Study the SLIDE documentation on the web.
You may also look at additional example files in ../CODE .
After reading some of the background information, familiarize yourself with the "Geometry" statements, and with the first five ""Geometry Node" statements, "object" through "torus," as well as with the "polyline" and "sweep" commands.
Prepare some small SLIDE program files, using one or two of the above primitives, and view these files with the SLIDE viewer.
After you become comfortable of creating some slices out of spheres and tori, and stacking them on top of one another, try to generate a sweep along some simple knotted piece-wise linear space curve. If you know how to deal with B-splines you may generate a smooth curve through space, and correspondingly a smooth worm.
Then, when you are comfortable with this, try to combine some of these elements to make an object that looks like a coffee mug or like a tea pot -- i.e., some hollow partial piece of a sphere or cylinder with an attached handle, and perhaps a spout, generated with a sweep.
and a couple of recent unusual designs ...
The next step is to make this object description consistent enough for fabrication on a layered Solid Free-form Fabrication (SFF) machine. We will aim our current designs at a Fused-Deposition Modeling (FDM) machine. The machine from Stratasys comes with its own preprocessing software: QuickSlice.
QuickSlice hasa been installed on the machines in 349 Soda,
and runs nicely !
It runs local -- unlike SLIDE -- so it is available even if the cross-mounts don't work !
You will examine your shapes generated in SLIDE with this program, cutting it into the individual layers from which the object will be composed, and then inspecting these layers with QuickSlice to make sure that the machine understands the shape the way that you had intended.
You will also create the supports necessary to support extreme overhangs that slope out by more than 45 degrees. Finally you generate the actual paths along which the plastic filament will be deposited, and ask for an estimation of the build time.
A more detailed enumeration of the steps that you should go through can be found in "Running your Design through QuickSlice".
The final step is to make this object functional as well a manufacturable. The walls should be of reasonable thickness, the handle firmly attached, the spout hollow and connected to the belly of the tea pot, ...
