Wade - Serial Slicing & Pepakura (Final)

Serial Slicing (Week 9-11)

I kept using my iron man model to make the serial slicing and Pepakura sculpture. 

First, I used Rhino to slice my iron man 3D model. The description below is the requirement and the rules of serial slicing.

Serial Sliced model in Rhino properly formatted for laser cutting:

• Solid Model scaled no more than 16"
• Serial Sliced using the Contour command with .25 registration pins
• Cut sheets properly layed out and labeled
  • Reference layer (CYAN)
  • Exterior Cut (MAGENTA)
  • Interior Cut (BLUE)
  • Text (RED)

And then put every slices in to the 48 by 24 inches rectangle (Laser cutter use 48"x24" cardboard), after this, there is ready to go laser cutting.

Reference layer (CYAN), Exterior Cut (MAGENTA), Interior Cut, (BLUE) Text (RED)

Process - Laser Cutting

Once every slices have been cut off, the next step is to glue them together, I used two 1/4" wood rods to keep the cardboard in alignment.

Gluing Process

The next step is to use masking tape to cover the whole sculpture because I want to use Aqua-Resin to paint it, so we need to do some water proof.

Masking Process

1 liquid(L) : 2-3 powder(S3)

Aqua-Resin Painting/Brushing

Once covering the whole sculpture, I added some more powder inside to make resin more sticky which I could build the special texture on iron man's face.

Texture Representation

Pepakura (Week 13-14)

Just like the title, this session is using the application - Pepakura and Rhino to build the low poly art work. 

Pepakura Designer is a Win application which makes unfolded patterns from 3D data. Pepakura Designer features to automatically unfold 3D polygon-mesh models, and allow you to edit them.

First, we need to turn the original model's poly face down to around 200-500(simple - detail), I used Rhino - Mesh - Mesh Edit Tool - Reduce Poly Face.

a million polygons > down to 325 poly faces

Then I exported it to .obj file format and used pepakura to open it to unfold the sculpture. There's a bug in Pepakura, so we need to use millimeter to modify our file, and the paper size should be : width - 1219mm, height - 610mm (48 x 24 inches). Now, we can start to play and manage our poly slices in logic way.

Process - Pepakura

The next step is to export the file as .dxf file and back to Rhino adjusting some minor but important things (change the typeface, define cut lines, reference, text) for laser cutting.

Process - Gluing Pepakura

Last but not least, I used thin masking tape to cover the cut line! 

That is my first experience of Pepakura and Serial Slicing process!!!

Special thanks to Amanda Marder and Prof. Andrew Scott!