Group 10 – Charlotte Chang, Samia Smith, Christine Lai, Abhay Narasimhan
For our 3D printing project, our team created a magic wand by scanning each of our heads and modifying our models with funky shapes to represent our individual superpowers. Our magic wand is designed to be held in the hand of the mannequin, who will gain our powers whenever using the wand.
If we have learnt anything in the past six weeks of college, it is that a good team can make or break any project. A group of people with diverse backgrounds who vibe well together is the singular most important element to success.
Thus, we wanted to craft an object that would represent the creative power that results from a collision of our respective individual strengths – together, we make a cohesive team ready to accomplish our mission!
Christine decided to design an intricate pair of wings for her model, portraying her power of flying, which symbolises her boundless imagination and ability to think outside of the box.
Samia chose to fabricate a crown of jagged spikes, representing her power of ice, which illustrates her talent of turning any inkling of an idea into a fully-fledged product, just as water can be frozen into ice! It should also be noted that the real Samia is anything but cold!
Abhay opted for the power of laser vision, which embodies his mission-driven mindset; whilst some may find his tunnel vision restrictive, in our team, he is the one to keep us on target to accomplish our goals.
Charlotte selected super strength (as seen by the curved horns on her head, which can be used to brutally ram into mortal enemies). This conveys how she is the protector of the team; once she views someone as family, she will defend them to the ends of the earth.
Everyone has their own superpower because we are all unique and special in our own ways, but the magic really occurs when we come together as a team.
Once we thought of our concept, it was time to execute. Our first step was to 3D scan our faces on Polycam. After the scan, our group uploaded the scan as a .obj in Blender and got started with modifying our faces. On most of the designs, the Sculpt Mode was used to turn the faces into our desired super powers, We would play around with the different sculpt tools to mold our faces into different shapes and patterns. For Samia’s, a spiky mold that surrounded her whole face. For Charlotte, protrusions she made from molding her forehead into two long horns using the inflating tool. For Abhay, molding of the sunglasses on his face. Christine went through another process of modifying her face as she put wings onto her design. This was possible through a SVG download of a 2-D wing image. After this download was put on blender, Christine edited away the extra material of the image and was left with the wing itself. Then, she selected all the vertices of the 2-D wing and used the extrusion tool in Blender to create a 3-D form of the wings. The model was finished when the wings were joined together with the scan of Christine’s face.
When our 3-D models were finished, we were able to 3D print them. All of our prints took on average 4 hours to complete fully. Fresh out of the print, the supports of our models were especially hard to take out since our designs were so intricate and detailed. After spending time hacking away the supports, we were left with the final rendering our modified faces. The last step was to attach the the pole that would complete the magic wand. This was a simple cyclinder printed to scale with our models. Using super glue, we joined together the designs to the pole to finally create our magic wands.
Overall, this project proved to be a very unique and new experience for our group. We started with minimal knowledge on 3D printing and finished with knowledge on how to edit Blender files, printing forms, and perfecting/customizing the prints. Considering our group had varying schedules, it was difficult to find time to collaborate in person. To combat this, we did a lot of our personal brainstorming individually and came together to share ideas and essential process details. We utilized our text group chat to send any updates along the way (about measurements, concepts, printing, etc.). The most difficult part was editing our 3D scans in blender considering that we all scanned our heads, but after a lot of collaboration and troubleshooting, we were able to get our desired outcome. In the future, we will probably begin with an object that’s a little less organic so we can understand the siting process clearer, and then move on to more complex forms. It was very rewarding to see our project fully come together and be brought to life!