Mandala Effect

A gift for a friends wedding

Some good friends of mine were getting married!

So instead of just buying a generic wedding gift, I wanted to build something special. Sarah, (the bride) really likes sunflowers, and even had them in her bouqet, so naturally this was the thing to make.

Towards the end of 2024, I borrowed a Snapmaker from Daniel Lopez Lomeli, a good friend of mine from my university days who is also an incredible artist. 

If you want to know more about his work, you can check it out at his website

The Snapmaker is a 3 in 1 tool that does CNC, Laser and 3D printing by switching the toolhead and base. For a beginner, it is a great starti

ng point, and I am super grateful to get something free to play around on. To be honest, I wasnt a big fan of the laser cutting process, especially the fumes and safety issues. The 3D printer was OK, but the technology is evolving so fast and becoming more affordable, so older models are slower and less capable.  

The first step was to build an algorithm for the disk florets in the centre. Although in the real world they would be lots of fine needles, the change of this breaking was too risky. 

Luckily, I already had a Grasshopper algorithm that perfectly produced a pattern similar enough, inspired by a mystical vision I had once. 

From the base curves, the object was modelled in Rhino manually, then converted into a series of curves.

A C# node then sorts these into stacks to output as a Data Tree.

Another C# node then converts this into G-Code for the machine to read.  

To save the machine some time, I manually cut the corners