SHOAL FLY BY



SIAL Team:
    Mark Burry
    Andrew Maher


SIAL have been working with the artists Michael Bellemo and Cat Macleod to design develop their maquettes of the Shoal Fly By series, public art for the Melbourne Docklands precinct.

The artwork consists of four separate sculptures which depict the form and movement of surfaces in water and are to be constructed from stainless steel metal tubing.


Shoal, the first of four, completed and on site

SIAL researchers and summer students worked with the artists to develop a digital design process, beginning with translating the physical to the digital using SIAL's laser scanning measurement techniques. Algorithms were developed to approximate the wires to a series of tangential arcs, as nearly all tube bending is done using two dimensional arcs. This involved collaborating with the fabricators and constraining the design process to fabrication tolerances. In addition to the digital models that were developed, documentation of the tubes was principally in the form of spreadsheets, extracting spatial information which can ultimately be input for computer numerically controlled tube bending machines.

SIAL
Mark Burry
Andrew Maher
Peter Wood
SIAL Summer Students
Lee-Anne Khor
Rebecca Naughtin

Tube Bending by BENDTECH Industries
Fabrication by Olivetti Engineering


Scanning in progress and resultant point cloud


Reconstructed Model