“Ichnos” – CNC Milled Generative Ornament

“Ichnos v.01” is the first CNC milled derivative of the “Ichnos” series, a project I have been working on in collaboration with Wade Martin of AxisCutParts in Auburn Washington. Ichnology  is the branch of geology that deals with traces of organismal behavior, such as burrows and footprints. “Ίχνος” is the trace in ancient and modern Greek. The design of Ichnos is based on the traces of  grey-scale image samples, those traces are deformed , tessellated, distorted and finally smoothened into embossed meshes. The algorithm is developed in Grasshopper3D, contains some VB.Net scripting and part of it can be accessed here.

The produced geometry is exported from rhino, then imported into the CNC software where using surface machining processes is roughed out with .125 inch call nose, while  the finish pass is made with a .0625 inches by a step-over of .003 inches. The overall process took over 4 hours to be completed. The material used in the sample is a solid 12 mm thick white corian surface of 5×10 inches.