Vinyl cutting tree sprits
Kodama - japenese tree spirits - have been popularized is western culture by Hayao Miyazaki's Princess Mononoke. They have also been a popular hello world design for the vinyl cutter because they are relatively easy to cut and are cute as hell. I've been obsessed with kodama for a while now, and have made it my mission to plaster them all over the world. We even made an instagram documenting urban tree spirits (just as kodama symbolize the health of the forest, UTS represent the health of urban ecologies).
I started with a gif from reddit (left), then did an Image Trace in Illustrator to convert from raster to vector. Then I cut 100s of kodama which I have distributing to everyone I can.
The next step is a digital kodama QR code that links the digital and physical and gives people a way to learn more about the project once they see the stickers around town
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Manufacturing geodesics with a laser cutter
For laser cutting, I focused on geodesics. Using domerama, I calculated the number of triangles and their dimensions. Using Illustrator, I made a vector sketch of these triangles as well as a simple joint mechanism involving circles that interlock with divets.
When assembling this dome, it became clear that the joints I used were not going to provide the necessary structure. They still have an axis of wiggling, which made assembling quite difficult.
Ultimately, I had to use hot glue in order to get the dome to fit together. The final result was pretty, but left me hungry to iterate and figure out a better joint mechanism.
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Onwards to better tooling and a glueless dome...
Next, I modeled a geodesic in Fushion 360 with help from this tutorial. I sketched a lot of different join mechanisms before settling on I thought would hold. The joint I used is similar to the first one, but has teeth that allow to click into the triangles, and removes the axis of wiggling.
The cutting and assembly process took a while because the final geodome was larger than expected.
The final results held without glue, and was so weight bearing that I was able to hang it from a wire embedded in a single trangle.
