Melanie Estes and Sarah Roberson: Pepakura Monopoly Man

Concept:

For the concept for the pepakura, we wanted to do Monopoly. But what better way to represent that than modeling the man behind the logo? We also wanted to model some of the pieces. We were originally going to do all of them, but due to lack of time, we ended up making two of them. We made the ship and the car both based off of designs that I first modeling in Rhino, and then made them low poly by re-modeling it in Maya.

Modeling Techniques:

(This is written by Sarah Roberson) For both Melanie and I, we didn't have much experience modeling in Maya, but the tools that we did end up using were the Multi cut tool, the Merge tool, the Mirror tool and the snap to grid tool a lot. With the sunken in parts of the model, I used the multi cut tool to create a face in the shape of a hubcap and then extruded it inward. I also did it for the fron and back faces to make it look like a grill and just to add detail. When it came to unfolding the surfaces to make the Pepakura file that would eventually be cut, we did them in three phases. The first was the main body, and then the two pieces came next. We unfolded them trying to follow the motion of the already existing piece which would make it easier for us to put it back together one everything was cut. 

(This is written by Melanie) With the help of Ronald and Ashley, we used our original higher quality Rhino models as reference to remake inside of Maya. The man started at the head as a quad ball. The rest of him was made by extruding specific faces and altering points to stretch and squash specific faces. He was made in the classic T pose. His arms were later positioned by rotating and translating the edge loops from the shoulder through the fingers. His feet were taken from a transformed version of the original Rhino model and stitched on to the ankles of the Maya-made model. The hat was later separated into its own piece to make it easier to build. The ship started as a cylinder with the end cap faces removed. All of the features on top of the deck were made by extruding cylinders that were then stitched onto the deck. I did this by using the multi-cut tool and insert edge loop tool to create faces directly under the towers, deleted those faces, and merged the points to meet the bottom of the towers. The ball at the end of the further tower is a quad ball. The end pieces at each edge of the ship are cubes added in the same fashion as the towers. To ensure that the two halves were congruent, I deleted half of the faces and mirrored the remaining ones over. 

After the pepakura was assembled all except for the feet, we taped the body using electrical tape due to its stretchiness. The car, ship, and hat were taped with regular masking tape. We filled the feet with expanding foam to help weigh down the body and keep him from falling over. All pieces were sealed with spray sealant. The shoes and hat were painted with black acrylic while the car and ship were painted with a hammered metal spray paint. The clothes were bought from a thrift store; they ended up being baby clothes in order to fit properly. The cane is actually a large candy cane cut to the proper height and covered in black electrical tape. 

Material Choices:

The materials were already chosen for us, but the pieces and the man were all made out of e-flute cardboard. This is a sturdy material which helps give the models the shape that it needed. We used a ton of LocTite Superglue and white electrical tape to seal off the body. When the pieces we all put together, we then painted the feet and hat black and then ended up getting clothes for him.When we put the car into Keyshot, we used a rusted metal which we added a scratched bump map to the piece. For the ship, we used a brushed black metal base which then I added a blue color tint to it to make it feel like you were on the sea. The man was difficult. We ended up using a white plastic to mimic the color of the e-flute and then turned the lights down on the background. 

(So I accidentally deleted the keyshot renders for the Monopoly Man and the Boat and didn't have time to make new ones)