Ashley D Goodenough: Pepakura "On the Surface"

Concept: My Pepakura design is called “On the Surface.” I was inspired by water gardens I’ve been to in DFW and Atlanta, and wanted to recreate the feeling of serenity and peace that the koi ponds at botanical and water gardens have.  I also wanted to play with the idea that the ground could be like the surface of a pond, reflecting the objects just above it and “completing” an image. I designed a koi fish half out of water, swimming between two differently sized lily pads that create balance and visual harmony.

Modeling: I modeled my two objects (lily pad and koi fish) in Maya, then brought them into Rhino for some final editing. After making sure I definitely had a mesh object, I exported both as .objs and brought them into Pepakura Designer. Using Pepakura, I cut both models into strategic loops, then unfolded them and arranged them on the grids. I ended up with two 24x48” sheets for the koi, 2 for the large lily pad, and 1 for the small lily pad. I made sure my edge IDs were visible in Pepakura (and also assigned magenta and blue to the different cuts and folds), then saved a .eps (for edge IDs) and a .dxf (for cut and fold lines) to be combined in Illustrator. In Illustrator, I overlaid the text edges with the cutline/mountain/valley .dxf file, and then brought it all back into Rhino for final adjustments and layer assignments. I had to make some changes to the dot-dash and dash line types for mountain and valley folds to make them distinguishable from each other when laser cut. I also needed to move and resize some of my edge IDs. Since this is my first pepakura project, I kept them all just for some insurance while I was constructing the pieces.

Materials: For my Keyshot renders, I did three passes: a diffuse pass for color info, an occlusion pass for contact shadows, and a shaded wireframe pass to emulate the pepakura look that the piece has in real life. I used Axalta lime green for the lilies and leather for the koi. With the leather texture, I turned off the bump map, changed the foreground and background colors, and increased the scale to 3000. For occlusion passes, I applied the Keyshot occlusion material to all objects. For the pepakura effect, I applied the Keyshot shaded wireframe material to all objects.

White e-flute cardboard was used for my fabricated pepakura, which I then taped off with white masking tape after assembling with Loctite Pro.  I finished the pieces by coating them with a layer of polyurethane, then I painted some areas with acrylic paint, but kept some of the surface unpainted so that you can still see how the pieces were created. After that, I sealed them with a satin polyacrylic coat to give it shine and protect the paint.