Xochitl Juarez: Week 12 Pepakura Creature

 Concept

    For my initial creature design, I wanted to try and combine various animals. The animals that I decided to combine were a sun bear, an axolotl, and a flamingo. Each had different characteristics taken from them, such as the bear’s body, the flamingo’s neck, and the tail and whiskers of the axolotl. I wanted to combine these animals as I mainly wanted to create a lizard mammal hybrid. The main changes that were made while creating the concept were if more bird features should be added, such as a beak and wings. I ultimately decided against it as I did not want to make the design too cluttered or confusing. For the color scheme and texture, I wanted to stick with the mammal features of fur, attempting to simulate the texture with the renders. I also decided to make the color scheme red as I wanted the creature to stand out and seem less aquatic.

Techniques

    I started on the head of the creature with a quad ball that was created by using the Smooth function on a cube twice. Next, I pulled on individual vertices to create a slightly squished head. Then, I created the eye sockets by using Extrude on the socket faces, pushing them inwards. I also extruded the front mouth faces to create the mouth fold, adjusting the vertices as needed. Once the head’s base was complete, I started work on the neck. Using a cylinder and a NURBS curve, I positioned the curve’s points to create the arch of the neck. I then positioned the bottom faces of the cylinder to the top of the curve, extruding them and adding sections to create a more seamless neck. Once the neck was complete, I created a new quad ball from a cube to start the body. I stretched the ball and pulled the vertices as needed to create an oval-like shape that would be tall enough to hold the legs and tail. With the body set, I started creating the legs. Using a cylinder, I added edge loops with the Insert Edge Loop tool and pulled the loops to create the bends of the legs. The feet were made by starting with a cube that I added subdivisions to through the input settings in the Channel Box. I duplicated one of the legs and applied the second leg to the back of the body to prepare to attach the body together. To make attaching easier, I first deleted half of the model, leaving only the left side to work with. Next, I deleted faces that would be used to attach the head to the neck. I made sure to have the same number of edges on each section to then use the Bridge tool. With it, I was able to create additional faces that connected the head and neck. To ensure the connection was smooth, I used the Smooth Preview feature to see the connection. I moved vertices and spaced out the edge loops to avoid lumps. This same process was used to attach the two legs. However, extra edge loops were added to avoid excessive pulling. Once the attachments were complete, I returned to the head. Using a cylinder and NURBS curve again, I created the antenna that would hang from the sides of the face. The attachment process was the same as the rest of the body. Some of the edge loops of the head had to be changed as the antennas were so small that the head would be lumpy with so many edge loops placed together. Once the antennas were attached, I set the center pivot to the center of the model when whole. Any vertices that were unaligned were adjusted. To be sure of having few problems occurring, I froze the transformations and deleted the model’s history. Next, I duplicated and flipped the model’s half and connected it by using the Combine tool on the halves of the model and the Merge tool on the vertices. With the main body complete, I extruded some of the back faces with a NURBS curve to create the shape of the tail. The final cleanup of the model was done with freeze transformations, delete history, and mesh cleanup of nonmanifold geometry.

Materials

    The main colors and textures were made by using Substance Painter. Within keyshot, I used a default hard plastic material to apply my own texture maps. Next, I changed the type to generic, making the roughness 0.385 and the specularity 0.302. The texture maps were applied as color and bump maps, each constraining to the model by following the UVs. For the basic renders, I used the product lighting preset and a grey lighting setup. For the environment render, I used an art gallery as the backdrop as the sculpture would be displayed in a proper setting. If my design was chosen, I would have liked to achieve the fur texture with the use of paper mache and clay. The base color would be spray-painted on while the patches of darker areas would be painted on afterward. The eyes would have been painted with metallic paint so that they would be reflective and stand out.

Group Design Choice

    Of my group, the design that was chosen of the three was Paris’ merman design. We decided to name the sculpture The Merman of Trinity River. The reason that we decided to choose the design was that it seemed to be the most flexible for post-processing purposes as to what designs, colors, and textures could be created. The design also lends itself to having a more fun tone that played upon the expectations of the ideal image of a mermaid. We were also able to tell a story through the sculpture the most directly with this model in comparison to the other options.

Group and Individual Roles and Expectations

    For work to be distributed as evenly as possible and to work around any time constraints or transportation issues, Ammer was made responsible for preparing the model for pepakura and the laser cutting within Rhino. As the model belonged to Paris, he and Ammer cleaned up and simplified the model to make the pepakura file preparation easier. Once the file was prepped, I transitioned the file to Inkscape as SVG formats to comply with the laser cutter’s format. In addition, I was the one who input the file and ran the laser cutter while both Ammer and Paris checked the pieces and removed them from the cardboard. Between the three of us, we folded the pieces and made sure the pieces were accounted for. With the laser cutting complete, Paris and I assembled and applied post-processing to the model and the model’s base. 

Process and Contributions to Group Work

    The model was first cleaned up and made to have as few faces as possible, done by Ammer and Paris. Once a good footing was found with the model, Ammer and Paris collaborated on making the pepakura file have as many large pieces as possible to make assembly easier. When a version of the file was complete, I would check the file and check for any pieces that seemed to make little sense for physical construction. Once complete, Ammer made the Rhino file that contained the pepakura file. With the Rhino file, I made the perforations needed for the cuts and converted the Rhino into “sheets” of SVGs for the laser cutter.

    Once file preparation was completed, we met together at the maker space to cut the pieces out. I ran the machine and monitored the cuts, giving Ammer and Paris the cut sheets once they were complete to check for any pieces that were cut incorrectly or were unusable. Once the laser cutting was complete, the three of us folded the pieces and did a final inventory check on the pieces.

    With the pieces completed, Paris and I assembled the model with the use of masking tape and loctite. As some of the pieces ended up tugging on each other, the loctite would occasionally snap off, requiring tape to be the main method of assembly. Another issue that was encountered was that due to the twisted pose of the model, certain pieces were not able to attach as seamlessly. This was mainly an issue for one of the arms as it was partially within the chest. Despite minor issues with assembly, the model was able to stand on its own as it has three points of contact with the ground: the two arms and a portion of the tail.

    The direction for the post-processing was decided to try to have a gradient look between the tail and body, accomplished through spray paint. Illustrations were added to the tail to act as ‘tattoos’ of what happened for our creature to look the way that he does. To add to the macabre appearance of the merman, we decided to use the contours of the eye socket to add multiple eyes to the creature. In addition, clay coral, barnacles, and shells were added to the body alongside seaweed, with inspiration being taken from fish and whales who are covered in a variety of marine life.

    Overall, the model and the assembly were able to be completed in a timely manner. If there would be any changes that could be made, I would have liked to have added a layer of paper mache to smooth out the sculpture’s surface. This was originally taken into consideration but was ultimately decided against in order to have time to complete the sculpture and whether the cardboard would be able to handle being soggy and hold shape. Clay could have been used as an alternative, but its fragility and long drying times also made it a poor choice for full-body application.