Kendall Corless and Daedra Evans - Project Final - Chess Piece

We began the project by researching images of unicorns for our chess piece. the reference images can be cited here: andalusian, unicorn 1.

The next step we took for the chess piece was for Daedra to draw the basic concept for the unicorn chess piece. he drawing was scanned in with a flatbed scanner then used by Kendall to model the piece.

Kendall began modeling the piece in Zbrush to create the basic high polygon look we wanted to achieve for the piece. Once the model was completed, Kendall brought the model into Maya to retopologize it and reduce the poly count. The basic form of the shape was taking place as the polys were lowered. 

Once the model was completed we brought the model into Keyshot to experiment with the type of materials that would suit the chess piece. We decided to use the black glass material for the chess piece to have a classy look for the piece. While playing with the various maetieals we used several glass image textures we thought would suit the piece.We rendered our images from Keyshot to show the design of the piece and highlight its shape. We have one of the unicorn's ear damaged looking, so he looks meaner and ready for battle!

Once we rendered in Keyshot we took the model into Pepakura Designer 3 to unfold the model and layout the sheets for printing. Daedra, unfolded the model making sure to follow edge loops in a logical manner to create a model to easily to piece together. The numbers were added and the mountain, cutting, and valley lines were color coded. The files were exported as .DXF and .EPS files. 

Once the Pepakura files were exported, Daedra, brought them into Illustrator to create the file for printing. An odd thing that did happen when working with Illustrator, the DXF file did not line up correctly when placed over the . EPS file. However, changing the units to mm and 1 to 1 ratio quickly resolved that issue and everything lined up perfectly.

Our last step before assembly is to take the Illustrator file export it as a DXF and bring it into Rhino to make sure all our layers are formatted properly and ready to print. We had to scale our project down a bit from Illustrator to Rhino when the lines were appearing solid, even though they were actually dashed. We laid out the rectangle for the laser bed 48" x 24" and placed the objects on the sheets. We used five sheets for the entire chess piece which can be seen below.

Now that we have completed all the workflow for the files we are ready to print. We used the cardboard provided for our material and the resulting chess piece turned out great!