Will McKiernan Pepakura Project

For this pepakura project, I was inspired by Professor Scott's fist model and wanted to do something similar. I attended a mold making session with Professor Scott to create a mold of my right hand. I then transferred the hand to a digital medium and reproduced it in the physical world in cardboard.

I created a digital model of my hand using a laser scanner. After aligning the scans, I used Rapid Works to clean up and fix the mesh. I then reduced the mesh to 500 poly's and saved it as an OBJ file. I opened this file in Maya and "Reduced" it once again. Originally the polys were triangles, so I quadrangulated the mesh, then used the Merge Vertices tool to create rings of square faces to make the unfolding easier. Unwrapping the model in the Pepakura software was the hardest part. Because I was doing a hand, I couldn't make the pieces symmetrical. Finding edges in the geometry that could be easily put back together was a difficult task. I ended up with 29  separate pieces on five sheets.

Honestly, I wasn't sure how tall my pepakura would be. Once I started assembling the pieces I realized it would be quite tall. I had a few problems with the assembly in that some flaps did not meet their respective pieces quite as smoothly as I had anticipated. Overall, I think the model came out very well and I'm happy with hw it looks. This was an extremely fun project and I learned a lot about fixing models and transferring files between programs.