G Lee: Week 4 Project 2 Serial Slicing

Concept

With this project, I wanted to build something organic and slightly fantastical because that's where my general interests lie. Human-faced creatures like sphinx and harpies are some of my favorites, as are invertebrates like velvet worms. So, the idea of combining the two came naturally.

"Folk Figurines" by artist Willow Sadam inspired the stylization of the model and on how I could help prevent an uncanny valley effect with the face through simpler shapes. The colorful nature and hand-made touch also inspired the idea of using paper mache and acrylic paint for the final sculpture to try and reintroduce a more organic feeling over the serial slicing.

Techniques

Before I began building any of the model, I set-up picture frames of my references so I could trace over them. From there, I used the Control Point Curve tool to build the outline of the nose, neck, and body. Both the nose and neck received enough curves to allow them to be built out of the surface network command in Rhino, as I desired very particular shapes with them. Further alteration was done through simply turning on control points and manually adjusting the points - this included deleting out entire sections and pushing or pulling points into place.

For the body, I revolved the curve defining the "top" of it 180 degrees around, and then used control point editing again to adjust to have a taper at the end. The bottom was closed with a plane I trimmed to fit and joined, creating one of many polysurfaces. Around 5 different leg shapes were made by lofting different modified ellipse curves together, and then were copied and moved into place all along the body.

Boolean union was used to connect all of the separate pieces I built into one closed polysurface. Any naked edges that would interfere with the union were removed through careful trimming or moving of surfaces.

After serial slicing and extruding, I looked through the entire model for any excess geometry that would not be worth cutting out and edited curves deviated too much from the original model.

Materials

I knew from the very beginning that I wanted to paint my sculpture, so I used only Keyshot's paint materials. For the face, I split up the surface so the eyes and mouth could use separate paint materials to color them in. The antennae, body, and face have a color gradient texture applied to the diffuse to represent the differently painted areas. A bump texture was added to all of the materials to try and give a little depth that would match the roughness of the paper mache.