Taylor Volquardsen : Week 13 - Laser Scanning in Detail

Scanned Object

Ghosted Image Painted Black

Render 1

Render 2

Concept: When I first started this project, I had absolutely no idea what I wanted to scan. I've had this little red dachshund eraser for a while now, and when I saw it it reminded me of those chrome balloon animal statues by Jeff Koons. I thought it would be cool to play off of that idea and scan the dog and make it out of chrome.

Scanning Process: Like everyone else, I scanned my object once from the side and once from the bottoms to make sure I got all the parts in. It was a bit difficult positioning the dogs since the thinner parts like the legs and tail could bend and offset the scan if I wasn't careful. The first set of scans I did without any guide dots, and I wasn't confident that I had aligned them correctly so I ended up rescanning the whole thing again with markers placed all around my dog. In the end, it wasn't all that hard, the real challenge only came from the fact that I was working with technology and software I was unfamiliar with, unlike in other projects where I at least had some experience with the programs involved.

Rendering Process: This was probably the easiest part for me since unlike with scanning I actually have a little experience with Keyshot from previous projects, and a lot of knowledge of photoshop in general.  I chose the front of the visitor's center because that grassy area in front is a prime spot for a statue, especially a large one like the dog I placed. Getting the model to match the environment was the trickiest part since the shadows didn't want to work with me, but the rest was pretty smooth sailing. I ended up tweaking the shadows using photoshop anyways since the statue looked like it was hovering just slightly above the ground no matter what I did in Keyshot.

Taylor Volquardsen : Week 11 : Laser Engraving

Vurro's Boogie

Tiny Plants

Background Influence

Concept:
My design was heavily influenced by the video in the link above. The video combined with lots and lots of plants pretty much sums up my aesthetic, so I wanted that to come through in my engraving. Just the skull with the plants on the board felt empty though, so I added a graphic art background to help fill in the space behind them.

Design in Adobe Illustrator

After Engraving

Techniques:
I wanted a slightly jagged feel, so I hand traced all of my pieces in my design using a heavy stroke with the pen tool in Adobe Illustrator. It's composed entirely of straight lines, even when it looks curved. When I got it back from the machine shop on campus, I used a medium-sized brush to fill in the large engraved parts of the board with wood stain, then used a much smaller detail brush and a towel to fill in the smaller lines of the design. I used the towel to brush away any stain that got outside of the grooves and clean the board. After the stain dried, I added a coat of clear gloss polyurethane to seal everything.

Stained Engraving

Materials:
8.5 in Moose blank skateboard deck
Varathane Kona wood stain
Minwax clear gloss polyurethane

Taylor Volquardsen: Week 10 Cardboard Ball

Concept:
My original idea was to create a boar's skull. I had seen things like longhorn skulls and elephant heads, but not a boar. The idea for a boar, in particular, came from the movie Princess Mononoke. I thought it would be fun to work with the tusks.

Technique:
I originally pulled a few different models from the digital databank. I had the idea of taking one of the animal skulls and modifying it to look like a boar's. I decided that I didn't have the time to do the sort of work that would have required, so instead, I took the cat skull model, lowered the polycount, and reworked the wireframe into something that would be easier to cut in Pepakura. As I started putting together the cardboard pieces of the skull, I realized some of the pieces came out smaller than I thought they would, making them hard to manipulate and I had some trouble getting some of the pieces to fit right. In the end, I ended up editing the design some and removed the complicated eye socket structure to aid in construction.

Materials:
Cardboard, and eventually sealant and acrylic paint

Taylor Volquardsen - Week 8 - 3D Printing

Concept:
I don't have much room in my house anymore. I've taken so many art classes and have so many projects laying around that I wanted to be sure anything I made was something that I could use. I have a small indoor garden going on downstairs, so I decided to make a little planter pot. It was something small enough to fit in my house and also something I would use, so the plan was perfect.

Technique:
The shape of a basic planter pot is pretty simple, so I kept the modeling simple as well. It's one shape, made from a single sphere that I divided up and extruded to get the shape I wanted. The interior is a basic cylinder shape-instead of following the shape of the outside-to make planting and printing easy.

Material:
It took a while to find out what kind of material I wanted, having to take into consideration both cost and look. I originally wanted to do it in some form of wood or wood-looking material, but that was pretty expensive. I got lucky and found out the cheapest material for me to use on Shapeways was also one that I wanted to use. I decided on a Gloss Celadon Green Porcelain, a ceramic type in a nice seafoam green color.

My model is currently being printed at Shapeways. It should be ready for shipping by October 27.

Taylor Volquardsen: Week 1 Castle

Concept: I like the aesthetic of sleek, futuristic-looking houses with lots of white and marble and ceramic interspersed with gardens, so I wanted my castle to reflect that. When I started thinking of ideas for what I wanted to do, I remembered the movie Oblivion with Tom Cruise and immediately knew I wanted to make my castle float like the house in the movie. In the end, I kind of combined ideas: the floating home from Oblivion, the rounded, swooping shapes of the Space Needle, and based the garden around these images I found on the internet.

Ghosted Image

Ghosted Image with Command Line

Ghosted Image with Layer Assignment

Modeling: I’ve taken some modeling classes, so I decided to use Maya to make my castle model and import it to Rhino. I admit it was a bit of a challenge remembering to keep it simple and keep in mind that I would have to start modeling for 3D printing which couldn’t get all of the small details unless I made it bigger, which would be expensive. That was probably the biggest challenge changing my mindset away from what I learned as a modeling student. I decided to try sticking to primitive shapes and worked from there, keeping it simple cylinders and tweaking them to get the basic idea of what I want. 

Rendered Castle - Bird's Eye View

Rendered Castle - Pedestrian View

Materials: Like I mentioned above, I like the aesthetic of futuristic looking buildings, so lots of marble and glass and white ceramic with wood and plant accents. I wanted the main base to be a shiny white surface, with parts of the buildings made of wood to add a bit of a pop of color, with a lush but controlled garden to, again, add color with the fountains made out of maybe marble or some kind of natural stone. I couldn't get it exactly how I wanted, like I would've put bark on the tree trunks and tried to imitate some kind of leaf texture on the trees, but the idea is there.