Nick Moolenijzer

I started with a photo of one of my plants that I wanted to recreate with cardboard.

Then I cut out the single leaf in Photoshop and used a threshold to get rid of irregularities due to the color.


After that I converted the object to a vector in Illustrator and had a happy leaf to use in Rhino.

I pulled the leaf from Illustrator into Rhino and cleaned up the vectors by deleting some busy points and using the rebuild function to remove a lot of the unnecessary points and to smooth curves out.

Then, I measured my cardboard to be 5.77mm thick, so I added some 5.77mm wide rectangles, positioned them on the leaves, and started using splits and joins to make them into notches.

Finally, I added some basic base structure and "vine" pieces as well so that a full little plant could be created. I used array linear to duplicate the outlines, and here we are! Ready to try out once the machines are back online. [Update 10/15 - machines worked!]

After that, I took the Rhino file back into Illustrator and set the stroke size to 0.001in and prepared the document to print on the laser cutter! To do that, I set the size of the file to 32in x 20in, power to 50%, and a range of speeds from 15-25% (multiple cuts due to the thick cardboard).

I assembled my kit into two separate standing plants. Unfortunately during the process one piece got broken - but nothing a little tape can't fix! The plants stand on their own and withstand the shake test, shown here!