Unit 3 Assignment- Wooden Sculpture
This is my first foray into Meshmixer and Slicer. I enjoyed finding out how to smooth areas of the scan and fill in the holes. It was also fun to play with slicing the 3D image. This one definitely worked best in this direction in terms of fitting it onto 4 sheets and not having a very large number of components.
I decided to use a Poly Pro scan of myself for this project and was drawn to a yoga pose to express my reflective and meditative nature. Rather than bow my head to my hands, I tilted my chin upwards in Hero pose. This allowed for more light to fall on me and so improve the chances of a comprehensive scan. Once I had processed the3D image in Meshmixer, I exported it to Slicer where it was clear right away that a horizontal slice will suit my design. That being said, I did experiment with other orientations.
I took photos of the process along the way, in the event of the program crashing. I adjusted the object size to get the maximum use of my 4 pages (for the template). After chatting with the experts, I decided to assemble my figure on a central dowel. So this feature was added to the pattern before it went to printing. When I was tracing I place an ‘x’ on each circle for the dowel so that I would have a clear ‘target’ area for the drill bit.
My idea with the dowel is to make the sculpture interactive- so the onlooker can rotate the layers to create different appearances and forms. So often sculpture is exhibited in a ‘no touch’ environment- for understandable reasons. However, our brains and bodies are still often drawn to experience 3-D objects through touch as well as sight so I felt with this creation, I could invite touch and interaction. The horizontal slicing and central dowel put me in mind of the classic stacking toys that many children play with. Playfulness is therefore another theme of my sculpture.
Some of the pieces required a little bit of fixing in the tracing process (e.g. one of the knees was a bit square from my meshmixer sculpting) but mostly the template was easy to trace onto the plywood.
The wood shop was a great experience and I focused so much on my project and the many safety aspects that I omitted to photograph this stage. I used both the scroll saw and the band saw, as well as one of the sanders (and some hand sanding). Here are a few of the pieces- some sanded and some not yet. I number each with pencil so I will be able to assemble more easily.
