Sowmya Rajendran: Project 1: Form

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Week 1:

I’ve always been interested in figure studies, so I decided to translate one of my old figure drawings into a 3-D model. I wanted to explore the organic forms and beautiful S-curves of the human form – especially focusing on the line of action of the figure. First, I looked at some of my old figure drawings for reference.

French artist Gaston Lachaise perfectly juxtaposes a solid, weighted form with  fluid  gestures giving the piece, aptly titled "Floating Figure", a weightless and serene quality. 

I really loved the curves of the second gesture drawing, so I decided to build something similar, but with a little more exaggeration. In Maya, I started with a cube and used the extrude and edge loop tool to build the torso and bottom half of the figure.

I continued extruding quite a bit more to build the rest of the areas, and I also used a very handy tool called the sculpt geometry tool to soften the edges, which resulted in a smoother form.  I wanted the form to be asymmetrical in nature, in order to capture the movement of the gesture drawings, but create balance at the same time; so, I pulled the left arm out, and I pushed the hips on the other side out a little as well. 

And here's the final design!

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Week 2:

For this week, I decided to fix some areas of my model (the figure felt too stiff). First, I separated the legs and positioned one leg in front of the other to give the figure more movement. After hearing some feedback from a fellow classmate, I also brought down the chest area a tad bit and rotated the torso to exaggerate the pose even more. 

New and Improved Model

No naked edges found. Off to printing!

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Week 3:

I uploaded my model to Shapeways and it passed the initial tests. The material I chose was white strong & flexible plastic. Shapeways sent me an e-mail a day later letting me know that my model had passed the manual test, and it was ready to be printed out. I'm pretty excited to see how it will turn out! 

I found hollowing out your model can save you a ton of money. If anyone is interested there's also a 10% discount for students and the promo code for that is C65GX.

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Week 4:

I really loved the weathered texture of the Floating Figure sculpture (pictured above), so I applied the Steel Ultra Scratched material in black to my sculpture to replicate the same look and feel of Lachaise's sculpture. The lighting environment I used was 3 point Sharp Low 2k.

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Week 6:

Here is the final printed model I received from Shapeways. 

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