Digital Fabrication: The “Cheese like” brick

Students: Andreana Papantoniou

Antigoni Anna Anastasopoulou

Our intention was to create a form which takes advantage of the special potentials that 3D

printing and milling machine offer. So, we chose to work with globular and curviform solids

which are difficult to handle with, in a handmade model. The final brick has a “cheese like” form

which came up mainly from a free use of sphere solids.

We considered important to use solids and commands to edit them, so that we finally have a

unified solid that the milling machine can recognize. Thus, we designed several solids and we

abstract them from the brick, using mainly the Boolean difference command. In particular, we

first defined the limits of the working region in order to conserve the necessary thickness of the

external surfaces. Then, we abstract a big part of the internal solid using the ellipse solid and the

Boolean difference command.

The final brick The brick and the spheres solids before the BooleanDifference command

The internal aspect of the brick showing the created forms which permit several views through it

Using the array command in X, Y and Z axis, we created a framework of tangential circles. We

used the centers of these circles and the points of contact between them as centers to create

spheres of various radiuses that we finally abstract from the main solid. For the best organization

of the design we needed to create different layers to group the objects we used.

The concept, which the design and the position of these spheres were based on, was to make

the brick pierced and to permit several views through it.

The base of circles created by the array command and the solids to be abstracted

The fabrication process | The brick on the 3d printer

The 3d printed brick