Damn Dino.
The creation of our triceratops.
The creation of our triceratops.
My partner Melissa and I came from working on a previous project together. We didn't feel 100% successful with our last project, so we wanted to see what else we could do together that would create a better result. We started with our inspriation for our last project that we didn't end up expanding on - a mounted head lamp. We initially found a mounted moose lamp that we were really interested in, but couldn’t figure out how we would do conceptually. Instead, we took that idea and combined it with another idea of a low-poly paper dinosaur head. We started by creating a dinosaur head in Rhino, but ended up not being able to produce it in Pepakura due to the internal geometries. We then were advised to take a low-poly item off of the internet to create instead. Once we got that figured out, we were able to produce our dinosaur head and create something that we were both very happy with.
After deciding that we wanted to create this paper dinosaur, it took us many steps to get it fabricated. We started by building a model in Rhino and lowering the poly count in mesh mixer. It looked good, and we liked it. But when we went to put it into Pepakura, it had too many internal geometries and it wasn't going to work. So, we took a low-poly dinosaur off of the internet, cut off the body in Rhino, and used that model instead. That model worked better for us. We were able to lower the poly count more in mesh mixer, and put it in Pepakura to produce the folds that we could laser cut. Once we got this process down, we laser cut the document and started folding. We figured out that it would be easier to physically number each of the folds so we could see what we were gluing. So, Melissa did that while I started gluing each piece after she finished. Once we got about halfway done, we realized that one of the sheets was upside down, so we had been folding each sheet opposite, so the whole project had to be scrapped. We lasercut the file once again, and once we did that, we had our system down and were able to work quickly and get the project completed. It was a struggle towards the end not to rip the pieces and to get the glue gun inside the form without doing so, but we were able to repair the damages and complete the form. We then painted the dinosaur to have a better look that wasn't so plain. We completed the project successfully, and are very proud of it.