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Description as a Tweet:

We made a fun 3D-printable, secret-message object generator! From one point of view, the object's silhouette forms a message! Turn it 90 degrees and another message appears! Customize both messages! I suggest and - you have such a pretty name afterall

Inspiration:

I've been making these illusions by hand for my friends and family for a few years now. I always knew it could be done procedurally, but I never quite gathered up the gall to automate the tedious process --UNTIL NOW!

What it does:

The website takes in two text user inputs (uppercase English letters only) and a color and generates a 3D silhouette optical illusion which can be viewed virtually and exported to an .stl file which can then be 3D printed IRL.

How we built it:

First we set out to make the user interface ...

Technologies we used:

HTML/CSS
Javascript
Python

Challenges we ran into:

Juggling libraries, a major change in trajectory and BUGS BUGS BUGS BUGS BUGS (We're sure we're not alone on that front).

Accomplishments we're proud of:

Rolling with the punches. The "major change in trajectory" happened around midnight when we learned that the library we were trying to rely on didn't accept concave meshes. This was a big blow as all letters in the english language, apart from "I", are concave. We decided to do the unthinkable: compute every combination of letters along with pairs of split letters for a total of 6,084 3D object files to be stored and referenced later (see python code "automate.py", and folder intersections on our github) In the end, it took us 4 hours to generate them all, and the code actually works faster because of it.

What we've learned:

I learned about front-end development, GitHub, VS-code and working in a 2-man dream team.

What's next:

Debugging and making the export feature work.

Built with:

We used Three.js for rendering the final product, fusion360 to model the 78 base objects, python to automate the matching and intersecting of 78^2 = 6,084 final objects, Micosoft teams, Microsoft VS code, snapchat and github to communicate/collaborate, jetbrains' webstorm and pycharm IDEs to code and lastly our blood sweat and tears to make all the gears run smoothly (There's no better lubricant!)

3D-Printable Secret Message / Optical Illusion Generator