A few people have asked what the photo is on my Google ID…

I got inspired to try something like this when I saw this work:http://www.shapeways.com/designer/vertigopolka/creations

Not sure where I found the equation I started with, but I used MeshLab to tweak something I found online and played until I got settings that gave a wall thickness and slice of the form that worked for a pendant. In Blender I sized it correctly, added the frame (extruded cylinders and some Boolean operations) and exported it. Had it printed at shapeways in their castable wax material. Very impressed with the print quality.

I was worried about the casting given how thin the ripples turned out so I sprued the hell out of it. Probably well oversprued but I'd rather do the wax work and suffer more cleanup than have the casting fail. Here it is cast in sterling right out of the investment.

And after the first crude trim, a good brush, and some time in the pickle.

Cleaned up the casting, added a simple bail, did a little hand polishing and finished in a shot tumbler.

Around the same time I was playing with lofting greyscale digital elevation maps to get 3D landscapes. I printed Acadia National Park (where I lived for a while) at a jewelry scale and printed it in their default “white, strong and flexible” material. I invested it and cast in Bronze. The dogma is that this material would not burn out cleanly, and you can see in the finished piece that it picked up a lot of surface texture that was not in the model. As I understand it one of the biggest problems with trying to burn plastics out of casting investment is that they swell when they get hot and/or expand violently when they get to combustion temperature and this can break fine details out of the investment or, as in this case, mess up the surface.

For this piece though the surface (shown in the inset) adds to the piece making the landscape look “real” (IMHO). I finished it with a brooch pin and an ammonia-based patina.