A follow-up to the Faking Fire post:

Today I had a little time to cut a cardboard box and install a fan, a piece of fabric, 2 nightlights, some red glitter garland and two plain-ol’ wood logs to create a fake woodstove. I still need to paint the outside flat black. While not perfect, the fake fire is highly convincing; I’ve caught myself feeling the “heat”, yet the fake fire is blowing cold air!

Those few brave souls that know me may tell you that I am obsessed with my “art projects”, often to the point of discussing them.

The art project doesn’t have to be good or virtuous like RoGR or micRo; rather this is what I do on my rare “day off”.

A small part of a long-term creative goal for me: faking fire. The “Psychic Fire”, a thing which is warming yet cold. In my hitherto unpublished desires to recreate atmospheres in non-sequitur spaces (ahem), I should emulate a few elements noted for their comforting presence. Primarily fire. Fire is innate, yet remarkably abstract; a flickering light can suffice so long as the flicker conforms to our “cellular memory” of fire’s flicker; hell, a reasonable facsimile will suffice. Those great little LED “candles” come to mind. (Anecdote: A bartending friend of mine bought some LED candles (with her tips) to save her clients from flaming sleeve syndrome, yet the LED candles were all stolen in just one weekend.)

For some reason, a few years ago, I became crazed with the notion to adapt certain jejune materials such as fake melamine brick paneling: using convincing “treatments” on the materials to achieve a properly believable yet temporary condition. Yep.

So…to fake some fire. I found myself in the presence of some MalWart fabric tonight, and somehow came home with a few fabrics that seemed good for faking fire.

It is now 10am after that event, and I am hunched around my “fire” still. I have these fabrics that I have cut to shapes and “experimented” with atop the fan. (I was told back when I was like…12, that a fan, some silk, and some clever lighting could make a “simple fire” for stage, at a distance. Here is the rig.

A 12′ fan, a small halogen lamp, a kid’s shoebox for a “log”.

But the effects are beautiful. In only a few minutes I had results. Here’s the first try:

A few minutes later I had a 14″ “flame” on the kiddy shoebox. .

These “finger flames” are better than the “real thing”.

The patterns can be beautiful, creepy, biomorphic and abstract.

A vampire bat defeats a devil’s claw from entry into our world via the shoebox.

I thought this “fading” effect was convincing. My camera can’t capture the “real”.

I figured not much could be scarier than my own face on a Halloween pumpkin, so I set out to carve my face on a pumpkin using Lumenlab’s DIY RoGR Robot kit.

The first issue was to get a head shot. They say beauty and brains don’t go together; they were wrong twice!

Next was to create the g-code to run the robot. We use the incredibly great open source software called “EMC2” as our machine controller, which just so happens to come with a great little program called “Image to gcode” that let’s you go from a grayscale indexed image to a depthmap g-code. Basically I used the Gimp to index the above image to 8 shades of gray, then imported the image to EMC2 with Image to g-code. Nothing to it!

Next was to get the pumpkin on the RoGR (Lumenlab’s Robloks Gantry Robot)…

The amount of Z clearance is rather huge for a big gourd, but the RoGR is not a normal “CNC mill”. The RoGR was designed to be a modular robotics manufacturing platform, and one of the things I was sure to build into the machine was the ability to easily raise and lower the working platform. In less than 5 minutes, my coworker and I had the bed dropped and the pumpkin mounted.

I then imported my indexed PNG to EMC2. The generated tool paths look like this:

Nothing left but to fire it up! The job was run at 120IPM and took about 20 minutes to complete.

EW!

Hard to believe that’s me!

Here’s a video!

I used an air nozzle to blow the puree out of the carving. It was the consistency of baby food. When it was all said and done, I think it came out great! You can learn more about RoGR in the forums.