Brandon Wehenkel: Pepakura

Ghosted Black

Concept:
We had two ideas.
Idea 1. - Jeremiah and I wanted to create something similar to this.  We experimented with five-sided shape, a six-sided, seven-sided and concluded with a five.  Jeremiah liked the idea of twisting the shape slightly, so we ran with that in the model.  Jeremiah also likes illusions so this concept was perfect for his interests.
Idea 2. - We also wanted to create about 30 squares and hang them from the ceiling in a way that looks like they had exploded from one central space.  The viewer would be able to walk around the space and see it from all sided differently.  This plan was much more ambitious and it would be an amazing task to perform but the process could have taken much longer than two weeks, so we chose to make one shape with many interior perforations instead.

Keyshot 1

Modeling Technique:
Jeremiah sculpted the model with truncated pyramid with five sides.  He then created a stamp that was used to create the interior cutout.  He just duplicated the shape seven times and scaled and moved to create steps.  He also rotated each layer about 10 degrees each.  He used Boolean difference to make cuts both inside and underneath.  The shape was not quite finished when it was initially cut from the inside so I made the decision to slice the shape on the side.  Jeremiah wanted there to be at least 2 large cuts which gave the shape a unique backside.

Keyshot 2

Materials:
In Keyshot:
I used marble for the exterior because I loved the shine the lighting gave on the object.  I had hoped to recreate the same gloss but I didn't find a spray paint that was full gloss, only semi-gloss.  The interior colored sections I used soft plastic for the material because it looked similar to the paint texture.  I did not use a bump map.


In real life:
We used cardboard bought from the fabrication lab.  The blue acrylic paint was applied to the internal cut faces.  We used painters tape to cover up the connection points of the pepakura.

 Gluing

The entire building process was a bit tedious, but we managed to get it finished with only two sessions.  Jeremiah did most of the gluing, and we split taping. I painted and folded pieces.

Interior

We started by painting blue acrylic paint onto the pentagonal faces.  I made sure to label the faces with their corresponding numeric values on the back of the cardboard for easy assembly.  The flaps were much smaller than we had anticipated so instead of waiting for the super glue to tack together, we used hot glue.  The project, for the most part, was a simple task from then on until we put on the exterior faces.  Something didn't translate right from the 3d space to real space.  The thickness of the cardboard wasn't translated in real space so when we assembled the interior cuts, there was a significant gap.  It was too big to force the pieces together, so we chose to create L-pieces cut from scrap cardboard.

 Favorite Angle

After it had been assembled, we covered up the holes with paper and cardboard bits, to save the blue paint from being ruined and spray painted the exterior.  We also attempted to color the gap with white spraypaint.

 Distance

Thomas Perugini: Pepakura

Pepakura first piqued my interest a few years ago, for its common use of prop making. Props have always been a fun thing for me to make at home, so I decided to try it with Pepakura. I decided to make a futuristic welding and cutting tool. Much of my inspiration came from the plasma cutter tool from Dead Space, as well as general industrial aesthetic.

Most of the model was constructed from extruded straight curves. The pieces that go around the main body of the model were given a Boolean difference to hollow out the shape and holes. Then Pepakura was used to bring the unfolded shapes to the cutting board.

The shapes were cut from .25' cardboard, with rare earth magnets inserted in certain location between pieces so that they stick together and can move. I then got the idea to use cut pieces of empty water bottles for more accessories. All of the pieces were then painted with 2 to 3 layers of black Plasti-Dip, which is a latex paint coating. After that dried and set I took a grey acrylic paint and did heavy strokes on edges, and light strokes on surfaces for a worn texture and appearance.

Chloe Ferris & Nathan Bower: Final Project Chess Piece

When we grouped up together, we started looking at different inspirations for our chess piece. When searching we found a very interesting, modern set that we wanted to recreate. We chose the bishop from this set, as we both felt it was the most interesting and aesthetically pleasing, as well as being achievable within the scope of this project.

Chess Piece Inspiration

Nathan created the model for the bishop in Maya, since it was going to have to be a polygonal model in the end anyways. He made sure to try to keep the polygon count very low, so the piece would be easy to assemble. I took this exported OBJ and loaded up into the Pepakura Designer to create the flat sheet that we would need to recreate the piece in 3D. I tried to make the cuts on the model in places that would allow easy access to the entire piece during assembly to the best of my ability, so it would not turn into a huge hassle later. Then, I took these cut pieces and arranged them as close as possible on the sheets, and exported the sheets out to be sent to Rhino. Once there, I used the Grasshopper script to create dash and dot-dash lines for the valley and mountain folds on each piece.

Cut Sheets From Pepakura

Cut Sheet From Rhino

After printing, we constructed the chess piece using Loctite to hold it together. The piece was pretty easy to assemble. We started by making the square base first, then adding each side for the middle part. We then assembled the head separately and attached it to the main body, then added the top piece.

Final Assembled Piece