Following Halloween the decorations started to come down but the Pizza Planet rocket stayed on my desk. Christmas was coming up fast and I wanted to bring in some kind of tree to put at my desk. The Pizza Planet rocket was still on my desk since Halloween and a few coworkers would always move it around in different positions whenever they passed by. Once it was upright on its fins I was looking at it and had an idea to make the rocket the Christmas Tree! Almost as though they fused together or over hundreds of years a tree grew into the rocket. With my limited art skills I decided on a more abstract low poly Christmas tree that I could design in Blender. I already had a digital model of the rocket that I could add these other objects around to make sure everything fit together. First step was the trunk which I was able to find on thingiverse and scale to fit below the rocket. Next up were 2 tiers of branches made with low poly cylinders and cones shaped at an angle that felt proportionate with the rocket. Having both together in the same digital environment made it every easy to move shapes around, and even color them, to make sure that everything lined up. Once the shapes were formed it was time to make them fit on the rocket. Currently they were all still solid objects so they kind of existed in the same space and were just clipping together in the digital model. Blender has an easy mathematical formula of a feature to select 2 objects and have one of them trimmed down so no parts are clipping together with the other. I was able to do that for the tree and very quickly had some models ready to 3d print.
The 3d printing was pretty fast, and from the positioning on the print bed some defects on the bottom of the tree even came off as extra features which was nice. This then followed my usual steps, albeit faster, of prepping, spray priming, and then finishing off the pieces. After dry fitting them to the tree I started to wonder if I could get some lights on too. A quick amazon search and I found some fairy lights that would scale perfectly. These were battery powered lights but using one of the spare mini arduinos I had with no code needed I was able to get a constant 5 volts DC power easily so multiple strings of the lights could be powered. The final steps was attaching everything together. There was a cubby space in the bottom half of the tree to hold the arduino and in the slots for the fins I was able to string the lights out. A little bit of hot glue to hold everything in place and I had a finished tree. After brining it into work I had one final touch to add to it, a star on top. Back to thingiverse for the power star. A quick print and finishing and I glued this one in place to help celebrate the festive season!!
