Justin McGinnis : Week 6 WireRing

      For this project I was inspired by the practice exercises we did in class working with arrays and different patterns of piping projected onto a cylinder.  From that original thought I wanted to make a ring different than the usual solid style.  With that in mind, being a males ring I wanted it to be bigger like a class ring and the problem I wanted to solve was : one the weight of bigger male rings, and two limiting the annoying feel of a larger ring on the ringer.  I think sometimes wearing a larger ring it annoys me by the large surface area tight on my finger.  So with this concept I made a wire frame ring for the classy guy that wants to add unique style to his jewelry collection.  By making a wire framed ring it minimizes the heavy weight of the ring so its not too much to wear out and also isn't too much too much touching the finger.
      In modeling this piece I was very aware of creating strong and accurate curves as a base so that all the pieces would fit together.  I used command like pipe, split, blend srf, duplicate edge, loft, networksrf curves, divide, and patch.  Divide was a helpful tool for creating even distribution of my curves for piping along the original band.  I added the diamond gem on top to give it the class ring feel and black for the manly stone. You can see in the bottom image it is a diamond shape on the gem to fit the name black-diamond meaning experts only on the ski slopes.  I added my initials along the top for a personal connection to the ring and branding as it repeats around the top.  Lastly its all scaled to a size 12 ring at 21.3mm.
     I enjoyed this project as I continue to learn more about the powerful commands in Rhino and the different ways to use each particular command. Whether additive, subtractive, or blending and stretching different forms.  I spent awhile in the keyshot stage coming up with the right passes to really pop the final rendering's texture and dimension.  I used the beauty pass along with diffuse, specular, ambient occlusion, reflection, mask, and a shadow layer.  I had to play around with it for some time in photoshop to grasp the concept at hand but I think it came out well.  The material is a platinum gold blended piping along the outside surface like a luxury ice cream swirl and then a matte anodized black metal on the the side for a different feel from the side.  The top is black chrome for some shine and a black cubed gem inside, which is scaled and rotated to allow the centered diamond inside.