DAVISON - PRINT LOG #15 - FINAL PROJECT 5 - SUMMATIVE REPORT, Monday Dec. 10th, 2018 Well this is the end. The physical project is done and this last report will be a quick review and summation of all the other Print Logs and Reports. For a Step-by-Step look at the evolution and growth of this project, please refer to my Print Logs #11, 12, 13, and 14. They will show a much more in-depth look at all of the steps and mistakes in the progress of each of the pieces, and of the game as a whole. The instructions for our final project were to develop a printed piece that would be Challenging in that it would: 1) push the skill sets that we already had, 2) acquire new skills with processes or materials, and 3) fit into the four weeks of class time that we had left. I chose to make an original board game, (a good description of this is best found in my Print Logs #11b, and #12). While the idea of taking up The Challenge by exploring uncharted waters has a romantic appeal, I have often found that it does not produce a well-balanced finished work. For me, the key to this is to pick things that are just on the outside range of what you might actually be able to pull off. Or as well put by the musician David Bromberg, “A man should never gamble more than he can stand to lose.” So I chose to wrestle the Demon of Challenge by pursuing an across the board integration of techniques, and a complexity of scale. I am satisfied that I succeeded in both of those pursuits. I ended up with a good project, and I had fun making it. NOTE: All source references and Thingiverse citations will be listed at the end. The Physical Game is done, but the Rules are still being fleshed out. For more information on this please go to https://davisonlearning.weebly.com/moon-men-game.html

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2 GOAL: Make an Original Board Game based on the Art Adventures of an old friend of mine Bret H. Hart. From my proposal, this Board Game should: 1) be played by 2-4 people, 2) have a ‘procedural layout,’ meaning that the playing area was not fixed and could change from game to game, 3) combine a variety of game mechanics, 4) have some Art Product being created during the game. For more information about the real/actual Bret Harold Hart, please see the links in the Appendix at the end of this report.

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EMERGENT DESIGN: Based on the outline that I was given by Bret (see Appendix), I had enough of an idea to get started. I planned to sketch a basic outline of the mechanics and the rules and then turn it over to Bret and his musician friends for further development and evolution. The main game pieces were based on the personas created by the band (see image #2 bottom right). The rest of the characters I made up to make the game run better.

4 THE BASICS: Each player has a set of matching colored pieces and a thin tile like game board. The boards can be arranged in many ways to make each game session more interesting. The other parts are divided into Movable Pieces that can: move on the board, block others, capture the other players, and steal resources. And of course the other class of the game parts are the Non-Movable Resource Pieces representing Money $, Instruments I, and Recording Equipment R.

5 ABOUT MOVEABLE PIECES: The Moveable Pieces are divided into three classes: Boss (Musician), Booking Agent, and Roadie. Each piece has a unique set of characteristics in terms of: moving, blocking the other players, capturing opponents, and stealing resources. Much of that is being worked out right now in terms of play-testing the game and adjusting the rules for proper game balance.

6 CTHULHU BOSS ABOUT - Cthulhu is a Top Level piece of the Blue set. This piece will be similar to the Queen in chess. DESIGN - took the head part of a Cthulhu statue I found on Thingiverse and mounted it onto a pedestal shape that I had created in Rhino. The pedestal gave it the Chess-Piece like appearance. I had NO PROBLEMS printing this piece. It went off perfectly.

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MARTIAN BRAIN BOSS: ABOUT - The Brain piece is based on the 1957 movie “This Island Earth.” Again, it is a Top Level piece. DESIGN - I created it by finding a Brain Birdhouse in Thingiverse and scaling it down. Like the Cthulhu piece, I mounted it onto a Chess like base. I then added two spheres for the eyes. Scaled down in size, the brain folds were a bit smooth, and so I used the sculpt tool in Meshmixer to give them some more depth.

8 BRAIN PROBLEM #1: Pedestal inside the head. I had done a Boolean Union, but the pedestal remained as a separate part. SOLUTION: None. I was on a tight printing schedule and so left it as is. It did no harm to the final design other that taking up a tiny bit more material and time. I am still not sure why it remained separate, the other pieces did a Boolean Union perfectly.

9 BRAIN PROBLEM #2: The Brain was a little over sized for the base that it was on. It was prone to being tippy. SOLUTION: After I had finished all of the pieces in the game, I went back and redesigned a wider base for the Brain. Instead of Rhino, I used the Follow Me Tool in Sketchup that I had just learned about.

10 GAS MASK BOSS: ABOUT - The Gas Mask piece is a Top Level Boss piece and will be similar to the Queen in Chess. DESIGN: - I had found a very cool Skull/Gas Mask in Thingiverse (see left image) and made a piece based on it.

