Future Assembly: CNC Sculpture

Future Assembly was a client project that blended CAD, 3D sculpting and advanced manufacturing to produce a large-scale
art installation for an exhibition.

Presented at the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale (La Biennale di Venezia) Venice, Italy, 2021). ‘How will we live together’

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I was approached by a client to create a topographically accurate 3D model of a quarry for the purposes of CNC milling a large-scale model. 3D sculpting was required to achieve the fine, organic details and specific texture of the quarry walls.

Due to the sheer scale of the model, it was designed to be milled out in sections then later assembled. The houses and blocks were milled out separately and attached as the final set dressing.

The model was sculpted entirely in Blender 2.93 and exported out as an STL, which was then milled out on a five-axis CNC machine. The houses were also modelled in Blender using low-poly techniques.

A balance of mesh density (equating to milling time) to detail was required to finish the project on time due to the very short timeframe of this project. Voxel remeshing was utlised to help smooth errors prior to manufacture, although a fair amount of manual editing was still required to fix intersecting faces.

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