Hey everyone! Thanks for coming back for another week of blog posts! This week saw great progress with our model, plenty of fun with my fellow interns, and a reminder of a very valuable life lesson that I almost lost sight of.
Let’s start with the lesson: a reminder to not be reluctant to change. More specifically I suppose, a reminder that every path doesn’t have to be linear: sometimes it takes a single step in another direction to realize how to get to where you want to be. This lesson manifested itself, in our woes of 3-D modeling.
To be blunt, Rhino was not working. Every single time it felt like progress was being made on the model, it seemed like there was just one command, or one exception in the software, that would prevent the model from looking how we wanted it to look. In all honesty, I am not very well-versed in 3-D modeling, so I was spending hours watching tutorial videos and perpetually entering commands in the software to seemingly no avail. The thought crossed my mind to change platforms and start over, but it felt like if I did, all my prior effort would’ve been wasted. It was foolish pride, but I wondered what would have been the point of all of those weeks of hard work, just to change everything in the end?
As we reached the 4th of July holiday, I figured it would be good to keep working on the model during the break. Rhino is a paid platform, so I wouldn’t be able to work on the files on my personal laptop without purchasing an account. That’s when the option presented itself again to make the switch and start anew. Every single Rhino course on YouTube just so happened to have recommendations for courses on another platform on the side: Blender. I had heard of Blender before as an animation software but never knew that it had capabilities for 3-D modeling for 3-D printing. As Blender is free software, I finally decided to download it, just to see if maybe it had any insight to help me understand Rhino better. And just like that, the amount of progress I had made in Rhino in 3 weeks with Rhino, I made in just over a day in this new platform!
For me, this platform was much easier to use, and effectively it made our model look much better too. When we met with the clinicians this past Wednesday, they were big fans of how the model looked on Blender, they were very much in support! The same could be said about the texture and consistency of the BrickinTheYard gel silicone material we experimented with last week. That being the case, it looks like this is the material we are going to stick with from here on!
Our next move is to experiment with tumor design, developing a suspension mechanism for all the different lesion types, and figuring out how to incorporate thickening back into the model, as the BrickInTheYard silicone does not capture the same effect as the eco-flex when construction is added. As far as the lesion types, we’ve developed a 3D-print for a fibroadenoma, and have all of our hard lesions (made out of air-dry clay) ready to go. We’re currently brainstorming materials for making a cyst and hope to have an idea by next week.
The suspension mechanism has caused us a bit of trouble, as the silicone is not fully curing around our lesions. For some reason, the materials seem to inhibit the curing process, so we’ll be experimenting next week with different ways of preventing this inhibition. Finally, to figure out thickening, it seems as though we’re going to have to incorporate both types of silicone: Ecoflex 00-30 and the BrickIntheYard gel, to capture that effect. Dr. Taylor had suggested the idea of maybe partitioning the model into separate portions, and finding out a way to combine them all together in our final product. We’ve found that the two silicone materials do in fact stick together, so we’ll be experimenting with this throughout next week!
Outside of work, we’ve had so much fun! I’ve really been able to connect with many of my colleagues, getting to better know the SEED and international interns over lunches and just hanging out. By nature, I tend to be a pretty introverted person, but everyone has been so welcoming, and it has let me come out of my shell quite a bit! We played basketball as a group on Saturday and had a fantastic time. I played basketball in high school, so this served as a bit of a throwback to my peak competitive days!
We also went to a soccer game on Saturday! In my humble opinion, we were by far the most hype people in the audience. We made it on the jumbotron and may even be used in promo material for the Houston Dash! It was such a good time, and I really felt as though I connected with my fellow interns.
We’re starting to enter the final stretch here! We’re only two weeks out from the end of the internship and our final showcase. It truly has been amazing to see how this project has progressed, and I look forward to seeing our final product come to life! Thank you all for sticking along for my journey so far, and for tuning into this week’s blog post. Hope to see you back here next week!