Brandon Wehenkel: Independent Study (Update 1)

Concept:
The scope of this project is to make a 3D printed figure that has interchangeable parts. The best example of what I was trying to do is similar to 3DTotal Games' Kickstarter project.  My idea is to create a figure that can be displayed in a standing position or a sitting position.  The idea stems from my interests in action figures and anthropomorphism in the art world.  My 3D printed sculpture will be painted when finished.

The inspiration for this project begins with Greek mythology, specifically Pan the Satyr servant to Dionysus (the god of wine and parties) who is half-man half-goat. Goats are one of my favorite animals, and I found it quite fun to make a goat sculpture. I want to create my own figurine. I am an avid collector of action figures as well as an active member of the furry community.  I prefer to work with anthropomorphic art when I have the desire to make something.  The sculpture was influenced and inspired by some artists I follow.  Bear in mind those who have a "*" in front of their name have works that involve nudity and may not be appropriate for all.  *ECMajor (who is the best source for anatomy for anthropomorphic characters,) *Tchaikovsky2 (my favorite artist), Danny Choo, *Miura Etsuko, *Hans Bellmer, *Liu Xue, *Kristine Poole, Beth Cavener, Ryohei Hase.


Modeling Techniques:
I was required to make my sculpture before the 1st day of class because of the complexity of the design and also my skill.  Sculptures such as these need a lot of time and planning for it to be done correctly.

 Scetch

Full body Scetch

I started first in the sketchbook May 2017 with a few hand-drawn pictures of how I wanted my figure to look.  I drew a few poses to understand what I wanted to make, but I never knew exactly which pose till I had clay in hand.  I started modeling my sculpture in August 2017 with the creation of a metal armature.  The clay modeling phase took several weeks.

 WIP V1 Bust (August 2017)

 WIP V1 Body (October 2017)

 WIP V2 Body; Udder V1 (October 2017)

Armature V3 (November 2017)

I decorated the armature with tape and tinfoil to speed up the cooking process.

Armature with tape and a beginning layer of clay (November 2017)

Udder V2 (November 2017)

Udder V3 (December 2017)

Sitting V3; WIP Standing V1 (December 2017)

Once the sculpture was to the point of desirability, I needed to make a sitting version as well.  I also learned I needed to create a new arm after I finished my first scan.

 V3 sitting finished with extra arm (January 2018)

I cooked the sculpture shortly after New Years, so the family didn't have to worry about needing the oven.  The texture darkened some.

Cooked (December 2017)

Then I took the project into Scan Studio where nothing turned out right except the first standing sculpture.  The top and bottom of some surfaces did not show well in the scanner.   I scanned everything in 360 HD with 14 layers.  All the scans took 72 minutes, and I did 9 scans.  6 of those scans corrupted or failed to align.

The only thing that scanned correctly for the standing figure.  The extra arm and the sitting sculpture scanned much better than the standing figure.

Massive Issues:

In Scan Studio with the 6 scans that caused problems I also tried to do individual scans, and for some reason, they couldn't align with existing families.  I made 2 individual scans (took about 10 minutes each) when the sculpture was on its side to try to get underneath the udder and chin, but those corrupted the entire 1st scan process.  I did manage to get a save file before the corruption, so it didn't waste a huge chunk of my time.

I used a zip tie to try to keep the sculpture in an angled pose for the scanner, and it didn't translate for the scanner.  Also due to the size of the sculpture, I had to make several dissected scans for it to fit in the view window in HD mode.  The torso was the most frustrating because it did not stay inside the view window when doing a 360 scan.  For some reason, the scan corrupted when the scanned object went outside its cutouts.  I could not do a 360 scan of the torso because of the corruption issue, so I only got HD layers for the legs to the stomach.  This was the scan after I turned the model on its side to try to get the modeling around the holes.  It was not possible to fill them with this bad scan.  I scanned 2 different ways, and both were unusable.

  Holes

After I scanned the sculpture, I noticed there were a significant number of holes. The top of the head, underneath the chin, a large chunk of the udders, the calves, and all of the base.  I was told this could be fixed in nextEngine where I could bridge the holes together, it is my next step.  I lost 3 days dealing with the masking process for Agisoft then two days figuring out why the point cloud wasn't working.

I used Agisof Photoscan as well, and it didn't work either.  I took 40 pictures with my lazy susan on a cloudy day in my backyard, uploaded them to photosphop, and created a mask for all 40 individual photos (1 of the 40 is on the top of this blog post).  I followed this tutorial and this tutorial.  I uploaded them to Agisof, aligned the photos, and was given a cluster of dots that sorta looked like my sculpture.  I then created a dense point cloud to create a better image, and it didn't change much.  I only had a little more than 4000 points in my dense point cloud which was not good.

Agisof Photoscan dense point cloud error

1st four weeks expectations were to scan the model to 3D, remodel in Mudbox and Rhino where I wanted to cut the model into smaller pieces for 3D printing.  Unfortunately, I ran into too many issues with the scanner that put me back.  I came in several times after regular school hours, and I kept running into significant problems with the scanning process.  I had to delete some of my scans because something corrupted and ruined a bunch of the save files.

 This was the best alignment I could receive.  There are some ugly layers of certain parts of the legs, the udder, and the arms.

Materials:
Black Polymer Clay
Grey and Peach Polymer Clay
16 and 18 Gauge galvanized wire
Masking tape
Heavy Duty Aluminum foil
Clay modeling tools and pliers.