CONCEPT:
For this project, what I wanted to create is a whale swimming in the night sky. I got inspired by the Sky Whales from my favorite foreign fantasy novel. Since the specific species of the Sky Whale was undescribed in the novel, I chose orca as the species on my own because I personally love the design of orca. I feel it is greatly strong and charismatic. I made the orca to have a little tilted and curved shape to give much more interesting depth and volume to the sculpture. I decided to hollow out the bottom white belly part of the orca, which is not the idea from the original Sky Whale design, because I wanted my originality in this project, wanted to have challenges on my own in Rhino 3D modeling, and I believed that it would help the orca to fly if it lose some weight, since the orca is extremely huge and heavy animal. On the other hand, I did not hollow out the white spots around the orca's eyes and leaved them alone, because I wanted those to be strong focal points with color contrasts.
TECHNIQUES:
I modeled the orca in Rhino. I started with two big ellipse curves for head and tail, and created body curves between them by using tween curves command that I learned from external tutorial videos that I found outside the class. Then, I lofted the curves while the Record History button is turned on, so that I can continue change the shape of the body by adjusting the curves. I made the fins with the same method but fewer numbers of tween curves. I trimmed out the white parts around the eyes and belly, created surfaces with edge curves, and booleaned the body and fins. There I had the shape of the orca, and then I contoured the orca in a vertical (from back to belly) direction. After joining the curves, I made a layout for laser cutting by using rectangle and move commands with grouped supporting number text objects and core curves. I also created serial sliced version of the orca model by extruding the contoured curves to render it in Key Shot. Additionally, I was keeping my previous versions of the orca steadily while I was modeling in Rhino by using copy and paste commands. It was increasing the file size, but certainly helpful when I would like to go back.
MATERIALS: 1/4" thick 24" x 48" Cardboard, Black Glossy Spray Paint, White Tape, Loctite, Flat moon 980 down LED 3000K, Pencils
I rendered the orca in Key Shot. When I was rendering, I aimed for the skin that is close to the real orca. The most important thing was that it is very smooth, so I chose black and white glossy plastic materials in Key Shot. Then, I used a dim outdoor environment from the Key Shot cloud, and added a bit of moonlight to have the night sky concept staging. I did not use a completely dark midnight environment because it makes too hard to recognize the shape of the orca. In post processing, after I assembled the pieces with Loctite, I wanted to step a little forward than the simple design of the real orca, so I decided to draw some constellations on the orca with white tapes. I believed it would enhance my sculpture by adding more interesting originality, and add a lot more sense of the night sky concept since I cannot present the sculpture in class under the night sky like in the renderings. Also, I considered about laser cutting acrylic plate to make my sculpture resemble the glossy materials in the renderings, but I did not want a transparent orca and it was not easy find appropriate size of the acrylic plate, so I decided to use cardboard and black glossy spray paint instead. Lastly, I used few pencils as pillars under the orca to present it like it is floating as the concept.
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