Papercraft First Prototype

Out of the possible concepts I created to move forward, I chose the abstraction of a fabric knit. This was my decision because I believe it is both the most visually stimulating and the concept which utilizes the properties of paper the best. My prototype for this pattern consists of 13 repetitions of the individual pyramid form. You can see below that 6 of them make up the red top mesh and 7 make up the black bottom mesh.

 Because I needed 13 templates in total I printed off 2 sheets which each had 7 on them, leaving me 1 extra in case I messed up. This extra turned out to be much more useful than I anticipated.

Here is how my small first prototype turned out.

So back to that extra piece I was talking about. After I had completed the original idea for the prototype. I was messing around with the extra when Liam pointed out that an entire third mesh, above the red but below the black, could be worked into the design. This is definitely something that will be included into my final production of the project.

Papercraft Concepts

Below are 7 concepts-some including multiple forms, some being one form repeated-that were inspired by the idea of papercraft, and more specifically the works of Matthew Shlian.

A simplification of the Brandenburg Gate, significant to me because of the Christmas & New Year's I spent in Berlin in 2015.

Propeller and hub. Up until recently aviation was the only thing that had an extremely firm grasp on my attention

A little over a year ago I had a big change to my life and personality. Part of my own personal growth was shown through my own fashion sense. This texture is an abstraction of the knit of fabric.

Brick texturing. My high school/middle school had a very prominent brick wall on the exterior of the building, making it one of the first things I think of from my schooling.

Mountains combined with trail boot tread texture. A majority of my greatest experiences with nature have come from hikes and trips to mountains/vallys.

Fish scales. Because my grandfather lives across the country, I rarely see him. When I was younger the opportunities I did get to see him were spent on lakes or rivers fishing; something I only ever did with him

The grip on my drafting pencil. I don't think there is an item I use daily that I appreciate more. The last time I held it got me just as much as the first time I did; although the gnarling has worn down some.

The biggest challenge this project posed to me were the ideas of unfolding. Many of my un-executed concepts revolved around things that simply could not be unfolded or would cause the object to have too many tiny pieces. As well unfolding objects in a way where they could be folded easily was a more difficult than I imagined.

Papercraft Research

Out of the given papercraft artists, the one that jumped out to me the most was Matthew Shlian and his work. Shlian's work intrigues me more than any of the others because if is easily the most design-oriented. it isn't trying to tell a concise story or be representational of things from the real world. It is purely aesthetics. Because of this I believe that it is the most innovative art from this group of papercrafters. That would be because while all the other works mimic other artistic media, Matthew's works embrace the structural and geometric properties of paper. Things where paper really is the best, most efficient material to be using for the job.

Shlian is described as bridging the gap between art and engineering. This is the exact kind of art that I am most interested in and is similar to what I plan on producing in my own future. Like he says about himself in the short video Here, I have always had a more mathematical, mechanic view on life and the things I produce. For me careful calculation can hold as much beauty as the greatest paintings from throughout history. This idea is most prominently shown off in the piece by Matthew Shlian shown below.

Something about the slow twist seen throughout the piece draws my attention to how much of a blast this would have been to model in a CAD program to begin with. The piece looks very unnatural and looks as if it was created solely by an algorithm. My eye has always been attracted to things like this. When hand work by man can be done to such a precise degree that others mistake it for the work of a computer. I don't know what that says about me but then again I don't need to. Inspiration-wise Matthew's work leads me down a rabbit hole of designs that may have functional applications. When I first saw the above piece I imagined how breath-taking it would be as an architectural texture; something possibly used as the shape of an exterior wall of a certain museum or art gallery. So that is what Shlian's work mostly inspires in me, design that can be weaponized with real-world functionality. Whether it is for something as simple as a book cover or something as complex as an architectural exterior, designs such as these will always hold a special place in my heart and mind.

DID NOT GO EVEN CLOSE TO PLANNED

So this was supposed to be a blog post on my great success in creating something cool and interesting for this assignment and writing about all the things we were supposed to, but given that just about everything went wrong I don't think that'd be appropriate.

