Anisha Chaudhary and Darrius Williams Week 13: Pepakura

Concept:
For this project, we decided to work on a shield. We wanted to create something that we could use as cosplay for later times. We referenced images from Captain America's old shield and new shield, and combined elements from both to create our own unique piece. The shield is meant to look like it was cast in bronze, with a bright golden star emblem in the center. We made the choice to stay away from red, white, and blue colors since it is supposed to look like a shield used for battle. We decided to do a bronze color to resemble the shield on a penny.

Modeling:
We started out by modeling this piece in Rhino. We created a network curve and capped both sides of the plane closed. We made the flat piece bend using the bend command. To create the star, we used an elongated pyramid and the command "Array Polar" to make it even on each side. We then used the command Boolean Union to combine the pieces together. There was some minor difficulty in this, since the star would stick out oddly from the bent shield, so we bent the star as well and did a Boolean union. This did make the top part of the star a little longer than the rest, but not at an extremely noticeable level. We then took our complete shield from Rhino and put it into Maya. In Maya, we retopologized the entire piece so that it would take less polygons. We managed to get the poly count under 200. This made our piece a lot simpler to put together. We used one line fonts when laying out the pepakura.
After our pepakura was printed, it took us a few hours to assemble it. After assembling the piece we used M3 masking tape to cover all of the holes present on the shield. We then went over the entire shield with epoxy (front half) and shellac (back side). It took about a day for all of this to dry. We then spray painted the entire piece with a black primer. This was followed by a coat of bronze and gold spray paint. When spraying the shield, we taped down the star with blue masking tape. When spraying the star we did the opposite and put paper on everything but the star.
In total, our process was:
Create the Model
Retopologize the model
Layout the model in Pepakura software
Use one line fonts to organize the layout
Print
Assemble the cut outs
Tape together using M3 tape
Use epoxy and shellac to stiffen/harden material
Use a coat of Primer
Use a coat of Spray Paint
Glue wood pieces to back
Glue Velcro straps to wood

Materials:
We used Professional Loctite Glue to put pieced together
We used M3 and blue masking tape to close off holes and guide our painting process. We used Shellac and Epoxy to harden the piece and prevent the ridges from the M3 tape being too obvious. We used three spray paints and one primer to color this piece. We used a small plank of wood and 2 velcro straps for the back straps so a person can hold the shield on their forearm.

We used M3 tape and Professional Loctite glue for the inside of the shield to help hold it together.

 A chip bag clip was helpful when we needed pieces to be still so that we can let them glue together.

We taped off the front star to prevent hammered bronze from getting on it.