Tara Intyrath: Serial Slice

Concept: For this projects concept I wanted to focus on my favorite animal, wolves. I have been in love with wolves since I was a child after reading a book about them for a school project. They fascinate me and I have yet to design anything using a wolf so I thought to take this chance. A full wolf would have taken me far too long to model so I decided to go with the neck up of the animal.

Technique: I had a lot of difficulty working with this model as I haven't modeled something so organic before. I first took the approach of trying to edit a sphere or a box and shape it into that of a wolf head but all the vertices were very confusing. My second approach was to create curves of the wolf using google images as references and to create surfaces off those curves. I found that much easier to do and divided the head into four parts; the nose, main face area, the neck, and then the ears. I had lots trouble getting sweep or surface network to work properly or have an outcome I was satisfied with. It turned out a lot of my curves were not intersecting properly so I learned to make the curves into segments to get a better fit and then joining those segments together to make things work properly. I ended up using sweep2 for the whole process to create the surfaces. To make the swirls and detail of the eyes I made a flat curve and used project to get the curves to wrap around the model, offset them, made them into surfaces then solids, and boolean differenced them. I used various other commands such as join, to join my curves and surfaces once I created them, cap planar holes, and boolean join. Creating the contour lines, unrolling them, and making a spread sheet was the easy part of this project.

Materials: For the laser cut material I decided to stick with the .25 cardboard available at the Fab Lab as it was a cheaper solution and I also wanted to see how the ridges or the insides of the cardboard would look once cut out, hoping it would give an interesting outcome. Gratefully, it came out very well done. My model due to its shape and size has a lot of shapes and parts that aren't in one piece though in the same layer slice which is why I had to go with four rods. I decided to use threaded rods so I could tighten the slices together and ended up liking the "Frankenstein" look of it so left them in. I am very happy with the results of the real model. For my keyshots, I decided to choose a clear acrylic/plastic material and a metal material. I chose these two materials because I wanted to see what it would look like in various materials and hope to maybe make a serious out of these wolf heads.