Jesse J. Griffith: Project 1 - Found Digital Object Assemblage

Week 1

Firstly, I have very little modeling experience. I was thinking about scanning in a small sculpture but I wanted to refresh myself of the digital modeling process. I took a very fast paced Maya crash course during my undergrad and a lot of the Maya modeling process has been forgotten. I experimented a lot with Mudbox but couldn't get a hang of the sculpting process. So I resorted back to the basics and made a simple beer bottle shape.

1. Found a good reference image for the build, added it to an image plane.

2. Getting the hang of switching between views again.

3. I began with a simple Cylinder shape.

4. From that, I extruded the base and the neck of the bottle and shaped accordingly.

5. Finished bottle.

I know this is very rudimentary as far as modeling complexity (especially after seeing many of the class' models), but I am taking this course to introduce me to the 3D Fabrication technology to see if that is an avenue that I'd like to pursue in the future. So another goal for this class would be to further develop my 3D modeling skills while keeping the fabrication specifications in mind.

Week 2

Hello everybody. After last class I was very excited after finding out I can mash objects together. So I continued with an early I idea that I thought would be very interesting in investigating. My project refocused on the production of a digital assemblage piece.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assemblage_(art)

Utilizing found digital objects (and my rudimentary beer bottle) I smashed together the objects to create a new piece. Below I've listed my steps.

1. The three main components of the assemblage was my beer bottle, a wine glass, and wine bottle.

2. Using these objects, I duplicated, adjusted scale and orientation to make half of the skull.

3. I then grouped the objects so that they still remained all closed objects mashed together.

4. Duplicated the group and flipped it across the z axis?

5. Smashed my now two groups into one form,

6. Adjusted some of the angles for groups to make the final object. I'm pretty happy with it. It's sort of alien/monstrous in away and kind of humorous as well.

Here were some pictures of examples of some assemblages that I enjoyed and I wanted include some of the aesthetic qualities in my sculpture.

I also thought about adding a bit more complexity to the external surface of the object. But I'd like to wait to see if this assemblage would be good to print.

Week 4 - 5

Loading the file into Shapeways I could tell there was a huge issue with my mesh as far as the objects smashed together. If you look into the bottom right corner, you will notice my object would cost around $300.

So I've been wrestling with this model for weeks trying to get everything cleaned up enough to print. I loaded it into Rhino and the model isn't even considered a solid, but a mesh. I eventually tried to convert it so they operated as solids, but because of the intersections Rhino continued failing with creating unions.

Week 6

Nevertheless, Keyshot was able to import the models so I could get some nice renders of this object.

I used two textures that were transparent to match the wine glass and beer bottle content. This one I used the Liquid Beer texture that gave it a nice browning in some of the overlapping areas which I thought was quite nice.

And this one I used a clear glass texture to mimic just the glass objects such as the wine bottles and stem glasses.