second draft...

For the second draft I looked into another idea that my tutor suggested. I was trying to design a solid central tree structure to 3D print in one piece, and to suspend small little pods from. My tutor thought it would be a lot cooler to make the tree interactive and moveable, making it in individual parts that could lock together and swivel. I modelled the parts in SketchUp, making small pods and individual arms of the tree branches:

I 3D printed an individual arm... And then printed it again. And again. And again... 10 iterations required? How about 30:

I finally assembled the arms into the tree branch structure, all emanating from a core 3D printed hanger piece, and then assembled and attached the little pods. The first configuration:

I then rotated all the arms into a new configuration, which was pretty fun:

And another configuration... it wasn't supposed to be an octopus but hey, why not?

There's video footage of me reconfiguring the arms in the final production video later on.

With 3D printing, THE POSSIBILITIES ARE ENDLESS! THANKS MAKERWARE!