The Design
I stuck with the mock-up pair of glasses I had submitted to the Glarce Academy competition in the end. They aren't the most complex design but I considered to myself that sunglasses are tricky to make nail from a design perspective, too far away from the norm and you end up looking like an oddball. It's a bit of a shame society works like that but oh well.
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| This is the lame boss extrude I submitted to the comp. As if I didn't get nominated, right??? |
So in spite of my decision to keep things simple, i was a bit disappointed with my boring design after seeing some work from my classmates, but next time...
Issues
Now, the only relatively complex part of my design were the nose pads. I wanted them to be an extension of the glasses frame. Wrapping my head around how to do this was a nightmare. The amount of hidden surfaces in my final Solidworks part is shameful... But! I did get there in the end.. Kind of.
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| nose pads after 3 mental breakdowns. |
The outside and inside profiles of the pads were sublime, I couldn't have asked for anything more of the solidworks god. The profile that ran between them however, had many imperfections in curvature. I ended up using a lofted surface using the inside and outside edges of the rim as guide curves. This left a horrendously ugly flat zone behind the bridge.
Regardless, when it finally lofted, I smiled and it was good.
I also had issues exploding one of my sub assemblies. I used the same function to attempt to explode the sub assembly within the exploded main assembly, but to no avail. Perhaps because the assembly was mirrored? I'm not sure but it made me sad. And probably made you cringe when you saw my incomplete exploded view. You probably thought, "This shmuck forgot to exploded the arm hinge out". But it's not true! I mean, I am a shmuck, but I didn't forget.
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| Here's the sub assembly exploding in it's on file |
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| Here it is again as a stubborn teenager. |
A HEADING
Okay so here's my embarrassing head from last assignment.
I know, it's not a flattering angle, but trust me, it really is a piece of shit. Can I swear hear? I guess so, it's my blog, my internet space. Swearing isn't banned online, not yet anyway. I wonder if you guys read all the blogs all the way through... I suppose you would. Oh well I'm not going to delete that anyway. After this horrible attempt, I did some googling and found a video of a guy who did it with boundary surfaces. HE didn't do it, rather he was just showing a solidworks part off which someone else had made. A part which he didn't post a link to despite all 5 of the comments on his video asking for it. Anyway, I gave the method me best crack and ended up with this interesting shape:
Which doesn't look so bad at first glance, however, under further investigation, he does kind of look like a piñata at a 5th birthday in mexico. I used many many profiles to try smooth out the dents but I think I was just making it worse. This bad boy used at least 24 sketches to get here. I wasn't happy so I tried again.
Ooooh baby, there's the money shot. Well, it's not bad. I only used 6 profiles in total to boundary surface this one. I really did want to model the nose and eyes into the single surface but I settled for this which turned out okay. It at least looks like it could pass as a lively and healthy Extra Terrestrial. A humanoid Extra Terrestrial that is.
It was a relief to finally provide a good headjob.
Animation
The animation was actually pretty fun and I had little to no issues. Probably because I didn't try anything fancy. There's a moment when you can see the glasses case and glasses in the reflection of my copper plated head. That's because I have no idea how to create a new scene while keeping what was already "recorded" unaffected. Here's a gif of it hopefully:
Oh good it works. Good on you Google, I was ready to move to wordpress.
Goodbye, Again
I think i learnt some valuable new skills in this assignment, particularly the raw unlimited power of the boundary surface function.
It might even have helped me with my nose pad dilemma, who knows? Probably the person reading this i guess.
I think i have greatly improved with my solidworks ability over this semester and I'd like to thank Dan and Katie (who ever reads this tell the other person) for guiding me to this (hopefully) steady position of Credit average.
Okay I better sign off here. I've been up 25 hours and I still need to do the presentation board.
Katie/Dan, plus whoever the random extra viewers of my blog are, peace out, don't forget your towel and have a great break.- L Timpani
