Because of the structure of the class this semester (we covered multiple design programs and had a new unit on imaging) we didn’t devote as much of the semester to final projects so most of them were not quite as elaborate as previous semesters (Chris and Michelle’s 3D model of the quad for the admissions office being a notable exception!) In any case, students in this class produced some fantastic projects that I’d like to brag about!
Things that will remain a resource for future generations:
Molly Hoffmaster was a senior SMAD major noticed that the fact that there are only 4 colors of PLA filament available for the Afinia printer meant that many students were painting their models. Mollly’s final project was a poster, now on the wall at the 3SPACE, with samples of 8 different paint types (from nail polish to outdoor acrylic to paint pen) with a summary of the pros and cons of each option:
Jason Goldberg, a senior SMAD major, also found a spray sealant that allows prints to hold water! (will include a pic of this soon)
Innovations:
Ashik Banjade was a senior Computer Information Systems major who made several interesting innovations in the classroom. His senior project was a series of stencils that culminated in a multi-colored stencil set of the DC Metro system that highlighted the location of a skate shop owned by a friend of his. Unfortunately, he didn’t document it very well, but I do have a picture of his plan:
Ashik also came up with the idea of using the heat gun combined with scrap filament to stick objects together. Here is a picture of Ashik and Hailey Fleming (also a senior CIS major) showing off their use of this technique to repair a sculpture for the Class Challenge (in which students brought in broken household objects that we tried to fix using 3D printing).
Brett Voltz, a senior German major, in addition to producing a series of cheap, light weight 3D printed tools for the JMU crew team, thought of a great way to use the image scanner we borrowed from … in the Nursing Program and an excellent potential fund raiser for the new 3D printing club: 3D models of students in their graduation robes!
Holly Sprowl, a senior Architecture major, produced some of the most innovative work in the class including a device for shortening earbud cords for jogging
a working model for an interactive wall with moving marbles embedded inside
and a large scale moving model of a gyroscope building for her Architecture (and 3D printing) final project
Hailey Flemming and Vinny DiGilio, who are both senior CIS majors, produced something innovative not so much in the 3D printing itself but by being the first students to demonstrate the effectiveness of 3D printing as an explicit teaching aid. For their final project, they used 3D printing and their final presentation to teach the concept of an object oriented programing language! Their presentation included a simple sample program and 3D printed objects that together illustrated encapsulation and inheritance, two of the three pillars of an object oriented language.
Andrew DeMoss was a senior Intelligence Analysis major with an ambitious project to use Digital Elevation Model (DEM), data files derived from US Geographical Survey to print 3D models of terrain. Although he wasn’t able to print a 3D model of the JMU Campus using LiDAR (remotely sensed laser imagery) as he originally hoped, we was able to use this DEM of the state of Kentucky
to produce an accurate 3D elevation print of Kentucky:
Use of programs new to GSCI 104:
For his final project, Jason Goldberg printed two giant geometric designed using the programing based design tool OpenSCAD and printed on our Makerbot Replicator 2. Unfortunately, we don’t have any good pictures of them, but you can get the idea from his mini-mockup
Jason’s full sized vases were octagonal instead of hexagonal and more regular, but because OpenSCAD is programing based, changes like these were very easy to make!
Emily Bagdasarian, a senior Anthropology and SMAD double major, for her final project produced scans of fragments of ancient Native American ritual smoking pipes (Lamar pipes) on loan from the Fernbank Museum of Natural History in Georgia using the our Makerbot Digitizer and printed the results to take to an Anthropology conference. Such scans are particularly helpful because the pipe fragments are not just studied for their form, but also for their chemical residues in the form of soot and a laser scan allows the shape to be studied without damaging the artifact. Emily made 10 or 15 scans of each fragment to produce smooth an accurate models of the fragments.
Marian Buis, a senior SMAD major with a specialization in Film, produced many excellent models throughout the semester. Her model of Big Ben programed by hand using OpenSCAD
was particularly spectacular. The orchid model she made using 123D Catch (an application that knits together 2D images to produce a 3D file)
was one of the most successful imaging projects in the class (this was her third attempt at the orchid, her previous ones with 123D Catch and with the Makerbot Digitizer weren’t up to her standards. She also figured out how to use Adobe Illustrator to produce a lithophane after seeing one of Han Solo in the classroom. 
Left is a picture of Maddie and some friends. Her final project was a kit of 7 different mounts for a GoPro camera, which ranged from wall mounts to SLR camera flash mounts to a zip-line mount (the last was from Thingiverse, but was very tough to remove the support without breaking it).
Last, but certainly not least, Amanda Haddock, a senior Math major, used 123D Design and the Quadratic Edge Decimation function in meshlab to produce an entire low-poly chess set for her brother for her final project:
As you can see from this picture, the pieces were built in 123D Design out of spheres, cones and cylinders and then simplified in meshlab.
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