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HI, I'M UNDER CONSTRUCTION, PLEASE EXCUSE THE ROUGH EXTERIOR—I PROMISE MY CONTENT IS (MOSTLY) GOOD <3

ITP Fall '21 — Art Toy Design — Week 2

My idea for art toy is to take No Face at his (her? their? it?) most monstrous and make him cute. I want to make him translucent and color him almost like an ocean at dawn, and near his stomach add flowers (instead of all the food he ate). The mouth will also be wide open so that I can put some tiny air plants in there and make it a terranium.

Modeling

I tried Adobe Medium to sculpt in VR for the first time! It was such a fun experience, but also really exciting in terms of potential.

I actually recorded the whole sculpting session but it's just too large, so here is a bit from the beginning (at 5x speed so beware of motion sickness):

No Face "sculpted" out of foil during class, which gave me a really nice sense of scale and also taught me that the shape was really boring without arms (left), and the first segment of modeling in Adobe Medium (right).

It was quite intuitive after I did the onboarding tutorials, and I mainly used the Sculpt tool to add or remove clay and Smooth and Inflate for details. I couldn't do fine details very well though, so I'm not sure if that's a matter of upping the polygon count or needing to work bigger.

Printing

I also 3D printed for the first time! I used the Makerspace Ultimaker 3 Extended printers with 10% Infill and 0.2mm layer thickness (which was the fastest) and it still took 3.5 hours because of all the support it needed to print for the arms.

I'm definitely going to edit the arms to be closer to the body so that I don't have to print as much support. The other part that needed support was within the mouth, and that I probably can't change much if I want a big mouth to put flowers/air plants into.

I want to make a mold out of the 3D print (not this one, but a more refined version I'll hopefully print later this week) and then make the final version out of epoxy resin filled with flowers. But that means I'll have to split this model out into at least three parts—the body, the teeth, and the tongue (the mask I'll laser cut white acrylic)—so that the mold won't rip or get stuck on any of the parts.

Because that sounds like a lot of work, I'm also considering a different design with an original character that might be easier to print, cast, and assemble.