My journey through the topography of errors begun with the in-class mini critiques that were run on our 10 concept mashup pieces. Our group was fairly evenly divided on which of my 10 concepts was the most successful. It was split between the Jet Bike, and the Rocket Mug seen below.

Those who backed the jet bike did so because of it's potential to be a very technically challenging model and for the possibility of it to be very visually striking if done right, but we'll come back to this later. On the other hand the Rocket Mug was said to be more successful because of its conceptual properties. That it could be a more thought provoking, "artsy" piece if some viewers were added around the edge of the mug with maybe some scaffolding around the mug to make it look a little more like a launch pad. While I agreed with all criticisms of my concepts I remained 50/50 split on which I wanted to carry through to this assignment. It was a battle between strong visuals and strong concept. After some thought I came to the conclusion that the Jet Bike would be a more challenging model to move foreward, and wanting a challenge, I chose it.

I took the original concept of the motorcycle-with-jets-instead-of-wheels into Tinkercad and began hacking the thing up, adding many of my own details, and attempting to recreate a realistic paint job. That paint thing is what bit me in the ass. "This is going to look so good". "Bryan's going to be super impressed". No. About three quarters of the way through the completion of the Jet Bike model I realized the fatal mistake I had been making for the last who knows how many hours. Every time I finished a sub assembly I would group it in Tinkercad then activate multicolour. I swear you could've seen a little bit of my soul die when I realized that all of the work I had put into colour detailing would dissapear the instant I moved my model into Rhino 5.0. For those interested this was how far I got into my refined model of the Jet Bike. I'll probably still continue to work on it as a little side project in my own time.

At this point my options of where to go with the Jet Bike were very limited, so I turned to the other favorite concept in my critique, the Rocket Mug. While being a much simpler model I knew it was something I could polish up quickly to create an okay final product. Along with that I personally find the idea of a shuttle coming out of coffee mildly amusing. The power of coffee shown in a mix of mashup and juxtaposition. On Sunday night I begun to rebuild the idea of a space shuttle launching out of a coffee cup from the ground up using all new Thingiverse models for both the shuttle and the mug.

I completed the refined model in a relatively short amount of time but was quite pleased with the result, so I saved it and prepared to render the next day in Rhino.

A key element in my mind to a render looking good is the colour and material applied to certain details within the model. So before I opened my Rocket Mug in Rhino I grouped the elements I wanted to have the same material with Tinkercad. This is where things get rocky again. Apparently Rhino has a limit on how many separate meshes it can import within a single .stl file. So when I pulled up my model in Rhino it had decided to lump unrelated objects together in layers. For example it made one which included 2 sitting men, the coffee, and the fuel tank and boosters for the shuttle. Obviously the render would look like trash if those 6 elements were all the same colour and material so I moved back into Tinkercad to try to reduce the amount of separate objects in my model. I ran through around ten variations of my model trying to get it to read properly in Rhino. But with the bare minimum I could do, Rhino still was clumping things together. I figured I had got to the point where the model was the best it could be so I decided to screw it and move forward to the renders themselves.

You like problems? How about another? The final problem that backhanded me across the face came from a single point of light I created to illuminate my model for the render in Rhino. For whatever reason Rhino thought it would be a good idea to turn every object into a pure black silhouette every time I created a light point. With this very obtrusive obstacle in my way of properly setting up my renders and finally finishing this assignment I said "screw it" once again and did two renders of the Rocket Mug using only the standard ambient light provided by Rhino. As expected they look like trash. In an attempt to redeem myself I did a render with a point light by eyeballing the positioning for it and hoping for the best. Trash again. Here's what this shitty-shit-shit ended up looking like rendered in Rhino.

And as a real cherry on this cake from hell I realized after I had left ACAD that 6 renders were required of our final models, not 3. So uh, yeah. Lesson learned I guess.