Vincent Lo: Pepakura

Concept

This concept arose in class, and we decided to pursue the idea of Pepakura hands.

Techniques

We started off by creating molds for our hands, and once that was finished, we filled the molds to generate our hand figures. Using Scan Studio, we digitized our figures into scanned data. However, the data was full of holes, so we used Rapidworks to fix them up. We also used Rapidworks to decimate our hands to lower-poly hands. 

At this point, I used Maya to re-topologize my hand using quad draw. I did my best to be efficient with the number of faces while keeping some evenness among them. With a clean and relatively low-poly model, I used Pepakura Designer to layout the mesh. I was able to fit my 2 ft model into a 24x48" sheet. The data was exported into .EPS and .DXF files.

Using Adobe Illustrator, I combined the two files into a single .DXF file, which Rhino can read. After some organization and color coding, I was finally able to setup the appropriate file for laser-cutting.

Materials

For the Keyshot render, I used a gemstone material because I felt it was the most appealing and showed off the faces of the model well. For the sculpture, I used white cardboard for a similar reason. I thought white would be more aesthetically pleasing than brown.