Brandon Wehenkel: Pepakura

Ghosted Black

Concept:
We had two ideas.
Idea 1. - Jeremiah and I wanted to create something similar to this.  We experimented with five-sided shape, a six-sided, seven-sided and concluded with a five.  Jeremiah liked the idea of twisting the shape slightly, so we ran with that in the model.  Jeremiah also likes illusions so this concept was perfect for his interests.
Idea 2. - We also wanted to create about 30 squares and hang them from the ceiling in a way that looks like they had exploded from one central space.  The viewer would be able to walk around the space and see it from all sided differently.  This plan was much more ambitious and it would be an amazing task to perform but the process could have taken much longer than two weeks, so we chose to make one shape with many interior perforations instead.

Keyshot 1

Modeling Technique:
Jeremiah sculpted the model with truncated pyramid with five sides.  He then created a stamp that was used to create the interior cutout.  He just duplicated the shape seven times and scaled and moved to create steps.  He also rotated each layer about 10 degrees each.  He used Boolean difference to make cuts both inside and underneath.  The shape was not quite finished when it was initially cut from the inside so I made the decision to slice the shape on the side.  Jeremiah wanted there to be at least 2 large cuts which gave the shape a unique backside.

Keyshot 2

Materials:
In Keyshot:
I used marble for the exterior because I loved the shine the lighting gave on the object.  I had hoped to recreate the same gloss but I didn't find a spray paint that was full gloss, only semi-gloss.  The interior colored sections I used soft plastic for the material because it looked similar to the paint texture.  I did not use a bump map.


In real life:
We used cardboard bought from the fabrication lab.  The blue acrylic paint was applied to the internal cut faces.  We used painters tape to cover up the connection points of the pepakura.

 Gluing

The entire building process was a bit tedious, but we managed to get it finished with only two sessions.  Jeremiah did most of the gluing, and we split taping. I painted and folded pieces.

Interior

We started by painting blue acrylic paint onto the pentagonal faces.  I made sure to label the faces with their corresponding numeric values on the back of the cardboard for easy assembly.  The flaps were much smaller than we had anticipated so instead of waiting for the super glue to tack together, we used hot glue.  The project, for the most part, was a simple task from then on until we put on the exterior faces.  Something didn't translate right from the 3d space to real space.  The thickness of the cardboard wasn't translated in real space so when we assembled the interior cuts, there was a significant gap.  It was too big to force the pieces together, so we chose to create L-pieces cut from scrap cardboard.

 Favorite Angle

After it had been assembled, we covered up the holes with paper and cardboard bits, to save the blue paint from being ruined and spray painted the exterior.  We also attempted to color the gap with white spraypaint.

 Distance