Coming into this project, I didn't really have that many ideas. I was sure that I wanted to make something using the laser cutter, because I feel like I've 3D printed a lot so far and I wanted to use wood to have a cleaner look. I first thought that I wanted to make a jewelry box with patterns on all the sides using the laser cutter, but I decided that the concept was too simple. Then I thought about still making patterns, but using them to make a lantern instead. While I was looking at images for the lanterns, I came across this picture of a light box that had several layers of paper that all came together to portray a scene.
So I decided to go with that, and I would still be able to use the laser cutter to cut out each layer of my image as well as make an interesting looking box to hold it. I really liked the Peter Pan scene and I also saw an Alice in Wonderland scene that I thought was cool, so I decided to do a scene that was inspired from a movie. I really like the Harry Potter series, so I started to look at images online to get inspiration from. The most important thing was to find an image that had different layers to it so the light box made sense. I came across this image and decided to use it.
Then I brought the image into illustrator and used the pencil tool and the line segment tool to trace over what I thought should be each layer.
Then I brought the outlines into rhino, spaced out each layer by the same amount, then created a box to go around them.
Then I constructed my environment so that this light box could be visualized in a space. The first two images are all mostly one color, and the third is how I imported it into Fusion so that changing the appearances would be easier.
Fusion was a little difficult at first because I wasn't 100% sure how to render something, and I didn't know if a render was taking too long or not. I had a bunch of trials and errors when it came to rendering, but I think some of the images turned out fine.
One of the biggest issues that I had was trying to get the layers that were supposed to be paper looking more translucent. The translucent effect wasn't really working with any surface that I tried, so I didn't end up getting any of the effects that I wanted for the shadow box. There was probably a downloadable paper option that I could've tried but nothing I already had worked. Overall, I think this was fun to do, especially since I got to use so many different programs (Adobe Illustrator, Rhinoceros and Fusion 360) to make this scene.
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