Paris Lopez: Pepakura Creature Sculpture

 

 

I wanted to create something lighthearted and with a sense a fun from the beginning, so when the class decided on a creature for the final prompt I was excited. I wanted to do an odd mix of things, especially some animal mixed with  human characteristics. I ended up thinking of a fish creature and decided on a merman. Upon researching mermen it was clear they were also usually portrayed as strangely sensual creatures since the above image shows up as the second google images result for "merman"...

 

I decided I wanted to do the opposite and decided to give him an ugly fish head. Ended up to giving him a buff body but a giant swordfish head. The merman concept eventually evolved into a creature created by toxic waste, giving it a reason why he is mutated instead of just being a mythological creature.

    For modeling I decided on Maya since I had much more experience modeling  with the software. It started out as a simple cylinder and became a whole creature by adding more curves, scaling said curves and extruding many faces. I needed to keep it low poly so it'd be easier to transfer into a pepakura sculpture. For the renderings I really went all out on the weird angle and gave it a skin color for the torso so it'd make the viewer uncomfortable. I gave the fish parts a dark blue color with metallic parts to resemble wear on said parts. The Textures were created on Substance painter
 and then tranferred to Keyshot. In Keyshot I created a new material and connected the textures on the material graph. I imagined the paint used as matte so the material has little glossiness.

For the actual project my design was chosen for its zaniness, form and post process potential. The other two designs for my teammates' designs were great as well but the merman already had movement and a less stilted silhouette in its designs. The eventual name of the piece was decided on as "The Merman of Trinity River" due to the toxicity of said river and mutations that happen with wildlife with toxic waste.

 

     I had to simplify the model by deleting several faces and curves. Ammer did as well since he was in charge of pepakura. For the final design we agreed mine was too disturbing and went for a variation of Xochi's design. We took a bit of time trying to get the pepakura layout to a point where we thought building the sculpture would be simple. Xochitl did the SVG and lightburn set up for cutting. 

    The actual cutting process took most of the time. First the school's laser cutter was broken so after the Makerspace was found, its leadership was made aware of us by having everyone email them, we had a 3+ hour info session where we had to get a monthly membership to use the equipment. Since it was 20+ students in such short notice the staff was clearly unable to train everyone right away. That meant we all had to find another time during that week to get trained to use the laser cutter, and, on top of that, share that time with other students trying to get two projects cut. This process ended up taking us into fall break for the actual build, which made it harder to schedule work sessions.The Makerspace President, Doug, was kind enough to take plenty of his time to teach and guide us through this long process. Since the laser cutter  smaller than the UTD one, we all ended up cutting our cardboard to fit it. Xochi and I spent quite some time trying out the laser since we needed to get the power and speed of the cutter just right for the whole thing first, otherwise it'd be a waste of time. In the end Xochi did the cutting while me and Ammer did some folding and organization for the final build. He ended up providing much of the paint and loctite for post-processing as well.

For the construction Xochi and I did used a lot of tape and glue. At one point I realized my model had many faults for a real life sculpture, mostly because of the way I angled the shoulders and arms. This made those areas tough to construct without adding more tape for reinforcement. We sprayed primer to the merman first and then used two different shades of blue for the body. Once putting on the funny googly eyes, I added several ones as a gag but we ended up liking it more than the simple two eyes. It also looked more like a mutant this way. Xochi also thought about adding bits of colorful coral and barnacles to give it more contrast to the whole thing. She rolled up her clay to make them and we both painted them and glued them on. Drawings on the tail were added by me to tell an ecological story showing men dumping toxic waste in a body of water and the transformation of the merman. In the end I was happy with the lighthearted Merman, especially after it being made in such a tight, unusual schedule and this being our first pepakura work for all of us.