11 MASK PROBLEM #1: Similar to the Brain, the Mask was too large for its base and was tippy. SOLUTION: I added a small disk to the bottom. I wasn’t too crazy about the look of it. But It solved the tipping problem, and it did give it a unique look compared to the other pieces.

12 MASK PROBLEM #2: While everything looked good. The model fell apart as I took it off the print bed. Nothing seemed to really be held together. It seemed that the problem was caused by a bad STL file. Upon a deeper examination I could see that the ‘mask’ was a poor patch job over a skull. There had not been a good Boolean Union and there were many voids inside the piece that got filled with breakable Supports that just fell apart. It should have been filled with a tight structured grid of 20% Infill. I went in and tried many ways to fill it, combine, make solid, etc. . None worked. Something always ended up being a void that would be filled with Supports instead of Infill.

This is filled with breakable supports, it should be a grid of 20% infill.

13 SOLUTION: Seeing that it would take way more time than it was worth to fix, I decided to start over. I went back into Thingiverse and found a poorer looking, but better constructed gas mask. I fitted it onto the base and got it ready for printing. Although it did not have the visual impact of the original piece, it got the job done and printed well. I needed to keep on a tight schedule of Prototype Developing and then later, a full Production Run. It was important for me to always keep in mind on this project, that I had 40 pieces; and while none may be ‘Perfect,’ the success of my game would rest on the Whole Ensemble, and not on one individual piece.

14

GODZILLA LIZARD BOSS: ABOUT - The fourth of the four part color set, the Lizard is a Top Boss Queen like piece. DESIGN - I went to Thingiverse and found many Godzillas. I chose a simple one and fitted it to a base I had made in Rhino. It printed well with NO PROBLEMS.

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BOOKING AGENT: ABOUT - The Booking Agent is the 2nd most powerful piece. DESIGN - I designed it by taking some Google Image clip art and putting it into Tinkercad. I then used the Follow Me tool in Sketchup to build a square base for it. It had a nice aesthetic contrast with the more formal Chess-like Boss pieces.

16 AGENT PROBLEM #1: The design phase of the Agent went well. It was when I was Slicing it that I noticed that parts of the model seemed to disappear. I tried to fix it by going back into Meshmixer and filling in those areas. Mr. Burnett and I played with it and found that it was a Scale Problem. It was too small an area for the printer to print. SOLUTION: I went back into the Clip Art and enlarged those areas so that they would print better. The Problem was fixed.

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AGENT PROBLEM #2: When I first saw the mess on my blue agent I thought that something had gone wrong with my printer. Then I realized that this was caused for some reason by the Support system not putting anything below the brief case. SOLUTION: I went and manually added supports and the problem went away.

18 ROBOT ROADIE: ABOUT - The Roadie piece is the lowest ranking of the Moveable Pieces. DESIGN - I did a quick mashup combining the upper half of the Utilimaker Mascot with the lower tracks of the classic robot from the 1960s TV show - Lost in Space. If I had had more time I would have liked to have designed my own robot from scratch.

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ROADIE PROBLEM #1: I had some small problems with the supports. Sometimes they generated fine, and at other times they did not show up as expected. The blue Roadie showed that I did need supports below the hands. SOLUTION: So I took to forcing manual supports and sometimes got an overkill of more supports than I needed, but the problem went away.

20 ROADIE PROBLEM #2: I was using a new brand of filament and noticed that I was getting a bit more stringing than I had gotten with my other brands. SOLUTION: This only happened on the Yellow Roadie and so I left the problem alone for now. This is an area where I will need to do more investigations and use the procedures that we used in the Print Parameters lesson.

21 ABOUT NON-MOVABLE PIECES: The game has two Non-Movable piece groups: the Game Board, and the Resource Tokens. I originally had wanted to have a game board that doubled as a travel case, (see comments #28-29). Since I was both designing the Game CONCEPT and the PHYSICAL Game Pieces, I needed a way to be able to Play-test while I did my design work. So I created and used Paper Game Boards to help with the designing process, (see image #4, and image #29).

22 RESOURCE TOKENS: ABOUT - These pieces represent the Money $, Instruments I, and Recording Equipment R; that the players need to steal from others while protecting their own in order to win the game. SHAPE DESIGN - I wanted these to be stackable, and so I needed to make a negative space in the base. My first step was to make a generic BLANK that I could customize for each of the separate resources. In this picture I am using a cutter shape to do a Boolean Difference on the top. That same adjusted shape will be a Boolean Union and become the recessed bottom. These would all be printed in White so that they could be used by any of the players.

23 TOKEN PROBLEM #1: I had created my negative bottom by using the top to make a Boolean Difference. The only problem was that it was an EXACT MATCH to the bottom and was too tight. The top needed to have a letter stamped on it, so I could not remove material from there. SOLUTION: So I needed to cut away some space inside of the bottom. I made some narrow spacers and then did a Boolean Difference with them. A better approach might have been to use a more mathematical CAD program like Sketchup or Rhino. However, I felt that I would lose too much time playing with the learning curve of those more difficult programs, and so I used Meshmixer that I was fairly good at.

24 TOKEN PROBLEM #2: I had thought that it would be very easy to use the primitives in Meshmixer to make the letters to cut out of the tops. I thought WRONG! The center of the R would not punch out and make an open negative space. I tried over and over, but to no success. The Letter would always re-form itself back into a Flipped Normal. SOLUTION: I remembered that Tinkercad had a Text feature. So I went and made my $, I, and R letters in Tinkercad. For the $ and the Serif Capital Letter I, I needed to do a little custom building. It all came out fine.

25 TOKEN PROBLEM #3: When I went to do the Boolean Difference, I could not get a good cut between the Letter and the Token Blank. I quickly realized that there was probably a mesh incompatibility between the shape and my letters, (things like letters usually have a very simple geometric mesh). SOLUTION: I did a simple Remeshing of the letter (two passes). This made the Letter mesh match the size of the Token Blank mesh and it cut perfectly.

26 TOKEN PROBLEM #4: I took my first printed batch to check to see if the extra space at the bottom worked, (and it did). But while I was working with them by my game boards, I realized that they were too big to fit the spaces. I had forgotten that the Barrier in the Home Studio took up some space. SOLUTION: I reduced the size down from 18mm to 16mm and everything was fine.

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PROTO GAME BOARD IDEA: My original idea was to make a combination game board and travel case using the Print In Place method. I did some research and found some good designs that I printed out. The one from The Royal Game of UR was especially nice. I started to use Tinkercad to make a similar folding board/case for this game.

28 BOARD PROBLEM #1: As I was working on the case and the early game pieces I saw that I had a problem. Many of my piece designs were in flux and changing size and shape. This made it impossible to nail down a case size. SOLUTION: I gave up on the idea of a folding game board / travel case until later. I decided that I would use a flat tile like game board for now.

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BOARD PROBLEM #2: Having set aside the idea of a folding board, I encountered another problem. I needed something to play on as I created my game. SOLUTION: I came up with a board design that I thought would work for many situations. I printed these out on colored paper and used them as I plugged away at making up the game concepts, the game rules, and the game pieces.

30 BOARD PROBLEM #3 - (A SOLUTION WITHOUT A PROBLEM): This solution came about BEFORE I encountered a problem that needed fixing. I had done a Paper design of my Game Board to Play-test with and had spent most of my time working on the Character Pieces. Before I had to try to make a Game Board (and encountered problems), our teacher had demonstrated a way to use Simplify3D to turn a 2D image into a 3D form. I did a simple test of this with PhotoShop and printed out a test Game Board and it worked Perfectly.

31 BETTER SOLUTION: I decided to try and have more control over this and did some testing using a PhotoShop Grey Scale from 0% (there is no 5%), 10% to 30%. and used it to cut a shape in Simplify 3D. It is always good to double check everything, and so it was great to see my results stay stable back in Meshmixer.

32 BOARD PROBLEM #4: As I had noted, I had quickly designed and printed out a Paper Game Board to do Play-testing with. I had then used the same design to test making my PLA Game Board from a PhotoShop Grey Scale. Now I was ready to start my Production Run of the four colored boards. Before starting, I noticed several design elements that I wanted to change. SOLUTION: Normally this would have been a major headache. However, given the fluidity of PhotoShop and my use of Layers, it was very, very easy to move things around and make corrections. NOTE: that the Top Right image shows my elements in Black. This is for visibility. Before producing the version for Simplify3D, I would render these elements in different percentages of Grey depending on their depth into the Game Board.

33 BOARD PROBLEM #5: My first test board was 12mm thick (the highest point to the bottom), and took 2.5 hours to print. SOLUTION: As I made several of the changes mentioned above, I took the opportunities each time to make the board thinner, going from 12mm to 6mm, and ending up at 4mm; with a printing time of only 1 hour 20 minutes.

