Week 1 - Computer-Aided Design

For my final project, I wanted to do some mechanism that helps reconcile long distances, read emotions and display them to someone else wirelessly. As an international student who has been living away from home for 8+ years and is also in a long-distance relationship, I know that video calls and text messages help a lot in keeping up to date with each other, but there’s still a gap in conveying the spontaneous demonstrations of feelings possible when living with someone. I wanted to do a crossover between mood rings and a crystal ball, that helps in communicating how you’re feeling to someone away.

My project is called CRYSTAL: Communicating Remote Yearnings Sentiments Through Aura Lights

As part of the assignment for the first week, we were supposed to create a render of this possible final project. I wanted to try to familiarize myself with an animation/3D rendering tool before I had the details to create a technical drawing of my project, so I decided to try out Blender. Following this beginner tutorial on youtube, I was able to create my own version of a crystal ball, with an illuminated/smoky interior.

Updates

On the actual construction of my crystal ball, I had the base 3D printed in Black Resing using the Formlabs printer, and its shape had sharp spirals that were designed in Fusion 360 in a similar way to my twisted pumpkin from Week 4. Below you can see how my 3D model looked.

Files for this week can be found here