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. 

Lauren Barbieri Week 13:Pepakura

The original work I actually designed in blender to learn the software earlier this year on my dad's old desktop. Imported to Maya and simplified and imported further into rhino for the export. I initially worked face by face, starting with the muzzle shape and moving down the body, extensively mirroring and joining, learning the existing shortcuts for skills I had already had. The original finished was around 500 so it wasn't too much work to simplify. It was a pretty lucky break to have already had such a low poly model handy. And Im glad I got to do a full body with so few polys.

Mesh

Mesh(left) and Nurbs(right)

Working in pepakura had it's own problems, primarily my initial difficulty in getting wineskin running on my MacBook. I had a slow start trying to figure out the design shape but I called on childhood experience of designing cutouts like this by hand, and once I got into that mental space it got a lot easier figuring out the shape Thinking about it as though it's something that exists, with the knowledge that soon it will. If that makes sense. My strategy at the start was to make it in rings, that can then connect strategically together, and for the most part that worked.

I started from the back legs and worked my way up.

I spray painted the dog black and then applied an acrylic gloss finish since scotties are generally black dogs. 

David Rake: Week 10 - Serial Slice

Concept:

For years I've been making helmets. I've wanted to make Thomas' helmet from Daft Punk but never got around to it or had all the skills I needed for it. Over Spring Break I had plans to finally start it and had a plan for how I would go about it. As this project came up I thought it'd be interesting to try this new method (to me) to create the base for the master mold.

Technique:

I created a Sphere as the base and drew out curves to block off the major parts. After blocking off the main extensions of the mask I created the slopes by extruding curves and using booleans to sculpt almost. I got the model as close to picture references as I could then inserted the two cores, one in the front where the absolute bottom is and one at the top of the helmet. The helmet was then sliced into 43 individual pieces.

Materials:
The original helmet is chrome and eventually I would like to get it to that point, The Serial Slice will be Cardboard. The mold will be silicon. Then the cast will be resin or fiberglass depending if I chrome it myself or not.

Final:

I changed the axis the cuts were on from my original choice of front to back and instead chose top to bottom as it contained more details that I wanted.

David Rake: Week 11 - Laser Engraving

Concept:

I made a replica Thomas helmet from the band Daft Punk for the Serial Slicing Assignment. I thought the helmet would look decent if it was repeated a couple of times in a horizonal direction. Almost like the neon 16 bit art.

Technique:
I used the make2d command to pull a perspective view of the head to get the majority of its aspects. After I replicated it 3 times and combined the outer curves. Originally I just engraved the helmet lines and it turned out alright but seemed too simple. After I took the three helmets and applied a different density hatch to each.

Materials:

From the start I planned on using Acrylic. The original helmet is chrome and reflective. The helmet stands out but in a different way than paint. Acrylic is one of the closer replacements because its clear unlike most other engravings on wood or such.

David Rake Week 12: Waffle Lava Lamp

Concept:

Growing up I always had lava lamps in my room, 4 or 5 at any given time. Now when I hear lamp that is almost always what my mind thinks of. If not its that one lamp that loomed over my father's reading chair. Regardless I thought a typical lava lamp would look cool.

Techniques:

I started by drawing the outer edges with the curve tool. I created 7 vertical columns using polar array and 4 horizontal planes. I extruded and capped the curves. I then used boolean tools to create the indents. I do not have the hole cut out for the actual light yet. I inverted the lava lamp design because the top of lava lamps are typically pointed or at least tapered. To create the aperture for the actual light would leave steep columns which didn't look particularly good.

Materials:
With Keyshot I chose a shiny blue plastic that looks close to my favorite lava lamp from my childhood. Upon building it I used cardboard and it was stronger than I originally thought it would be. For the light I used a small 7W Led bulb.

David Rake: Week 13 - Pepekura

Concept:

About 4 years ago a game by the name of Battleblock Theater came out and the character I played as I really loved. The character has since been used as my avatar on social platforms. In senior year of high school I made a 3d model of this originally 2d character. I 3d Printed the character as well. This character has no official name but has gone been titled the abomination by my close friends at the time but I prefer the friendlier name of Catty. 

Technique:

Although I still had the model I created back in high school, it was not a good model as I knew very little about modeling. Pepekura violently rejected the model and I slowly remodeled every piece trying to salvage the original model but alas that didn't prevail.

After fighting Pepekura and getting everything laid out and cut I started with the legs. I build each leg separately. I then built the arms and connected the legs to the torso. Then I connected the arms. Overnight I filled the legs with expanding foam to give them some weight and make him more rigid. I taped every seam on the body because as a cartoon character all his edges are black and I wanted to closely replicate that. After the body was complete I assembled the eyes, ears, mouth, and head separately. I fastened the head on the body and added the facial features afterwards.

