My final project consisted of a series of topologies that represent a clash between structured human development and the erosion of nature. Each piece is aprox. 10in squared and was created using CNC milling on renshape.

To make these, I first started by creating a surface mesh in blender. I made these surfaces very repetitive to reinforce the idea that it’s man made.

These meshes are then converted into displacement map using some texturing. Based on the Z-axis, the surface texture changes from white to black. This effectively turns the mesh into a 2D image.

Next, I put the texture back into the node editor, where I composite it with other textures. In this case I used a combination of wave textures and a spherical gradient to shape and form the bubbles into a sea.

The final product is yet another displacement map! At this point, I take it into deskProto and generate a tool path for CNC.

One thing to note, I found the CNC process to look very different than the preview I was working with in blender. There are a couple issues that come up. First of all, the values I create using the node can range from any value, even negative. When baking textures, it need’s to be a range from 0.0-1.0. This means I have to map whatever values I come up with into that specific range. Another issue is that there seems to be some linearity problems. The holes on the surface are supposed to be equal depth, but for some reason the holes found in deeper sections of the CNC show up deeper than holes towards higher sections.