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3D modeling and bamboo scale model

A project log for Spaceship Menorah

A large blinky sculpture with 2142 RGB LEDs

terragterrag 03/14/2016 at 20:000 Comments

Two weeks ago I drew my empty wall in SketchUp. I decided to keep going and model the entire room to give a feeling of how the sculpture would look in the space. Lots of work with a tape measure getting dimensions of doors, windows, stairs, etc.

Last week I drew the Spaceship Menorah in Tinkercad. I found it difficult to change the length of the PEX tubes once I had rotated them in the model. SketchUp has a better way to do this with the push/pull tool.

Yesterday I exported the tinkercad model to an .STL file. Then I imported it into SketchUp using a trial version of a SketchUp plugin. It lets you do 30 imports before you need to pay for it. It appeared in my SketchUp model but it was about 140 feet tall! After scaling it down, I slapped it on my virtual wall. It looked good!

Then I used SketchUp's dimension tool to measure the lengths of the PEX pieces that I modeled. Not all of them added up to 98 inches (~2.5m), so I made some corrections. Then I took some bamboo skewers (for grilling kebabs) and cut them to a ~10 inch scale version of the sculpture. I mounted it on a piece of scrap foamboard. I used coins in place of the acrylic discs.

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