For this project we were assigned to create a laser-cut representation of the Rice War Owl as shown below.

The first thing we did was create a series of circles at different power levels in order to determine a baseline for the effects of the laser cutter. We used a speed of 500 then did powers of 10, 20, 30 and 40 in order to create a spectrum. Below are the circles that resulted.

We then attempted to cut our owl, but ran into a problem when the laser cutter began cutting out an outline of every aspect of the owl, and which resulted in a collection of all the individual pieces.

Above is a picture of what this mistake resulted in when stopped part way through.

Once we fixed this issue we began testing various powers for each individual color. This was our first attempt, but we didn’t like the lack of contrast between the black parts and the white parts (colors referring to original).

This was our next attempt, but again there wasn’t enough contrast, this time between the black and yellow areas.

This was the owl that resulted from our final power settings. For this design we cut out the perimeter of the owl. This allowed us to decrease the power level for the black areas while still showing where the owl started and stopped. This therefore created more contrast between the black parts and the white/yellow parts.

We made this owl as a smaller prototype and once we were satisfied with the coloring we created a larger model shown below.