Michael Crow: Week 16 - 3D Scan

Concept: For this Project I worked with Melanie Estes. She created a candle overnight with fast drying clay, using small beads and animal sculptures, she created a relief into the wet clay of the candle base  and placed a candle int he top.

Modeling Techniques: Once it dried we scanned the sides of the object, in 12 continuous shots at the wide settings with Standard Definition. After the sides we took a single snapshot of the top to mold onto the rest of our models. Moving into alignment mode I cut out all the background scanned material and we merged the families using the tips of the fins on the dolphins, waves, and Fish Fins. this created a model with .01 deference, a very good result. This allowed us to move onto the smoothing using sandpaper and eventually an overall smooth. from there we were able to make sure there were no holes in the model, and create other , lower poly versions. Going form 1.2 million polys to only several hundred in our Polygonal model.

Materials:While the original Candle holder was made from fast drying clay. I imagined it as a mass produced little under the sea kind of room decoration for little kids. So the materials I went with for it were soft plastics and rubber. I made the candle  a blue color that would both allow for maximum visibility of the relief texture, while also maintaining the theme of the sea.

Keyshot - In Keyshot I imported the model in multiple times and aligned them all up to the grid, using show grid under the camera settings. Making sure my camera was in the proper 11 x 17 ratio I went through thee different lighting environments till I found one that mimicked the street post lamp and night sky as well as I could. making sure that each one had the right gloss, texture,and was casting proper shadows I did a number of renders so that i could composite it to the best single image in Photoshop possible including a clown render for each object, a color Render and a shadow render.

Michael Crow: 3D Printing Assignment

Concept:
The Legend Of Zelda is my quintessential connection to all things nerdy. It is what made me want to pursue my career in animation, modeling and video games. In the N64 Game "Ocarina of Time" you are sent to several dungeons to collect "Medallions" to beat the game. To me each of these medallions represent challenges I have overcome in my life. I consider learning the ability to create physically what i perceive visual a milestone in my training and a talent to carry forward with me. So I decided to recreate these medallions and a base fitting them.

Modeling Techniques:
Each medallion started out the smae with a wide cylinder base, using a slightly smaller copy of the base with a Boolean difference to create the raised lip edge. From there it was mainly simple shapes, adjusted using their "Control Points" and duplicated to create the reliefs I needed to Boolean Combine or difference to get the shape I wanted. from there I was able to Fillet the edges to create a nice swooping join along the edges that wast to wide or to pointed.



Materials:
3D Print - The medallions were all 3D printed at the UT Dallas Art Barn Fabrication Lab, using ABS plastic. These were then coated with 3 layers of XTC-3D to give the model a more cohesive look and provide a primer for the different colored Acrylic paints. One different color for each of the Medallions. The base was laser cut from 11x14 sheets of .25" thick Acrylic. A base and a Top layer were cut and the sides facing each other were sanded down and conjoined using Super glue. Once that was hardened the entire base was sanded using 120 grit sand paper and coated in multiple layers of Black Gloss Spray Paint and the Golden triangles were attached with super glue

.

Keyshot - Starting with the base,I wanted it to be a dark stone color and texture, that way it would set a nice background for the colors used while also not really creating a distraction from the key parts of the piece. At first I wanted to make the medallions out of some sort of precious stone such as jade or ruby; depending on its color. However with such a dark platform the colors, being as transparent as they are, didn't get the effect I wanted across, instead much of their color was lost to the base. So instead I used textured and colored glass. It would make the model much more affordable, and even more importantly, give each of the medallions that transparent shine and luster, while still proudly displaying the color desired.