Quinn Baldacci: Week 9 Rocket Lamp

My lamp is a rocket.  My rocket is a lamp.  Lightbulbs symbolize ideas and my rocket lamp takes off with those ideas.  I wanted to make something fun for this project.  I considered modeling a lava lamp but I already have one of those.  Then I hit on the rocket idea.  I'd love to have a rocket lamp in my apartment.  So rocket lamp it is.

This was fairly simple to model and then a little harder to make into a feasible product.  I used the solid tool to create the body and the extrudesrf tool to create the fins.  The contours and sections were easy enough.  The hard part was making it open to get a lightbulb in.  I quickly realized a cap would be best.  I initially had the cap just be the top two contours but when I checked dimensions I realized the cap would really have to be about half the body of the lamp to fit a bulb and a hand in.  To actually make it a cap I just split the sections and rotated them 30 degrees so they wouldn't overlap.  Then I trimmed all but two of those so they wouldn't even hit the same contours.  This I did so I could have the cap easily slide on and off.  The two that hit the same contours as the base are cut in the same direction so they can slide out and up to take the cap off.

When I went to render it I decided to stick with wood textures because I'm making this lamp from luan.  I'm not a huge fan of luan though so I played with the wood I would actually want this made from.  The darker vertical sections are maple and the lighter wood is ash.  I put in the lightbulb and then played with the environment and angles.  I wanted to show it lit, unlit, capped, and uncapped.  The first two renderings include the top, front, and right views.  The third rendering has the cut sheet.  I can actually fit two lamps onto a 2'x4' sheet of material so thats what I'm making.