Jackson Lanphere: Week 16 FlatFab Model

 Concept

I bounced around a few ideas in my head before landing on the hippogriff. In fact the hippogriff only came about because FlatFab crashed and I lost my work on the griffin I was making. When I tried to remake the griffin the feet looked more like hooves to me, so I made it a hippogriff instead to better fit the design.

Process

I tried to do this project without any training at first and it didn't go so well. I've worked with 3d puzzles and similar models before so I figured it couldn't be too difficult to make one. After a few minutes of being confused by FlatFab's controls I decided to turn to the tutorials on their website. Once I had the basic controls it wasn't too difficult, but I still felt that the controls were unintuitive. I struggled with the controls the whole way through this project. For a few of the pieces of the model I was able to mirror them which made the modeling process a lot easier. The legs were a bit awkward to make since each one needed to be a different shape, but I was able to get the general shape of one leg and edit that for each other leg. I used the linear generation tool to create the pieces that give the body and tail depth and then manually edited what didn't work. For some reason moving around in FlatFab made me nauseous. I also lost my work due to FlatFab crashing after I hit save. I'm not sure why I struggled so much with the program, even though I found it relatively simple.

Overall I think FlatFab is a good tool for anyone wanting to get into simple 3d modeling for free, but I feel that they may have oversimplified many of the features most people would expect from any program. However it is still in beta so I'm looking forward to what they come up with in the future.

Materials 

I wanted my hippogriff to be a small model that I could put on my desk. I have a habit of just putting seemingly random things around my workspace because I can't just leave it neat and clean. Most of the models I've made are made from thin pieces of wood and I tried to replicate that with my final render. However these are fairly cheap, made to be punched out of a thin sheet of wood, and are surprisingly fragile, so a stronger material would likely be better. Probably some sort of plastic or even PVC sheet.