Toothless is finally beginning to take shape.

I had a slow start with modelling him because countless (perhaps unnecessary) hours devoted to drawing, assembling, and placing the horizontal and vertical section cuts  in their correct positions: a feature that I, ironically, am not even exercising.

The first component I began modelling was his head. For this, I used one horizontal section, two vertical sections, and one cross section to then run the “NetworkSrf” command between the lines drawn. I then used control points to adjust his face and create his nose, which protrudes slightly out of his face.  I created his eye with a flattened sphere and placed it in the exact same position as the original model.

This image represents my two attempts at modelling the body. The “NetworkSrf” command was not successful in using vertical, horizontal and sectional lines for construction in the way that I had arranged them, so I began altering an already made solid, in this case a sphere, with their control points in order to mould a shape that resembles his torso.

Different strategies for attacking Toothless’ ears were explored.  Much adjusting of control points needed in order to create necessary indentations, curves, and heights.

After testing many strategies in constructing Toothless’ legs,  I settled with using the pipe tool. In my next approach, I will proceed to use control points (as few as possible) in order to shape the leg further. I can do this because I created a framework from an earlier, more geometric rendition of Toothless’ leg. This rendition was constructed by extruding one leg’s profile as a surface, generating various rectilinear section lines from the leg, rebuilding the rectilinear lines into circular shapes, likened to the leg, and then constructing a centre curve through each midpoint.

With a better idea of how to set our bobble head to create accurate sections, I designed a better method of how to position the head above the body. The goal was to glue the doll to a solid back board so it was securely in place for the spray foam and the band saw. I needed to fill in the gaps that its over size head created between the body and the back board. Then I had to position the head correctly over the body because they are two separate parts after I removed the spring. I accomplished this by layering material beneath and around its body and head and then glued it into place. Then, I enclosed the box and filled it with spray foam. Amy continued the process in the workshop to successful cut accurate sections.

 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.