Brandon Wehenkel: Independent Study (Update 1)

Concept:
The scope of this project is to make a 3D printed figure that has interchangeable parts. The best example of what I was trying to do is similar to 3DTotal Games' Kickstarter project.  My idea is to create a figure that can be displayed in a standing position or a sitting position.  The idea stems from my interests in action figures and anthropomorphism in the art world.  My 3D printed sculpture will be painted when finished.

The inspiration for this project begins with Greek mythology, specifically Pan the Satyr servant to Dionysus (the god of wine and parties) who is half-man half-goat. Goats are one of my favorite animals, and I found it quite fun to make a goat sculpture. I want to create my own figurine. I am an avid collector of action figures as well as an active member of the furry community.  I prefer to work with anthropomorphic art when I have the desire to make something.  The sculpture was influenced and inspired by some artists I follow.  Bear in mind those who have a "*" in front of their name have works that involve nudity and may not be appropriate for all.  *ECMajor (who is the best source for anatomy for anthropomorphic characters,) *Tchaikovsky2 (my favorite artist), Danny Choo, *Miura Etsuko, *Hans Bellmer, *Liu Xue, *Kristine Poole, Beth Cavener, Ryohei Hase.


Modeling Techniques:
I was required to make my sculpture before the 1st day of class because of the complexity of the design and also my skill.  Sculptures such as these need a lot of time and planning for it to be done correctly.

 Scetch

Full body Scetch

I started first in the sketchbook May 2017 with a few hand-drawn pictures of how I wanted my figure to look.  I drew a few poses to understand what I wanted to make, but I never knew exactly which pose till I had clay in hand.  I started modeling my sculpture in August 2017 with the creation of a metal armature.  The clay modeling phase took several weeks.

 WIP V1 Bust (August 2017)

 WIP V1 Body (October 2017)

 WIP V2 Body; Udder V1 (October 2017)

Armature V3 (November 2017)

I decorated the armature with tape and tinfoil to speed up the cooking process.

Armature with tape and a beginning layer of clay (November 2017)

Udder V2 (November 2017)

Udder V3 (December 2017)

Sitting V3; WIP Standing V1 (December 2017)

Once the sculpture was to the point of desirability, I needed to make a sitting version as well.  I also learned I needed to create a new arm after I finished my first scan.

 V3 sitting finished with extra arm (January 2018)

I cooked the sculpture shortly after New Years, so the family didn't have to worry about needing the oven.  The texture darkened some.

Cooked (December 2017)

Then I took the project into Scan Studio where nothing turned out right except the first standing sculpture.  The top and bottom of some surfaces did not show well in the scanner.   I scanned everything in 360 HD with 14 layers.  All the scans took 72 minutes, and I did 9 scans.  6 of those scans corrupted or failed to align.

The only thing that scanned correctly for the standing figure.  The extra arm and the sitting sculpture scanned much better than the standing figure.

Massive Issues:

In Scan Studio with the 6 scans that caused problems I also tried to do individual scans, and for some reason, they couldn't align with existing families.  I made 2 individual scans (took about 10 minutes each) when the sculpture was on its side to try to get underneath the udder and chin, but those corrupted the entire 1st scan process.  I did manage to get a save file before the corruption, so it didn't waste a huge chunk of my time.

I used a zip tie to try to keep the sculpture in an angled pose for the scanner, and it didn't translate for the scanner.  Also due to the size of the sculpture, I had to make several dissected scans for it to fit in the view window in HD mode.  The torso was the most frustrating because it did not stay inside the view window when doing a 360 scan.  For some reason, the scan corrupted when the scanned object went outside its cutouts.  I could not do a 360 scan of the torso because of the corruption issue, so I only got HD layers for the legs to the stomach.  This was the scan after I turned the model on its side to try to get the modeling around the holes.  It was not possible to fill them with this bad scan.  I scanned 2 different ways, and both were unusable.

  Holes

After I scanned the sculpture, I noticed there were a significant number of holes. The top of the head, underneath the chin, a large chunk of the udders, the calves, and all of the base.  I was told this could be fixed in nextEngine where I could bridge the holes together, it is my next step.  I lost 3 days dealing with the masking process for Agisoft then two days figuring out why the point cloud wasn't working.

I used Agisof Photoscan as well, and it didn't work either.  I took 40 pictures with my lazy susan on a cloudy day in my backyard, uploaded them to photosphop, and created a mask for all 40 individual photos (1 of the 40 is on the top of this blog post).  I followed this tutorial and this tutorial.  I uploaded them to Agisof, aligned the photos, and was given a cluster of dots that sorta looked like my sculpture.  I then created a dense point cloud to create a better image, and it didn't change much.  I only had a little more than 4000 points in my dense point cloud which was not good.

Agisof Photoscan dense point cloud error

1st four weeks expectations were to scan the model to 3D, remodel in Mudbox and Rhino where I wanted to cut the model into smaller pieces for 3D printing.  Unfortunately, I ran into too many issues with the scanner that put me back.  I came in several times after regular school hours, and I kept running into significant problems with the scanning process.  I had to delete some of my scans because something corrupted and ruined a bunch of the save files.

 This was the best alignment I could receive.  There are some ugly layers of certain parts of the legs, the udder, and the arms.

Materials:
Black Polymer Clay
Grey and Peach Polymer Clay
16 and 18 Gauge galvanized wire
Masking tape
Heavy Duty Aluminum foil
Clay modeling tools and pliers.

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