The Ultimate Dream
This was my first experience with 3D shapes, and I found it very difficult. Not because the website was hard to work with, but because I never had. It is a skill like calligraphy: the strokes are simple, but the experience required to execute them efficiently is not. Herein, you have the seven objects of the assignment and how I felt about them. The title of each section is in reference to a work I like (vague wording is purposeful); if you crack the code to what series it is, I will be impressed.
A Strange Artifact
This was by far one of the hardest shapes for me to make. Why? Well, I had never touched 3D software before. I struggled to augment the screen so that I could see the image optimally. I did not even know how to center the image, and I had a limited range of motion because I just did not have the right amount of control over the object (only one millimeter when I needed a tenth of a millimeter). I had to come back after getting experience to be able to accurately make the PVC pipe.
The egg was when I finally started to understand how to use TinkerCad better. It wasn’t as grueling as the PVC pipe, and I was able to follow along with the rest of the class. It was a better introduction to how to play with shapes, and I enjoyed making it.
This one intimidated me because I saw it as much more complex than what we were asked to do. Coming from the egg, I was not expecting to have to do something so complex and intricate. In retrospect, there were many worse things that I would need to go into great detail for. I was calmed when I saw that it was just a bunch of squares that just needed to be arranged up and down. Here, too, I was able to follow the class and ended up even writing some text on mine.
How pernicious: A Fork of Causality
This was easily the most challenging one out of all of them. Though I did not have the displeasure of doing the spoon, it was still not fun at all. First off, I did not have a mouse with me the day we started to do some of it in class, and that made it infinitely more annoying. So I canned it and decided that it would be much smarter for me to work on it on my PC. Here, things slowly but surely came together. The main thing that this shape taught me was how to “sculpt” a shape and how to derive complex shapes from simple cylinders and parallelograms. There were many times when I just had to let this one sit for a bit, but after a while, I was able to smooth it out.
In and out of trouble
I liked the flask because I was more captivated by doing it. This one we started in class, and when I got back to my room, I was able to refine it. The volumetric flask was interesting because it taught me how I could not only remove objects but also reintegrate them. Like with the part of the flask that was erased, I was able to make a copy of that, turn it red, and then place that inside of it to make it “whole.”
The hat was interesting; those hats, by their association with fedoras, often have a negative connotation. Hats like those used to be class symbols in their day. Now the only hats modern people commonly wear are baseball caps. I wonder how hard it would be to create that in TinkerCad. I think that it would be more involved than the hat we made. Nevertheless, I had to edit this one when I got home to make sure that the correct parts were voided.
An Eclipse?
If I had to describe making aviator sunglasses, I would say dreadful. First off, from an aesthetic standpoint, they are hideous. That is just the nature of the glasses. They don’t have bite to them. They are not like cat-eye sunglasses, which have a sharp, crisp, and almost intimidating allure. That being said, the most challenging part of creating these glasses was not the creation of the nose mount bits but actually creating the glass. The shape of aviator sunglasses is uniquely difficult in that it drops down in a way that is very hard to replicate in Tinkercad. It took me serious sculpting to get the shape right. Once that was figured out, everything nicely fell into place, and I was able to fit in all the pieces and create something that, though not professional by any means, I am proud to present as an attempt at aviator sunglasses.