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ENTIRE PROJECT SOLUTION (PARTIAL): Here is the game set up with all of the pieces in their starting positions, (remember that the Game Concept allows for the Boards to be laid out in different shapes each time). Although I have finished the Physical parts of this game, I am still working out the Game Mechanics and Rules Sets. Even this will be somewhat incomplete as my goal is to only get it to a basic working state, and then turn it over to Bret and the other band Members for final development, (after all, it is a game about them).

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PROTOTYPE AND PRODUCTION PIECES: And here is a fairly complete look at both the Production Pieces and the Prototype figures that were created in order to realize the original vision in Bret’s 2017 memo to me.

36 PRINTING SPECIFICATIONS: All filaments printed well with no adjustments to the parameters All pieces were Sliced using Simplify3D. All pieces were printed on my Qidi Tech X-one 2. Temps: 200 Nozzle, 40 Bed Layer Height: 0.2mm Speed: 40 mm/sec Infill: 20% Supports: Automatic Adhesion: Skirt Retraction: ON ESTIMATED PRINTING TIME OF ENTIRE PRODUCTION RUN: 12 hours

37 FILAMENTS: Architectural White, 1.75mm PLA - by Materio3D Azure Blue, 1.75mm PLA - by Materio3D Yellow, 1.75mm PLA - by Shenzhen Hello 3D Technology Traffic Red, 1.75mm PLA - by ColorFabb Leaf Green, 1.75mm PLA - by ColorFabb

38 SOFTWARE USED: Rhino - Pedestals for Bosses Sketchup - Pedestal for Agent Tinkercad - Travel Case (on hold), Agent, Text for Tokens Google - Agent Clip Art Thingiverse - Source for parts of all Boss figures, and Roadie PhotoShop - Design for Game Board, Grey Scale Simplify3D - Slicer, 2D to 3D Conversions in Game Board Meshmixer - General Assembler for most part, Tokens, Inspector for all pieces

APPENDIX CITATIONS AND REFERENCES Gel Box: Silica Gel Box (https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2357196) by Korgano is licensed under the Creative Commons - Attribution - Share Alike license. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ Fabian Gebhart - Fgebhart Game of UR Box: Royal Game of Ur with Print-in-place hinged board (https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2308211) by Cymon is licensed under the Creative Commons - Attribution license. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ Joseph Larson - Cymon, Hurricane, Ut For Brain Boss: Bird Brain Bird House (https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2816038) by Additive_Artist is licensed under the Creative Commons - Attribution - Non-Commercial - No Derivatives license. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ Marco Valenzuela - Additive_Artist For Cthulhu Boss: Buddy Cthulhu (https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2459673) by Kibilz is licensed under the Creative Commons - Attribution license. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ Chad McKinley - Kibilz, Calgary, Alberta, Canada For Gas Mask Boss: GAS MASK Skull Logo V2 https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:890750 James Gibson, jbgibson87 Grande Prairie Alternative model for the Gas Mask Boss: NOTE: My original try fell apart due to problems with non-manifold shells in the original STL file, so I went with another file instead. Gas mask soldier on stand https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:527918 by steyrc Nov 3, 2014 steyrc, Slovenia For Lizard Boss: Godzilla 1957, by jmathews Jun 12, 2014 https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:361914 Jeff Mathews, jmathews Colorado For Booking Agent: Pd4Pic Clipart / Shutter Stock Man Running Breifcase #3 http://laoblogger.com/clipart-man-running-briefcase.html#gal_post_48892_business-man-run-clipart-hd-3.jpg Found by doing Google Image search for “Businessman with briefcase clipart” Set on base made in Sketchup and modified to avoid slicer problems For Robot Roadie: Upper Body Ultimaker Robot https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:11551 by Martijn Sep 14, 2011 Martijn Elserman Martijn, Netherlands Lower Tracks B9 Environmental Control Robot (Lost in Space) https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:158085 by cerberus333 Sep 29, 2013 Perry Engel, cerberus333, Connecticut

BRET H. HART REFERENCES As I have mentioned in my first Print Log, I had created some earlier simple one player Bret video games using the Scratch programming language. Bret enjoyed these and then challenged me to make a more complex multiplayer game. This was beyond what I could program using the Scratch language. However, the idea of using 3D Printing to create the pieces for a traditional board game reopened the possibilities of making this happen. Below is the email that Bret had sent me with his idea, (Please Note that I have annotated it to better show the ideas he wanted).

“BRET HART Fri, Apr 7, 2017, 8:26 PM Paul, I have a game idea. PLOT: Each of the three (now four) MOON MEN are plotting against one another for: 1) band dominance 2) and royalties. During game scenarios, each of the Moon Men tries to 3) break into their Antarctic Studio to: 4) steal or sabotage one of the other's equipment. I don't know where to take it from there, or how to segue into another scene, but I've included a bunch of images and the audio attachments. Maybe this one can be the super opus that outdoes all the previous ones, Take your time.”

