When designing a chess piece I thought a lot about the roles each piece plays in the game. I decided that the King should be a large lumbering beast since he can move in any direction but only one space at a time. Once I had decided to make a king piece, I thought about a theme. I came to the conclusion that I should make a TRex piece. Not only am I fascinated by dinosaurs, but TRex means King of the Tyrant Lizards. This makes it a perfect pick for a King piece of a dino themed chess set.
It was very difficult to model this chess piece. I ended up remodeling it three or four times due to trying to make this organic shape fit within a reasonable poly count.
The most difficult part for me was laying the pieces out in pepakura. I must have redone this process eight times.
Below are the next two steps where I took my pepakura files and first transferred them to Illustrator. There I made sure the lines were properly segmented for folding. I also made sure that the color was correct for laser cutting. Then I moved the AI files into Rhino so I could make sure they were formatted properly for the laser cutting machine. I probably redid these steps six or so times. I would make a small mistake somewhere and have to redo the entire process. This project was the most difficult for me and if I was to redo it, I would pick a much simpler shape with fewer faces.
My files did not end up getting printed due to my many errors when creating the Rhino files. I did get my final version in on the dropbox before the cutoff time. The last issue I did not see was that my inner cut lines were much to small and the cutting process would take an hour per sheet. My final files were on 2.5 sheets of cardboard. This would be unreasonable to cut these because it would take too much time out of other people's projects. In the future I would make sure I have more uniform faces on my 3D model so that I can have larger inner cut lines. This would help with both assembly and cut time.
I choose to render my lizard King in keyshot with a black plastic look because it is supposed to be a chess piece and ideally it would be made of plastic.
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