Elee Holtermann Targhees

                                      

The Glasses I designed are called Targhees. They are mountaineering glasses so they are designed to to be light weight and minimalist while being wide enough to cover your eyes completely from the sun. I stuck with the old fashioned style circular lens to give them a retro look while improving various features to make them perform well on the mountains. These glasses have a longer ear wrap to help them stay on your head even when the rest of your gear doesn't.

I enjoyed building these in Rhino because it showed me how to work with more 3D and organic shapes. My glasses frame came out nicely after using the curve to view command to get the shape to form around the head. I had a lot of trouble giving the frame smooth fillets because of the complex curves so i spent a lot of time cleaning up my curves to make them work. Another tool that I used a lot was the mirror tool to not have to remake the side pieces and the lens. Making the sun blockers on the side was a long task since it was 3 separate curves joining into one part but it was definitely worth the effort. I played around with different material combinations a lot and decided to stick with brushed titanium for the frame. This went well with my concept because its a very light weight and durable metal which would be perfect for the amount of activity they would get daily. For the sun blockers I chose perforated leather which went perfect with my design since these parts should block harsh sun rays but still breathe fairly well. The soft leather on the hard metal gave a nice contrast that came out looking very clean in my renders. For the side sections I used a hard transparent plastic with a dark grey tone which complimented the light grey of the titanium frames. Finally for the lenses I took a more unorthodox approach to get the heavy analogous coloration effect that I wanted inorder to mimic snow glasses. The glass tints were too light so I ended up stumbling across the orange peel material which had a really interesting effect with my lighting and looked surprisingly like the lens style I was looking for.

My concept for the Targhees are barebone sun glasses that are designed around the real outdoorsman. They are much more organic in comparison to most athletic sun glasses which are very angular. I took inspiration from old mountain climbing sunglasses from the 60's as well as some of the newer performance eye wear that athletes are wearing today. The name comes from a group of mountains in my backyard in Idaho that I spend most of winters and summers climbing. In the winter I wear a pair of snowglasses similar to these for backcountry snowboarding. Designing the Targhees was a great experience for me because I was able to add a lot of features that would make my sunglasses perform much better in the harsh winter climate.