Some of my Objectives of this Board Game were: 1) it could be played by 2-4 people, 2) it would have a ‘procedural layout,’ meaning that the playing area was not fixed and could change from game to game, 3) that it would combine a variety of game mechanics, and 4) that some Art Products would be created during the game, (these did not involve anything connected to the 3D Printing and so are not covered in these reports).

And YES!, despite some of the seemingly fantastic stories about him, Bret H. Hart is real; here are some links to various sites of his musical endeavors with the band Moon Men. Facebook - MOON MEN Official Genuine Real Human-Interface Hub https://www.facebook.com/groups/272370493206022/ YouTube - MOON MEN "AMAZING SCIENCE FICTION STORIES" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgdKfdc6seM&feature=youtu.be&list=PLqDj4k8TD1hs08JghxTxW7iogqAKaHjPE&fbclid=IwAR3y2H4S_6hvvOFyf5tEFPMIFm0WqFQrDH8eFy7-U4gOy0ZSo-R9i6JmLkM YouTube - Moon Men Reviews https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDM0-ni6h2g&feature=youtu.be&t=172&fbclid=IwAR0ANdO7LUJ9z4gAduRtRsxCbhpuoDzp6pZdRcvRXwZaCb4PWsyaFrTzTxo Music Site - bandcamp - Discover amazing new music and directly support the artists who make it. https://bhhstuff.bandcamp.com/album/moon-men-amazing-science-fiction-stories-2017-digital

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The Physical Game is done, but the Rules are still being fleshed out. For more information on this please go to https://davisonlearning.weebly.com/moon-men-game.html

A LOOK AT MY SCHEDULE FOR THIS FINAL PROJECT

rev

. PLANNED ALTERNATIVE

Mo # Dy Dt Ideas Design Print Activity1 SUN 4 PROPOSAL - GAME X 0 0 REPORT Rhino Water

Bottle

2 Mon 5 Game Board X Game Board X 0

3 Tue 6 Surface Des ign X Surface Des ign X 0

4 Wed 7 Box X Box X 0

5 Thur 8 Brain Boss X Bra in Boss X 0

6 Fri 9 Hinge System X 0 Brain Boss TEST

PRINT

X

7 Sat 10 Cthulhu Boss X Cthulhu Boss X Cthulhu Boss TEST

PRINT

X

8 SUN 11 0 0 0 REPORT #1

9 Mon 12 Gas Mask Boss X Gas Mask Boss X 0

10 Tue 13 Lizard Boss , Agent X Lizard, Agent, Re-

Des ign Gas Mask

X GasMask TEST,

Lizard TEST

X SKetchUp Revolve,

Grey Sca le Test

11 Wed 14 Flat Game, Tokens X Flat Game, Roadie,

Tokens

X 0

12 Thur 15 0 0 0 ERRANDS get

colored fi lament

Ottawa13 Fri 16 Roadie piece X 0 0

14 Sat 17 0 0 TokenTests , Agent

TEST

X

15 SUN 18Thanksgiving Break

0 0 Gas Mask 2 TEST,

Flat Board TEST

X REPORT #2

16 Mon 19 PRODUCTION RUNS

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

0 0 BLUE Boss , Agent,

Roadie

PRODUCTION RUNS

<<<<<<<<<<<<

17 Tue 20 0 Des ign New Tokens

18mm

X YELLOW Boss , Agent,

Roadie

X

18 Wed 21 0 Re-des ign Board

6mm, Quick Toen

Change 16mm

X GREEN Boss , Agent,

Roadie; RED Ross ,

Agent, Roadie; RED

Board

X

19 Thur 22 0 0 0 ERRANDS, No

Printing

20 Fri 23 0 Re-des ign Board

4mm

X WHITE Tokens (24) X

21 Sat 24 0 0 YELLOW Board X

22 SUN 25 0 0 BLUE Board, RED

Board, GREEN Board

X REPORT #3, CORE

PROJECT DONE

23 Mon 26 Try Two Color Des ign

24 Tue 27 Research Scanners

25 Wed 28 Scan: Qlone

26 Thur 29 Des ign and Sl ice

Two Color Model

27 Fri 30

28 Sat 1

29 SUN 2 REPORT #4

Supplements

30 Mon 3

31 Tue 4 REPORT #5

SUMMATIVE

Nov

embe

r D

ecem

ber