Prosthetic

Concept

read the full concept post here

I wanted to create an abstracted freeform looking shape and had varying levels of success at this. The shape came out well overall and I'm very proud of it. In the design stages I decided I wanted to stray away from shapes that conform too much to the shape of a leg, while still being functional as such, so there's a big hole in it showing the pipe The water design came around that, finding an excuse to have that shape and a good design reference for the kind of curves I wanted to have.

This early design features the hole in the front, the end result has the hole in the back for functionality's sake It's less likely to get caught on something that way. 

Modelling

 The base form of the leg was created using curves and then the sweep2, that got the baseline.

early attempts to create the abstract curvature I was going for were clumsy but the introduction of flow surface to my skill set made it much easier. 

in progress shot

the surface was created using extruded curves and then edge surfacing them and joining them together, and softening the edges. Then I wrapped it around the base leg using flowalongsrf and a lot of added randomized bubbles streaming up the top of the leg. Split along the surface of the leg and then joined. the interior section of the leg, necessary since this is a hollow object, was created by shrinking the base leg and extruding the edges where necessary to make it big enough to fit. The interior edge of the area with the hole was extruded inward in order to connect with the interior leg so I could split it in that spot. 

Materials

all glass, with a wavy bump map, different colors and levels of reflectivity were used throughout. The lighter parts have a higher reflectivity so they don't look too see through, and the darker parts have a lower reflectivity to accentuate the color. a matte black metal for the pipe and foot, I experimented with different metals but the shiny metals all distracted from the rest of the leg. 

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

Stefan Babick: Midterm Prosthetic Accessory

Heavily Inspired by the Reynisfjara Beach in Iceland and The Giant's Causeway of Northern Ireland, I wanted to combine strong hexagonal themes with a sense of flow. I decided on a bottom heavy design symbolic of heavy stone. The golden ratio provided the flow I needed on the upper extremity of my design. 

I started with a curve to create a spiral that was manipulated via control points until I reach the sense flow I wanted. Along this curve I created my hexagonal prisms by placing several six sided polygon-curves that I then Patched and ExtudeSrf'd. I had left my sketches loose knowing that the dimensions of the hexagonal prisms would take shape based on the dimensions of their surrounding prisms. I used ScaleNU to scale just the Y dimensions of the prisms. I then Filleted all convex edges and joined together the polysurfaces.

Knowing how quickly high gloss surfaces smudge and scratch, I decided on a rough sandstone material for the accessory. The foot material is a hard, rough plastic to ensure nonslip fitting of shoes while walking.