Conrad, Michael: Castle Fall 2017

concept

I appreciate the roundness of the features of Antoni Gaudi.  Ultra modern simplicity was imbribed into the sculptural space that could serve as an expansive living space.

technique

Using the polyline tool, I lofted a wall structure to make a facade.  Then, I incorporated a central space that could serve as a courtyard.  I added a slanted partition to the larger of the vessel rooms.  There are two paraboloids on the surface to offset the loneliness of the ingoing cylinder and to serve as decorative elements.

material

Urban concrete texture best matched the theme of the concept because of its rigidity and absoluteness of form.  

Brandon Wehenkel: Prosthetic

 Mechanical Horse Leg Front

Mechanical Horse Leg Left

Concept:
Anthropomorphism is, by all means, my most favorite form of art.  It's one of the oldest variations of sculptural form discovered.   Egypt was where it began for me.  Their culture was by far the most anthropomorphic cultures in history, they have a god/goddess for everything, and many are half-man-half-animal.
In my brainstorming phase, I remembered seeing an elephant that received a prosthetic foot.  Think about it, that prosthesis has had to have been a super strong material to withstand the weight of an elephant.  But as I always try to make everything 50x harder than it has to be, I thought of my friend and his love for horses.  I wanted to design a mechanical horse leg prosthetic.  It started out as just a regular horse prosthetic but thought about the complexity of horse movement.  Horses require a very complex anatomy to be able to run as fast as they do, so why not make a prosthesis that can also withstand the weight and complexity of a horse stride?  I used Andrew Chase - Mechanical Horse for the project.

I'm not an expert in mechanics but I did spend a lot of time, about 4 years, learning the mechanical make up of a weapon while I was on board a navy ship.  The Gyroscope (not actual mechanism, but similar) and the wobble gear (not actual mechanism, but similar) were one of the most complex mechanical mechanisms that I did maintenance on.  I really didn't enjoy the maintenance but I did love the complexity of the mechanics.

Also thanks to the excellent Ted talk by Aimee Mullins for giving me the idea.  I very much enjoyed seeing her anthropomorphic body morph where she portrayed a Cheetah with actual Cheetah hind legs as prosthetics.  She can be seen in "Cremaster 3," (2002) a film by © Matthew Barney.

 Ghosted Black

Organization Colored

Modeling Techniques:
About 80% of my design is copied from Andrew Chase's design, but I didn't make everything as crude as his design.  He made it look like actual welded pieces of sheet metal. I really liked the natural angles of a horse and morphed the angles of the knee and the hoof to match a horse's actual resting position.  So what I did was look up Horse anatomy by Herman Dittrich and drew some photos that resembled muscular anatomy.  I mostly just traced his designs so I could get correct angles.

Anatomical referenced leg

The image above was the leg I had based my mechanical drawing off of.  I used curve interpolate points to create the outline of my reference image from both the front and right sides.  I then manually bent the front curve to roughly get as center as possible from the right reference curve I created.  I used F10 to get the control points for the curve. The reason I bent the front curve was so I could create inner circles to loft the shape.  I used 103 curves to create the mesh for the form.  I lofted all of those curves together, which I give great thanks to Professor Scott for the assistance, and that is the image you see above.  The only difference is the green hoof is different.  I used that hoof and adapted it for the mechanical parts.  It's not entirely mechanical looking, but I think it looks better than the hoof in Andrew Chase's model.  I was not getting the NetworkSRF to work, so loft did the same thing for me.

Keyshot - Left and Front angles with Reference Images

Keyshot - Right Angle

From here on out it was very easy for me, organic stuff just doesn't click well yet.  I used MoveUVN coupled with Select U and Select V to smooth out all of my yucky curves.  Something that saved me hours, unlike my stupid mouse.  Thanks again Professor Scott for giving me this incredible tool.  It's the most essential tool for this project.

Keyshot - Gear / Knee

I used pipe for the cylindrical sections of the shin and thigh.  I created a cylinder for the knee gear, ankle, and a couple other locations on the top basket.  The knee is the only gear with slots on the leg.  I created the cylinder, a small box, and used array polar with 180 degrees to make the gear.  I used the reference image to create a majority of the shapes with curves and then extruded them.  The nub box on the top was purely impulsive.  I wasn't sure how I was going to draw that in my references so I left it out to sculpt later.  This was the hardest part for me to design because I wasn't sure what to do.  I used boolean difference to create the spot where the nub of the leg will rest inside.

