CONCEPT:
For this project, I wanted to create an Egyptian creature because I love the charismatic designs of Egyptian culture. After having my research and references, I decided to create a guardian creature that is protecting the king's tomb to have basic story that will help the design. Therefore, I chose a big dog's face since the dogs are people's best friends, guardians of the livestock or houses, and often represent loyalty to their master. I also added spiky lion's mane around the face to have more relationship with the king, since the lion represents the glorious king among the wild animals. The creature has a lot of eyes and huge ears to sense the intruders in the king's tomb, and its mouth is wide open to threaten them. Additionally, the sculpture has a flat big pedestal at the bottom to maintain balance since it has a top-heavy design.
TECHNIQUES:
I modeled the creature in Maya. I started with creating a high poly model of the creature, and then reduced the polygons to make it suitable for a pepakura design. I imported the low poly design into a free software called Pepakura Designer. I unfolded the model in the Pepakura Designer, edited their flaps, gave edge identification numbers to them, aligned the pieces in appropriate sized sheet with select and move command, and color coded their lines by following the professor Andrew Scott's tutorial videos. Honestly, using the Pepakua Designer was the most fun part in this project since it was like creating 3D puzzle. After that, I exported the layout in one composition vector DXF file, and imported that file into Rhino to make the layout more suitable for laser cutting. I moved the position of the pieces in Rhino according to the reference rectangles that I drew, and most importantly, I assigned the proper colors and line types to the layers.
MATERIALS: 1/8" thick 24" x 48" Cardboard, Loctite, Black, Gold, and Brown Paints
I rendered the creature in Key Shot. I chose the light and environment of a desert, because Egyptian culture was developed mainly in desert area. I used the Paint Gloss Black and Paint Metallic Yellow materials because those are the two most iconic colors used in Egyptian designs, and I was aiming for a strong color contrast of light and dark colors to have obvious focal points in my design. That is why I did not painted the mane in gold, since it will lose the focal point. For the physical sculpture, me and my teammates used thin cardboard material to make it possible to fold when we are assembling the pepakura. It also helped the sculpture to be relatively light-weighted compared to its huge size. My teammates assembled and painted the sculpture with black and gold paints, and attached golden eyes. Andrew painted the base of the statue in dark brown color, and wrote hieroglyph with gold paint to decorate it.
Paragraph 1:
In me, Andrew, and Gail's group, among the three different great designs came out for our team project, my creature design was selected to move forward with. It is a Egyptian guardian creature defending the king's tomb, and we were calling it as Good Boy while working on it since the sculpture was designed based on a dog's shape. There are several reasons for that we chose the design. Firstly, we all liked the charismatic Egyptian themed design that has strong contrast in it. Secondly, we agreed that my design has the highest quality 3D modeling and the most reasonable background story. Lastly, we believed that it will be the most challenging design to create, since we were aiming for a memorable statue that we can be proud of and will keep even after the course ends. As a group, we envisioned the final product to have less golden accessories than my original design to make it look more natural and have stronger focal point with color contrast. Additionally, we chose to use thin cardboard material to make it possible to fold and to help the sculpture to be relatively light-weighted.
Paragraph 2:
My role and contribution in this team project was the original design and computer works. To go into detail, I designed the sculpture, did the 3D modeling in Maya, unfolding in Pepakura Designer, and created the layout for laser cutting in Rhino. After everything is finished, transferred all the needed files through Box to Andrew and Gail to move forward. Andrew prepared all the cardboard materials, and Gail was responsible for laser cutting in TheLab Makerspace with those. After that, Andrew and Gail assembled the cut out pieces and did post processing. I did my best for the computer works because I am not great at handcrafting, and I was so relieved when the layouts were successfully cut out with no issue.
Paragraph 3:
Since I was familiar with all the required software, such as Maya, Pepakura Designer, and Rhino, but not confident in handcrafting, it was great for me that I could focus on computer works in the group. Gail said that she is completely opposite, she was not confident in 3D workflow but great at post processing, so I believe that was nicely divided pros and cons in our group. On the other hand, I experienced a lot of trials and errors while working on this team project. Even after choosing the design to move forward with, all of us tried to revise the design, so I tried various different 3D models in Maya. I spent long time while revising the errors of overlapping flaps in Pepakura design, and Andrew helped me in that process with his keen eyes. I also had to deal with a lot of trials and errors while creating layout for laser cutting in Rhino, since we had to use laser bed that is different sized from what we have been using, because the school's machine was still not working. But generally, I believe everything came out successfully in the end before the deadline, and I love how our teamwork went through this project smoothly like I wrote in the Team Member Review.
No comments:
Post a Comment