In the future I plan to build a stand for him as he cannot stand on his own most of the time (this was planned). I did not want to cut off his feet in order to add standing capability. I also do not know at this point what I want to do for whiskers or if I want to add them at all.

Material:

I used plain 1ply cardboard and black electrical tape. If I were to redo him I would coat all the white cardboard in Aluminum tape because I think it'd be interesting as I've never thought of this character making it to the real world on this scale.

Rebecca Genung: Week 13 Pepakura

For my Pepakura, I wanted to make a Xenosmilus as they are, in my mind, the embodiment of primal power. Xenosmilus is a species of saber-toothed cat (Smilodons are the well known species from movies and such) that had so much strength and such ferocious teeth that literally one bite was all they needed to kill their prey. Unlike any other land species, Xenosmilus would take a single bite and follow their prey until they died of blood loss. Ironically, this is what led to their extinction, as following prey took up precious time and energy. They were out-competed by other saber-toothed cats; who, in turn, were out-competed by "normal-toothed" cats. I am always a fan of "double-edged" forms and the unfortunate story of Xenosmilus has always stayed with me because of that.

For technique, I modeled it in ZBrush. I then sent it to Maya where I manually simplified it by deleting edges. This is because the auto simplify tools of both programs were simplifying the complicated parts, such as the head, into non-shapes while leaving the simple areas, such as the back and neck, more complicated than necessary. Once satisfied, I sent it Pepakura.

For material, I used yellow zinc in KeyShot as I prefer that particular texture over the gold options. I used the non-simplified model for the KeyShot pictures and the Pepakura file is much more simple in comparison. I couldn't afford any good material from the school, so I used hardened paper.

Griffin Korns: Week 11 Laser Engraving

Concept:
I originally wanted to do a raster engraving of the black/white image featured above, but due to some unforeseen issues with formatting, I decided to make it a crosshatched engraving instead, as I knew it could be done without issue. The car featured is a 2016 Mustang GT350 R.

Technique:
I took a wallpaper of mine and modified it in Photoshop to be black and white, and so that the shadows were extremely contrasting, and any excess color or lighter shadows were gone. I then took that image into Illustrator and drew curves around all of the different "tiers" of shadows, which made 4. I then took those curves into Rhino, and split planes with them, organizing each plane by shadow tier. Then I used the contour command to crosshatch each plane according to its shadow tier. I added an additional hatch for each tier of shadow, with the 4th tier having 4 hatches, and being darkest.

Materials:
I used a piece of regular plywood from Lowe's, and some glue to secure the feet of the stand.

Griffin Korns: Week 12 Waffle Lamp

Concept:
I wanted to make a simple, easy to put together lamp that sort of mimicked a globe, and could stand on its own.

Technique:
I created a series of circular curves, then lofted them to create the outer shape, then used the Cap command to seal it off. I duplicated the model and manipulated it to get the interior cavity shape that I wanted, then used BooleanDifference to hollow it out. I followed the tutorial video with the pipes to create the sliced model.

Materials:
The model is made out of 2 ply cardboard, along with a regular light bulb and a Bottle Lamp kit from Lowe's.I also created a mounting piece for the light bulb with some scrap cardboard, and cut it so it notches into the top of the lamp.

Griffin Korns & Michael Creamer: Week 16 Pepakura

Concept:
The design is a low poly model of a hammerhead shark, the intent behind creating it being to replicate an organic and fluid form with straight edges. It was also intended to be able to stand on its own, similar to a tripod.

Technique:
The shark was originally modeled in Maya, then brought into Pepakura to be tweaked until it was foldable. It was brought back into Maya to be split up and modified several times to fix any issues with folding.

Materials:
The shark was made of eflute cardboard, then folded and stuck together with tape and various glues. It was sprayed with textured spraypaint to make the surface more dynamic and visually interesting, as well as to add depth.

Maizie Desmarais and Hannah Revelle: Week 16 Pepakura

Concept:
We wanted to make something that involved our cats and decided a cat bed would be a good idea. We also wanted something that was familiar and that we were a fan of, and Portal was the first thing that came to our mind. The game cube was a big prop in the game and fit into the idea of a bed because of the easy shape. We didn't want it to be an exact replica, so we modified an opening and decided to make it circular to paint on the portals to act as if the cats were using the portal to their bed.

Modeling Techniques:
We started off with an inner cube and an outer cube so it has double walls. Then we thought about how to make the edge details perfectly by making another cube and splitting into three sections. Since there are two different edge details, we have to repeat the same process with different measurements for the second one. To create the outer details on the edges, we created rectangles around each side and Boolean differences it to get the shape. For the opening hole, two cones were used for the different edges. We kept the base in the same place, but used a truncated cone to get different slopes on the details. After that we put everything into Pepakura and made minor adjustments to keep our poly count below 300.

Materials:
We used the cardboard provided and used loctite glue to hold all the edges together with tape on the outside to clean our seams. After we used a primer, we used acrylic paint from there on out.