So the first thing that I was instructed to do was to find pictures that depicted what I wanted the set to look like and put it in a sketchpad which ended up becoming my notebook for the entirety of the project. This reference gathering allowed me to explore the ideas that I wanted to portray.
The story that I was making a set for depicted my character in a desert valley. In my references that I found, I explored both the scaling of a desert valley, a cave and how my characters would look in the middle of them. I also explored texture and color in this as well. This was just to make it as accurate as possible to the overall design. As depicted in the photo on the bottom, I also found pictures that related to bones because the story's valley also has bones in it. This was to further accentuate the story I was trying to create.
My next step from here was to take my favorite photos from this images and turn them into scale models. This step I took tin foil and paper machete it to create machetes. I learned from this what I didn't like and what I did like. It also helped me to figure out what form I wanted to eventually make into a much larger scale.
(Pictures Above: Before Paper Machete)
(Pictures Below: After Paper Machete)
I created five overall machetes though only a couple are depicted here. I took what I liked from each of them and then combined them to be one big piece. After everything had been covered in paper, then came the part where I discovered what color scheme the pieces were going to be. I took the images that I used for reference and tried to match the color as well as I could. I first tried to match the color by using Prismacolor pencils. Then I used Acrylic Paints to try and match the pencil color. I approached it this way to make sure that I got as accurate of a color scheme as I could and if I ran into color problems, I would be able to backtrack much easier with color pencil rather than paints.
(The Machete I ended up liking depicted in the pictures below)
Then came the fun part. Putting inside Rhino. This process included drawing lines over the parts of the machete I wanted to use and then going inside Rhino and trancing it to create a curve network. There were three separate pieces in the ending not to scale model that I ended up using to create the bigger pieces with, though only one is shown below. In order to create this curve network inside Rhino, I had to take a front, side, and bottom pictures of the piece there for I could recreate it inside the software.
(ABOVE: Curves created from tracing the pictures)
(BELOW: Curve Network created from those curves.)
The curve network was then reduced further by rebuilding the object using the rebuild command. This was to create a low polly pepakura style piece that would be later laser cut and then put together to create the final piece. Overall I had three rocks and each varied in size. The smallest of them was 2 and 1/2 feet tall and the tallest one which is depicted above was 2 and 3/4 feet tall. This was to ensure that the scale of my puppet models matched the scale of the object and than neither looked too small or too large against one another.
I got the rocks laser cut in three separate instances. This was to ensure that I didn't confuse the pieces as well as making sure that everything got put together properly. Then it came to the arduous task of putting them all together. The pieces were all cut from E-Flute cardboard which gives them the white color on the front.
I used a mixture of hot glue and super glue to put these massive pieces together. I basically put the loops together and then put them all together to create the final piece for the set. For one of them, I also inverted it so instead of it being white it was the traditional brown that cardboard usually is.
Then to finish them off once I put them all together, I used masking tape to hide the seams and make it look flawless. This is what the picture above looks like. I designed them to be multi purpose pieces so that if needed I could flip one over on its side to make a cave or something else like that.
Overall, I learned the process of what it takes to create a set from start to finish. I had never really thought of doing reference before and so when the professor recommended that I do that, it started to make a whole lot more sense to me. The end result is that I had three unique pieces that would eventually be used to create the set for my stop motion animation capstone. This by far had to be one of my most favorite projects I've done and I hope to be able to do it again in the future.
The one thing that I would do in the future if I were to repeat this project would be to design some handles or something to make it easier to transport and move around when I'm working with them.
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