Creating in Rhino

River Tables and Shelves

I’ve been thinking about a topographic table concept that I would like to render in Rhino, cut on a CNC table, and bring to life using resin and an LED light bar controlled by an Arduino.

Here is a sketch of what I would like to do:

Today, I jumped into Rhino, a CAD design program, and learned some of the basics, and was able to model my current desk. Rhino is an awesome program and creating this basic 3D model was fairly straightforward.

Before cutting into a solid slab of wood as big as a table, I am going to try a narrower shelf-sized slab. For this assignment and for the practical purposes of prototyping a CNC cut of a river, I created this shelf model.

I went ahead and experimented with creating a river, but I got these errors. I also couldn’t get the angles quite right along the riverbanks. I would like something much more organic, but this is as far as I got.

I also was a bit perplexed with exporting. For some reason, my models exported with odd missing parts. For a while, I tried to export OBJ files into Adobe Dimension to put on some fancy trimmings and environmental effects, but they didn’t import into Dimension at all. I attempted a suggested import and export from Cinema4D back into Dimension, but that was unsuccessful.

Without fancy material looks and an odd missing hole, here is my table: