Quinn Baldacci: Week 7 Ring

 

 

Because I'm a geek I decided to model the Green Lantern ring.  An iconic part of superhero memorabilia, it gives the wearer the power to create anything they can think of from green light.  That's a really simple explanation but I'm not here to talk superhero origin stories.  As with any other superhero costume, the ring has had a few redesigns so I took a quick glance at Google to make sure I wasn't too far off with what I had in my head.  Then I designed my version.  It's sturdy but sleek and would stand up in a fight.

The fairly simple design gave me some trouble when I was trying to build it.  I ended up using sweep2 for the band and the lantern and then triming and unioning the two pieces.  I set the center back a bit and had a painful time trying to fillet because of the angles of the lantern.  I added a separate piece behind the center to light in keyshot.

The band is Rough Anondized Black metal.  In reality the lantern would be a stone of some kind but I don't like how Keyshot renders stone on a dark background so I used Rough Clear Green and Shiny Clear Green plastic for the lantern.  Rendering in passes was a pain because I completely forgot what I was doing and had to keep going back to the tegrity videos.  In the end I like the final result better than a standard Keyshot rendering but I definitely need more time to familiarize myself with the method.

On Shapeways it would cost me $10.47 to print this in black plastic or $10.22 to print in alumide or $11.46 in polished alumide.  I'd probably print in the polished alumide to get the right texture look and polished feel.

EDIT:

I wasn't happy with the Green Lantern Ring I created so I made a different ring to print.  Also it let me play around more and keep working on my Rhino technique.  I wanted to create a simple band that was smaller on the bottom and expanded on the top.  I like the design on an open curve and I wanted to see how it would look with a square base shape.  Then I added the trace indent along the outer curve and the indent on the end.

I used sweep two for the overall structure.  Then I used sweep two and a triangle cross section to create the indent and then booleandifferenced it out.  For the punch on the ends I extracted and offset the curve.  Then I extruded it and booleandifferenced again.  There is a small fillet on all the edges.

This ring I would make out of a silver metal.  Possibly brushed nickel or chrome.  So in Keyshot I played with a dark metal and a shiny one.  I used the darkest background possible to really get the reflections to work and make the rings stand out.

On shapeways this would cost me $3.90 to print in alumide or $4.25 to print in polished alumide.  Or I would go a little more expensive and print in polished nickel or grey steel for $19.99.  Though according to the initial audit the walls might be too thin to print in metal other than raw silver, brass, or bronze.