I first came across Andrew Myers work in 2012 from social media. I thought it was a really interesting blend of mural and sculpture. I wanted to create my own take on this style, but decided to leverage my knowledge of CNC programming to help speed up the process.
The Process:
The work started off as a staged portrait session. From there, I did downselection and lighting correction, then brought the image into Solidworks, where I was able to create a trace outline of the two subjects. I attempted to generate the necessary hole pattern but this proved to be too much for Solidwork's parametric system to handle. Instead I moved into DraftSight, where I was able to generate a repeating hole pattern. From there, I took that DXF and brought it into MasterCAM, where I was able to generate a toolpath for a router to drill.
I routed the main board at the MIT Hobby Shop. As a fun aside, I first tried a more conservative approach to peck the wood at the halfway point to clear debris, but found that the runtime was 16 hours, longer than the shop was open! I ended up using a 1/8" carbide bit at 10kRPM and ran a full rapid through every hole, which got the time down to 6 hours. This was 1.25 holes per second! At a crash half way through the router had a software crash and I had to manually edit the G-code to get the tool back on path, because rerunning the program at rapid to get to the current step would have taken just as long as running the program!
The next step was to build out the frame structure, cleating points, and then outline the facial features for reference. Since I'm not that talented of an artist, I ended up borrowing a projector to project my reference photo onto the