Keyshot - Nub Seat and Ball Bearing Gear

Materials:
I wanted to use a tough metal like Titanium or Steel, but their color spectrium wasn't working for me even when manipulating the attributes.  I really liked Zinc's attributes because it had more than one color slot.  Then I used the pearlescent metals because they have the flakes.  I really like seeing pearlescent paint on cars.
Color inspiration, I used zinc and recolored it to more resemble the fire-bronzed metal on the image, I used colored metallic paint similar to the fingers.  And I wanted to add a little touch of color so I used another colored metallic paint and used one of the browns for the nub seat.  I changed the color of the flakes to make the overall color brighter and somewhat match the orange sheen similar to the other metallic paint I used..

Keyshot - Hoof and Ankle Detail

Brandon Wehenkel: 3D Scanned Object

  Final Concept & Design

 Work Station

Concept:
I've been wanting to do this project the entire time I've been at this school.  My goal is to buy a scanner to manipulate my sculptures in a more detailed digital fashion.  My design was to recreate one of my drawings into a sculpture.  I made a character when I was in ARTS 1201 (Drawing Fundamentals) at my previous school.  I'm quite fascinated with primates and anthropomorphism.  So I used my original drawing and the original picture as an inspiration to make my sculpture.

This is Bubbah he is my character, he's based off of the Common Chimpanzee or Pan Troglodyte species. He is currently a newborn shapen into my mind. Bubbah is a kind and intelligent half-breed. He didn't transform into how he is. He was merely born half man half Chimpanzee.


Modeling Techniques:
I started off with, I believe 12 gauge wire, no bigger than a coat hangar, and created a helix with a drill to build strength.  I just made a circle for the base and a 4x twisted spine.  I forgot to photograph it.  But trust me there's metal inside.

I bought about $100 worth of polymer clay of grey, black, and fair skin color.  I saw tutorials in the past to mix the black with other colors to make the clay softer.  It works but not as much as I wanted it to.  I ended up with about 10 lbs of clay into one gigantic marbleized clay block.  I ran into quite a bit of trouble mixing the clay together to make the shade I have now.  I bought an electric pasta maker to aid in my battle and it broke after 10 minutes of work.  I got my money back.  Next, I tried a meat grinder.  This lasted me 2 weeks.  The handle broke from excessive heat build up in the working process.  Because that crap was made out of cast aluminum I bought a cast iron one instead which you can see in the Work Station photo.  This worked a lot better to an extent.  I had to go and buy some clay softener liquid to use the machine more efficiently.  But I found out that it was much quicker to do everything by hand after I spent more time screwing around with machines.

Tools

None of the tools I use are meant for clay but I've repurposed them for my work.  I've got 2 crochet needles, 4 dental needles, a jeweler's flat head screwdriver & hammer, pliers, a spoon, an unsharpened knife, an eyedropper, and a plastic rolling pin.

Because the clay was such a disaster to work with I managed to smash it with the jewlers hammer when it was very hard to save my hands, thats when the rolling pin worked its magic as well. I asked around and learned that a hair dryer works too. Also the most efficient way is to heat up water and placing the clay into a plastic bag while it sits in the water for about 30 seconds. When I was able to get the clay into a swirled mess I put it inside the meat grinder.  That only worked for about as much as two handfuls of clay.  I gave up on the meat grinder after wasting about 4 hours cranking it to no avail.  Once I had about 30 balls of clay I started putting it on the armature and making the sculpture.

  Reference Images & WIP

 Facial Detailing

I was using a magnifying glass mounted to the table with some dental tools to remove all the burs that were left behind, left picture.  Right picture shows less burrs.  Burrs are the little pieces of clay that clump up when you slide a piece of metal into it kinda like how cheese curds.

  Ditched Design Idea

I originally had him planned as a bust design inspired by Gian L. Bernini, but I ditched the idea because the object was getting too tall. I would need to chop the bottom off and that would get in the way of the armature (also seen a part of my armature already cut, which came from the neck). Bad design on my part.  Next time I'll just make a thinner spine armature and not worry about making a wire base.


Materials:
Polymer Clay, Polymer Clay softener, 16 gauge galvanized steel wire, various tools I mentioned above,  NextEngine, ScanStuido, Rapidworks, Mudbox, Photoshop

 Scan Stuido Align Process

Next Engine 6.3M poly reduction to 900k

 Mudbox (Colored)

I ran into a problem where I couldn't get the paint effect to export to any other program.  Never used this program so its probably some very simple solution.  But I tried importaing as .obj to Keyshot, Maya, 3DSMax.  So here is an unrendered colored version of how my character looks in Mudbox.  The lighting is also quite wasky in mudbox.  I wasn't completely sure how to change them.  Their default presets were pretty awful.

Mudbox

Keyshot

Keyshot

Keyshot