Aidan Jones: Week 12 Final Project Pepakura Creature Sculpture

     Part 1: Personal Design

    Concept:

    For my personal design for this project following suit with the fictional creatures category, I decided to take inspiration from various animal/fruit combinations. I found an idea with real-life animals at first like banana slugs and decided to take it a step further by incorporating real elements of animals with food. The inspiration was shown to really spur forward with the image of the fox/carrot creature. I decided to take it a step further and use one of my old concepts from a previous project that had used bananas for the design. The final design and concept I settled on was a banana dog creature. The base dog body I used was a mixture of a basset hound and dachshund for the concept and modeling process.

Techniques:

    The workflow for my personal designed model started in Maya. I imported my concept art as a reference image to help with the modeling process. I started with a cube and scaled it to get the general size of the body down and added edge loops to add in detail for the banana shape. My after adding in enough edge loops I clicked and dragged vertices where it would prove beneficial for detail and shaping. Down the line, I had extruded faces outwards and slightly rotated them about three times to create the peel coming off of the body. To finish off the body, I was modeling in legs but I decided to take my initial design a step further and make the paws and legs into peels to further integrate the banana creature hybrid design. These were done similarly to the body peel except I scaled the peels more down from the legs to paw areas to give it a more organic presentation. The stem was completed by scaling edges inwards. One thing that really helped me is when I applied a modeling technique had learned in one of my previous classes to help give more definition to segmented areas in the peels. I used insert edge loop to provide holding edges to the angular sides of the peels. If you notice on the foot and ear peels I went the extra mile and indented these angles to give a greater sense of integration and peeling effect for the creature's appendages. The head of the creature was done similarly and did not require as much finesse as the body, ears, and feet. However, I did extrude the snout and give an indent with edge loops where the mouth and snout separation is present. Like every 3D model I do, I finished my workflow process by deleting half the faces, mirror, merging vertices that were on the center of the model, and combining geometry to make sure I get the most symmetry possible with the model.

Materials:

    For my renders I applied materials that I felt would simulate the real-life product of the creature. I set diffusion at high and chose color schemes that fit the concept of the creature. I made the dog's head and partial body of the banana color and the outside and peels a deeper yellow to look like the peel of a banana. Brown and black colors/materials were used for the stem and end of the banana body respectively. It helped when I imagined this creature shedding its skin almost. I made the middle body, ears, and legs a saturated yellow to fit what peels would look like. I made sure to match the specular settings for my materials to match the effect of a light coat of paint on cardstock. Diffuse was set to about .5 for each material used.

Part 2: Group Design and Personal Contribution

    For the group as a whole, we decided to go with Sheena's creature design. It is a hybrid between a whale and a penguin and the name of it is "I now realize why Steve Buscemi was terrified of his abominations in Spy Kids 2" but we usually refer to it as whale penguin for simplicity sake and casual conversation regarding the topic. We all really liked the design and how much of an eccentric but whimsical design it was for a fictional creature. We figured that with the larger cutouts it would be easier to assemble and eventually add more to post-processing. We thought that with smaller and more intricate pieces there was something bound to go wrong along the way. To compensate the sculpture was the largest in size compared to all of our designs. We also thought that with a penguin there would be more opportunities to add additional elements, which is what we did when we made a nest and eggs as well.

    Every member in our group participated in some way along each step of the process. But, naturally, we were more invested in some areas than others whether it is due to interest, abilities, time constraints, etc. Everyone helped with assembling the project together when it was cut out. Logan in particular was able to assist anyone with pieces that did not get cut out properly by the laser and surface applications, Sheena in particular completed cutting out the pepakura pieces for the penguin in the pepakura application and assembling the majority of the penguin. Throughout the process, I slowly saw that my role was specialized in carrying the process smoothly from digital to real-life applications of the project. For example, I divided the pieces of all of the flaps of the model to strategically use the material for the laser cutter and optimally assemble them into a complete sculpture. It turned out to be about 16 pages of cut-out parts since the campus' laser bed was out of commission. My responsibility was making sure the laser cutting process was going as smoothly as possible, as well as assembling all of the nest, eggs, and some of the penguin whenever I could spare the time.

    Throughout my role in the project, I needed to step up and really learn how to operate the laser bed. The process taught me a bit of the quirks of this particular bed that I needed to be aware of. Such as, if pieces are placed too high on the bed, the laser will most likely skip over those lines and not cut them out so I needed to watch out for that. One thing that really helped was going back into Rhino and splitting the pieces up into smaller pieces to accommodate for the smaller size of the laser bed. However, there was one wall we ran into early that I was really proud of and relieved to have solved. Whenever we converted our rhino files to The MakerSpace's computer it would not keep the information of our dashed and dotted lines. The problem was later solved when I realized that I could scale the vectors to their appropriate size when converting them to SVG in Rhino instead of taking them to Illustrator when the information of dotted lines becomes lost. As soon as I trial and error through the conversion process from Rhino to Inkscape we got back on track and were able to progress forward as planned. It would have really set us back if we had to manually dash lines or come up with another solution so we were thankful for that not being a major setback. Also, along the way, one of the eyes went missing and our workaround was to give it an eyepatch with signs of a wound on the area. It ended up working well as it gave the sculpture some added visual interest as well.

Extra pictures of laser cuts, assembly, and surface applications: