Concept
Going into this project I knew I wanted to incorporate all of the new sculpting techniques that we had learned in the previous week. I also knew I wanted more than just implied motion along the x-axis. Below you can see a Jamboard that I drew a couple of weird shapes on to see what kind of forms I wanted to sculpt. The shape that I was most interested in creating is the triangle maze form at the bottom of the Jamboard. I envisioned having this interesting back and forth path t hat would form an isosceles triangle, the path would start at the top point winding up to form the final edge, and I wanted to try and make the whole the thing a gradual incline (you’ll see how this turned out).
Iteration
When trying to create the forms that would make up my object I decided to start with my winding triangle form, which turned out to be my most complex and most difficult shape. I started off with making a sketch of a triangle so that I could make sure I was fitting the path inside the triangle correctly. In the end the shape ended being changed to a a completely different triangle form that is seen below. However, I still wanted to try and get some change in verticality of the shape and ended up using sweep to get a sort of rhombus shape that I really enjoyed, however, I had to clean up on side of the rhombus in order to avoid overhangs (highlighted in blue). The next two forms I created were the most basic, both of which were simple extrudes of sketches that I had created. The first was a curved sketch that I extruded to be a sort of arm to connect shapes, this arm (highlighted in purple) sort of acted as a highway to carry your eyes to the next form, which was another extrude. This next extrude was performed on a circle sketch and given an angle to create a dial shape, seen highlighted in red. I liked the role that my extruded curve played in guiding the viewers eye, so I decided to create another army shape, this time however, I used the loft function. In order to get the bend in the form I started with a circle sketch on the x-axis. Then I knew I wanted to get the arm to bend up so I created an off-set plane on the y-axis and added another circle sketch there. Unfortunately, this lead to a weird bend that pinched itself, so I ended up adding one-more offset plane. This time, the offset plane was on the x-axis, but raised off the ground. I added another circle sketch, angled it slightly, and then linked all of the sketches with a loft function to get a pipe-like shape that I sliced in half and is now seen below highlighted in yellow. The final shape, highlighted in green, was created by sketching a half-circle and then revolving it around itself to form a sphere. I ended up slicing the sphere in half to get this dome shape. I wanted to give the shape a bit more complexity so I ended up coping it, scaling it down, and stacking the smaller dome on top of the bigger dome to add some vertical motion to the form. 
Final
Once I had all of my shapes, I was able to join them together to form this sort of space station shaped/alien hieroglyphic body. The final step to prepare the shape so that it could cut the mold was to fillet all of the edges. For the most part the filleting was nice and easy, but once I tried to fillet my triangle-portion of the shape I ran into quite a bit of difficulties. Some corners were so small that the 0.075 in fillet was too much for them to handle, either I would get an error, or parts of the shape would disappear completely. I ended up going backwards and unjoining the bodies and fiddling around with the original shape. It took a bit of resizing, but I was able to get the fillet to work. To create my mold, I created the 8 x 8 x 2 block and centered on top of my form. Once I cut it out I exported it as an STL and loaded it into Meshmixer to inspect for any holes or problem with the mesh, thank fully there were none to be seen. The overall outcome of this project was a lot better than I expected and I really like the sci-fi mold I <strong>accidentally</strong> created. Playing around with some of the parametric functions can be a bit tricky when you don’t understand what kind of parameters you need to get the motion you want, but once you do figure out what is needed, it can be pretty intuitive.
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