Description
Sighweave is a contemporary silver jewelry collection, subtitled Flight Woven in Silver. It grew out of the author's deep fascination with the fluid grace of hummingbirds and is dedicated to someone whose love for these winged creatures is truly boundless: the author's wife. With textile in mind, the author developed six hummingbird figures for the collection.
It started with an AI image: a textile hummingbird generated in Gemini and Midjourney, inspired by the work of Iris van Herpen, which was then brought to life in 3D with Tripo.
To be cast in silver with the lost-wax method, the thinnest surface must be at least 0.5 mm thick, and the wings were less than 0.15 mm. So the author conditioned the pieces for fabrication in Blender: reducing the polygon count of the Tripo model, placing a 0.5 mm sphere at each polygon intersection, then smoothing the piece with the Smooth function, using eight iterations of Normal Smooth.
After this conditioning, the author printed all the parts in wax, then prepared and separated each one. At the time of submission, the only step left was casting, planned to begin the following week. The whole collection was made from scratch for this project; Claude, Lychee and Uniz were also part of the process.
How Tripo was used
Tripo turned the AI concept into 3D: after generating images of a textile hummingbird in Gemini and Midjourney, the author brought it to life as a 3D model with Tripo. The models were then adapted in Blender for lost-wax casting and printed in wax.
