3D Printed Olive Tray

As a personal die hard fan of olive oil and lover of wood working, I decided to design a set of kitchenware that complimented both. I will go through the process I took in creating a 3D printed ceramic oil tray take uses an image as a means to create an interesting surface condition.

Selecting the right image is important when trying to digitally map it to a surface. In this case, the grasshopper definition I will be using will analyze the level of light pixels vs dark; the darker takes on deeper impressions. The fastest way to adjust how well the image (olive tree core) will work was to use a couple Photoshop techniques.

1. First, turn the photo into a gray scale image. (see above)

2. Next, adjust the brightness contrast for a good light to dark ratio.

3. Additionally. I overlaid gray masks of dark rings to lighter ones from inside to out which created a deeper impression for the oil to pool.

Note: It was important to re-scale the image to 600 x 400 pixels as that was the output size needed needed.

Now we are ready to bring this image into Rhino - Grasshopper. Above is a definition that creates of series of points (600 x 400) and maps a desired image with the same parameters. In this case, I set the to 'slider' 20 as a multiplier of the darkness / lightness ratio to get a good bump effect on the output.

The next step is to give this undulating surface a thickness. In my case, I wanted to make a ceramic print so I started with at least the minimum thickness I know will print. Keep in mind that this thickness will be the lowest part of the inset surface not the overall dimension.

In Grasshopper, I started by extracting the new surface edges BREP COMPONENTS. I later joined all four edges of the rectangle. Once I had one solid wavy rectangular line, I projected the line to a plane for lofting purposes. So far there were 5 sides established. The final side is the base that can be capped off by connecting the PLANAR SURFACE button to the previous command. (see above). Lastly it is important to join all of these surfaces BREP JOIN button ...There now we have a watertight piece that can be baked.

By using the BEND command in Rhino, you can take an existing object and twist it into different shapes. I decided to make a more interesting wave like shape. Once I was happy with the shape, I lopped off the bottom rounded piece so that it would have a flat piece to sit on a table and not spill precious olive oil everywhere. I achieved this by using the BOOLEAN DIFFERENCE command followed by the JOIN to keep it water tight and thus still 3D printable