Professor Andrew F. Scott gave us the idea in class one day. At first, I thought it would be strange having multiple Pepakura hands produced, however, this turned out to be my favorite of all the projects this semester.
As the project progressed, I began to think about the deeper conceptual meaning of the project. Hands are expressive and every individual's hands tell a unique story. I decided to name my project "Loving Reach" to represent my endless reach for love. Whether it's the unconditional love of another, my desire to help, serve, and inspire others through education, or the passionate love of my creative endeavors (3D modeling, photography/cinematography, digital fabrication, and playing/composing piano music).
Modeling Techniques
During one class day, we created molds of our hands. My right hand had a sensitive area due to biting the skin around one of my fingernails, and I didn't want to irritate it further, so I chose to mold my non-dominant left hand. The process of creating a mold was a lot of fun. I hadn't gotten my hands dirty like that in a long time. It was quite liberating!
Professor Scott poured in more casting resin into my mold than the other students so it overflowed and created a round base.
The next step in the process was to use the 3D scanner to scan our hand and then clean up our geometry. I choose to use 300 polygons. I wasn't too fond of some areas of the mesh, so I cleaned it up even more and reduced the number of polys down to 191.
I chose to use the white cardboard because it was the same color as my resin cast and because it would be easier to paint. Professor Scott suggested using white tape to place along all of the edges to cover the numbers and any holes. During the re-topology phase of the project, I purposefully structured the geometry to produce the outline of a heart on the palm of my hand. When taping, I chose to outline the heart geometry in red tape.
Construction
After unrolling everything in Pepakura, I printed the model and pieced it together with my boyfriend at the 3D studio. The assembly process took about 7 hours total. My boyfriend became frustrated during the last couple hours of assembly, not expecting to spend his entire Saturday evening assembling a 4 ft replica of his girlfriend's left hand; however, listening to music, cracking a lot of "hand" puns, and playing around with the materials brought some enjoyment to the tedious process.
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