the surface patch containing the hole and the hole depth. Given this mapping and an input image, we show how to produce a distribution of holes with varied depth that approximates the image well. We demonstrate that by aligning holes with image features we can obtain reproductions that look better than those resulting from regular hole patterns – despite using slightly less holes. We validate this method on a variety of images and corresponding surfaces fabricated with a computer-controlled milling machine and a 3D printer.
Pablo Garcia, a CMU architecture professor, did a project in which he programmed the CNC machine to redraw 12 drawings of drawing machines. For more info here is the link.
The aim of this work is to bring the cultural heritage of two-dimensional art closer to being accessible by blind and visually impaired people. We present a computer-assisted workflow for the creation of tactile representations of paintings, suitable to be used as a learning tool in the context of guided tours in museums or galleries. Starting from high-resolution images of original
paintings, our process allows an artist to quickly design the desired form, and generate data suitable for rapid prototyping machines to produce the physical touch tools. Laser-cut layered depth diagrams convey not only the individual objects in the painting and their spatial layout, but also augment their depth relations. CNC-milled textured reliefs additionally render fine
details like brush strokes and texture suitable for the sense of touch. Our methods mimic aspects of the visual sense, make sure that the haptic output is quite faithful to the original paintings, and do not require special manual abilities like sculpting skills.
This system uses an elevated piece of material in the bed of a normal laser cutter. It cuts and heats to folds until it is in the desired form. Then the piece comes out already assembled.
With the design and construction of more and more unusually shaped buildings, the computer graphics community has started to explore new methods to reduce the cost of the physical construction for large shapes. Most of currently suggested methods focus on reduction of the number of differently shaped components to reduce fabrication cost. In this work, we focus on physical construction using developable components such as thin metals or thick papers. In practice, for developable surfaces fabrication is economical even if each component is different. Such developable components can be manufactured fairly inexpensively by cutting large sheets of thin metals or thin paper using laser-cutters, which are now widely available.
I’ve been looking for something like this for the longest time and I stumbled upon on it today looking for something else. This makes me quite happy that there actually is official documentation for RhinoCam. Its a little lengthy but it explains most of the bizarre things in RhinoCam that aren’t the most intuitive functions.
We present a system for semi-automatic creation of bas-relief sculpture. As an artistic medium, relief spans the continuum between 2D drawing or painting and full 3D sculpture. Bas-relief (or low relief) presents the unique challenge of squeezing shapes into a nearly-flat surface while maintaining as much as possible the perception of the full 3D scene. Our solution to this problem adapts methods from the tone-mapping literature, which addresses the similar problem of squeezing a high dynamic range image into the (low) dynamic range available on typical display devices. However, the bas-relief medium imposes its own unique set of requirements, such as maintaining small, fixed-size depth discontinuities. Given a 3D model,camera, and a few parameters describing the relative attenuation of different frequencies in the shape, our system creates a relief that gives the illusion of the 3D shape from a given vantage point while
conforming to a greatly compressed height.
The master (bottom board) and a single slave (top board) allows for stereo high quality wireless audio transmission from a sound source, to a remote x3pi robot.
