OUAN505 - Laser Cutting Final Elements

After talking with Callum and Gavin I made a list of the remaining scenes that we needed to complete and noted down all of the different assets that were required to bring the final scenes together. I had planned around five or six different extra aspects of the scenes including a fire sequence, more trees for variation from scenes to scene and the lungs for the 'lungs of the world' scene. I've tried to illustrate the process I use when cutting assets using the laser cutter through Photographs, but usually once the objects are drawn in illustrator they are then imported into a piece of software called 'ApS Ethos'. Ethos is an industry piece of software used for things like embroidery design, laser Cutting and laser engraving. The way it works is by taking a vector path and cutting the path onto an object, which for the purpose of this project is paper. Once the illustrator files have been imported into Ethos the paper is placed into the laser cutter and the origin is set so that the laser cutter knows the dimensions of the workspace. Following this, the object is cut out. I like using the laser cutter for creating assets in this way because it's efficient and gives great results. The quality of the shapes and drawings really relies on the path that's drawn all the way back in illustrator - so it's important to make sure they're of a high standard before they're cut out. One issue I did have with the method I was using is that the laser cutter was going over the same path two or three times each time an object was being cut. This had a number of negative effects, for example, it made the process two or three times longer because it was essentially doing the same job several times. As well as this because the laser was going over the line several times it meant that extra sections of the design was cut away. To rectify this where I could, in the instances where there was a single object being cut I decided to stop the laser cutter after it had gone over the shape just once in order to save it from being damaged. I'm not sure why this was happening and I've heard that other people have been having the same problem so I can only assume that it was a fault in the software or the presets that had been designated to the material settings on ApS Ethos.

The use of the laser cutter has been vital to the success and steady progression of the project. I've tried to do as many sessions with the laser cutter as was necessary to make sure assets are ready for both Gavin and Callum. This was made a little more difficult by the popularity of the tool and the hour slot that is allocated when its booked sometimes wasn't enough to do everything that we wanted to. Despite this it's been good to use and I've learnt a lot about how to create nicely cut assets using paper in quite an efficient way. As my roles throughout the project have been majority pre and post production I think it was a good thing that I was able to supply the production side of things with a steady flow of assets throughout the project. The way this project worked was to have he 'pre-production' stage running parralel to the production stage and essentially have a continuing feed of one into the other. This is not a standard method and not one that would normally use but in this case it worked quite well due to the high volume of assets that had to be created and the number of scenes that had to be compiled and rendered.