Mobile Device Project:

For this project we needed a concept that was a mobile, portable or integrated device and after brainstorming with the team in the first few meetings, we decided to go for our most favoured concept between us all which is the integrated water bottle, later be known as the ‘H2GO’. We believe that the water bottle, which is an extremely common and cheap product, lacks any revolutionary twist on the design and technology. Our bottle concept would include the following;
- LCD screen
- Batteries
- Water level sensor
- Bluetooth connectivity (allows our app concept to sync to the bottle)
- Built-in vitamin filter

This would allow users with busy lifestyles to keep hydrated with notifications via our app to drink some water every hour (recommended guidance) and to diffuse vitamins into the water bottle through our filter. The LCD screen would display information such as water level, time since last drink, progress on the recommended intake of 2 litres of water a day and more through regular developments and updates.

Once the research was completed, our design team went onto sketching different bottle designs and shapes. After reviewing the sketches, as a team we all agreed on the bamboo outer shell with a stainless-steel inner wall to keep the product ergonomic, environmentally friendly, reusable, extremely efficient, functional and aesthetic. The bamboo shell was primarily based on our research showing its eco-friendly use but also adds style and colour to the design as an added bonus. The lid was a very simple screw top lid, although, the simple design didn’t lack in the functional sense. The screw lid allows us to easily design a compartment to house the batteries to power the technology behind our water bottle.

With the design complete, our CAD team member used the design and planned measurements to draw the product in CAD whilst the design team moved onto branding and marketing information and one team member from the design team worked on the Arduino’s and software/sensors for the product to show how the product would function. As our CAD member was modelling the bottle, I moved onto modelling the assets for our proposed scene. I worked on modelling the tents, tables, benches and festival flag system whilst the other 3D member worked on the agricultural side of the scene. Using references, I found online I was able to model the products relatively easily, however, I wanted to add a dynamic function to these models to make the fabric look more realistic through reacting with gravity. When the team all agreed the models look good, I moved onto adding the ‘ncloth’ dynamic (through the ‘FX’ tab in Maya) to the tent and flag setup. Using the constraints function, I was able to select the points which will not react with gravity, double checking to select all the points I needed. Next, the frame range from 1-200 which wasn’t long enough form my computer to work out the computations so I changed the range from 1-2000 allowing the ‘ncloth’ attribute to play to a point I was happy with the way the models reacted to gravity and stopped the sequence at frame 900. I exported the models as .FBX to our other 3D member to add to the scene created in Blender and added materials to the models since this could not be transferred through .FBX files.