Recent research with 3D printing has come some way with devising an analog for fabric, its effects and applications. Much of this is due to the chain-mail effect, where sockets, or rings around each other that would be manually difficult to create and regulate, are printed with high precision such that material is both continuous, wraps around its neighbours, and is locally independent. This may not be ideal for printing on something like a desktop pinter where removing support material that seperate the rings would be difficult, but more applicable to industrial scale printers.
What I was curious about was seeing what the limits of the material and its geometry would be in the context of creating warpable surfaces in ways other than the chain-mail method. How thin and porous would it need to be? What do ridges do for it? How does flexible filament perform? This was maybe less than successful given the fidelity of desktop printers and the demans i put on it to cantilever without supports. I did a test of a more porous and less porous version with regular filament, and the same with flexible filament.
I think in the end I became more aroused by the porosity definition I generated, and wanted to just see this in application on different base geometries. In the end i used the zcorp to try out some of these larger tests, and the Universal for the large sheet to test the warpability one more time.
The definition is pretty simple given the intensity of its results I subdivide a surface into faces, extrude every other face alone opposite normal to the surface to create a checkering. this extrusion i suncapped and creates the impression of a single surface continuity between all its neighbours through a mesh relaxaiton process with weaverbird.
Great thing about this is it's fleixble for lots of surface types and so I could easily push out a bunch of iterations on different types.
3D Scanning with the Sense didn't work for me. At first I tried my glasses - reflections are of course made it difficult to accomplish. What i heard about later is i could have gotten better results by covering them in a powder to help make it more diffuse. My face didn't work either till i used the 123 catch which still left gaping views into the back of my head.
