Fabrication Time.

Learning how to put it all together.

Creating Blender mock-stages was fun, but prepping them to be built IRL was no joke. I watched a great tutorial that taught me how to add CAD-like dimensions to my Blender sketches that was very helpful. From there I was able to readily adapt my 3D sketches into 2D blueprint vectors to make the real thing. This very tedious process is essential, check out a few dimension sketches below.

 

 

 

 

 

Once I confirmed all of my dimensions, I built my stage in Adobe Illustrator. I added tabs and slots where they were needed and edited a few dimensions in order to have everything align correctly. Finally, I was ready to notch out where my LED lights were going to go. I played with a few placement ideas in Illustrator and finalized my grid pattern. I then had to test the hole-size to make sure the LEDs popped into place without too much force and without falling out. Then I was ready to take my 2D lines into LightBurn and laser cut my stage!

Assembly!

Once the time-intensive part was completed, I laser cut my design and assembled the stage. I used a chop saw to cut the half octagon shape pieces as a 45-degree angle, glued them together and began placing the LEDS. In order to program them readily as a DMX matrix in MadMapper, I am placing them linear and vertically.

Below is a MadMapper projection placement sketch I had some fun with! Up next is even more research on how to accurately synchronize projection and music with lighting.