Today I traced the slices of my vinyl Walter White in Rhino. Tracing the contours shown by my sections was relatively straight-forward, although there are a few decisions that I had to make which will likely affect the ease of my future modeling. For one, I had to decide which parts to keep as one curve – should the hair, for example, be drawn as part of the same outline as the head? Since the hair and some other sections are not perfectly symmetrical, I opted to trace those separately, but am still not sure that I made the best choice. The first image below shows tracings of the front to back slices.

The more difficult part of this week’s activity was to arrange each of the sections into 3-d space. After some trial and error, I came up with a method to also trace around the image of the foam block encasing each section. This made it much easier to align each section properly, one on top of the other, by snapping each bottom right corner into place and rotating as needed. As I put each section into place in the top view, I then dragged it the appropriate distance upwards or downwards in the side view. I took good notes of where on the model I took each section, but found that I didn’t account for the width of the bandsaw blade. I’ve averaged out each section (knowing the total length between all of them), but am worried about this lack of precision. I would likely have saved myself much fiddling by accounting for and noting the saw’s kerf.