I was asked to make a plaque for a sculpture produced by a 4th year student. He designed a special font and the layout. Again this was laser engraved on hand dyed anodised aluminium but was a bit trickier than the photo of my dad (in a previous post).

The special font required very subtle changes to its shades of grey so getting the laser settings right for that and making sure the settings would take the background back to aluminium was very important, as well as making sure the dye coating was even, made this a difficult piece to do.

I started looking at petrol engine diagrams and made up a design inspired by ball bearings and the kind of shells you get on big end bearings, pictured below.

I ended up with this.

After I did that design I decided to put the shell joints on the inner ring. I also added a cross piece so I could attach the design to a ring.

I finished the design of by adding a ring shank and some gems. While these designs aren’t exactly wearable I’m learning a lot about Rhino by playing around. This particular design has some great rendering. I think the metallic effects come across really well.

*EDIT – to include this short avi showing the movement of the ring. It’s basic I know but I’ll get there at some point.

Another ring render using Rhino, inspiration came from an air capacitor. I’ve also done a very short animation to show the capacitor operation. This is experimentation for designing jewellery with moving parts. This is my first attempt at animation so make allowances please.