The next part of the Who Will You Feed? project will be to create a 4 foot Pepakura bust
As a reminder:
"Who Will You Feed? was inspired by the Cherokee parable known as the Two Wolves (First People). This parable tells a story about a boy and his grandfather who teaches his grandson a concept that their is two wolves that exist in all of us who are in a constant state of battle. One wolf represents everything that is good and selfless while the other wolf represents everything that is evil and selfish. The boy asks his grandfather "How do you know which wolf will win the battle?" The Grandfather replies "It is the one I choose to feed"(First People).
To represent the Two Wolves parable I sculpted a wolf skull onto a bust in Autodesk program Mudbox. The left side the skull is dirty, scratched and scared to represent the bad wolf and the right side is almost untouched to represent the good wolf. After I finished the skull I brought it into the Autodesk program Maya to remove the skull from its original bust because the model had become to dense with polygons. When I was done removing the skull from the but I imported back into a mud box and placed it on top of a new bust. I kept the face of the bust featureless so that it would be more ambiguous and I added a hoodie to add an influence of Little Red Riding Hood and the Grim Reaper. I felt that the Grim Reaper was an appropriate representation of the wolf in Native American culture since the wolf is often represented as judge, jury and executioner. I sculpted wolf ears onto the hoodie so it would look more like a wolf."
You can read more about the project here:
You can read more about the project here:
The first step was deleting the base to the bust and bringing in the model to Mudbox to create a reduced mesh of my original model. From their a drew out the curves for my edges so that the retopology tool will have some idea of where I want some of the more important edge loops in my model. When that was done I used to tool and try to reduce the mesh as much as I could. This took a lot of trial and error to get it just the way I wanted it.
Once I got the model reduced as far as I could I exported the model to Maya and tried the reduce mesh tools a few different times. Once I again this took some trial an error with me tweaking the setting each time. I could only get it down to about 1600 faces with out loosing some of the more important details. So I had to go back in by hand and do a lot of manual retopology. The whole process took about 2 weeks.
Once the model was finished in Maya I brought it into Keyshot and rendered it see what it would look like made of metal.
Now it was time to bring it into Pepakura and unfold the model onto a 2' x 4' sheets for the laser cutter. To do this I drew out every single open edge and then told it to unfold. After that I seperated and joined edges so that they would better fit the sheets and be in bigger pieces so that it would be easier to put together. I made sure all the edge ID's were the and the flaps where the way I wanted them. The teeth around the front of the nose were the most difficult and had many little piece in the long run. Joining them together would not have worked for this model.
Once I was finished with Pepakura I exported the file to Adobe Illustrator and then to rhino. Illustrator only acted as a bridge between the two programs. Once in rhino I reformatted all the lines to be what they needed to be in order to be cut accurately by the laser printer.. I had to make sure the line where the right thickness and all the colors were correct. While also making sure I can tell the difference between a valley fold line and a mountain fold line. This way it will be easier to assemble.
Once it was laser cut I brought it home and started to assemble my statue. It was important to plan out where you start when assembling a Pepakura project. If you choose the wrong spot it will be a lot harder to put together. The tools I used to put it together were Loctite Professional, scissors and ruler to help fold the lines.
After all the cardboard piece were put together it was time to apply masking tape to seal the edges and I coated it with Shellac to protect the statue.
Once the shellac was applied it was time to paint the sculpture. I had to paint it 2 coats of silver and 3 coats of copper for it to get its full effect. I added turquoise paint to the copper using a dry brush technique to add more texture to the piece and I used a dark gray to the silver.
To stabilize the bust I added a spray foam called "Great Stuff" to the inside of the chest cavity and a few pieces of styro-foam to the base of sculpture.
The Silver metal represents the super ego which is the part of our personality that developed to live in society standards. The copper represents the core of our personality including the Id and ego. The Id is the part of us that is driven by instinct and the ego is the part of us that develops when we start make choices on our own. In other words the steel hoodie covers up an hides the true self, the copper mask.
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