For the first two weeks of this project, I spent my time trying many different things to create the “incredible” Hulk’s body. The most difficult part was creating surfaces with muscular definition, as the hulk is very ripped. In the end, I ended up with a Hulk that I wasn’t happy with and a handful of different torsos, legs, arms and heads that I built using different methods. After realizing this approach was not going to work and observing other peoples’ models, I decided I needed to try using techniques that were much simpler. On the bright side, I learned a lot more about how to use rhino by trying all of these different methods.

First attempt at the Hulk. Lots of attempts at the chest!

The arms: The first method I tried was putting spheres together. This was an easy method that definitely did not work. I also tried the command “sweep 2” and “rail revolve” to make the individual arm muscles and then I pulled them together. This looked better, but still wasn’t great.

The solution was using curve network surfaces to create each muscle! This created the best result. Using curve networks also ended up being the solution to create the legs. Yay!

Curve network arm

Techniques to building the chest: The first way I tried to build the chest was through lofting vertical lines together. This created a surface that looked “blocky.” Then I thought it might work better if I lofted together horizontal lines. I was wrong. Then I tried using “rail revolve” to create a basic shape and then played with the control points. Once again this did not work. Keara was able to figure out how to make the torso in a way that made the muscles look really good. She used lines that were well positioned to create definition and then created a curve network. I once again learned that taking time to really think about how the lines come together creates a more simple and better result. We now have a beautiful looking chest!

This week I gained a lot of practice with three aspects of digital modeling. The first was learning how to decide when to sculpt my form with control points and when to create more defined edges using boolean union. One challenge I came across that helped me understand the usefulness of control points was learning that our toy itself is so fragile that it caved in on itself during the slicing process and as a result, gave some inaccurate curves that needed to be eyeballed during the tracing process. I used control points with the o-snap on ‘point’ and ‘perpendicular’ to make sure that horizontal and vertical lines cmd in contact with each other so that the wireframe model aligned.

The boolean union command came up when it was time to attach the ears. I noticed that the ears on my model have a very defined edge at the head and I wanted this to happen in my 3D model as well. The second command I learned to master this week was rail revolve. I sculpted both the head and the ears using rail revolve and joined them using boolean union.

The final command I mastered this week was ‘project’. In order to sculpt the face, I projected the curves of the face onto the rail revolved head and created a variety of surfaces to form the teeth, tongue, lips and face. I used revolve to create eyes. In order to make these edges a bit smoother, I used the fillet edge command on each of the edges of the facial features.  Unfortunately, due to problems with the fillet tool, I experienced a series of small holes in the face of my model. I experimented with making a mesh and filling the holes. This experiment was successful in closing the gaps and forming a solid, but created a ‘disco ball’ effect on my model, creating a series of flat surfaces rather than a smooth continuous surface. My current goal is to troubleshoot this issue and move on to the arms, legs, feet and backpack.

Next we took the scanned images of the bus into Rhino and began tracing the outline of the sections to create a wireframe of the toy. However upon doing this, we realized that there were a lot of errors and inaccuracies in this method because of the low quality resolution of the scanner.

Hence, we started measuring the dismantled parts and modeling them directly in rhino. This in turn allowed us to be more precious and understand the shapes of the toy better.

This week I started to learn about the downfalls of certain commands such as the averaging that Curve Network does but started to learn how to mitigate them with other tools.

This week was spent more setting up lines but began to realize Curve Network was not going to solve all my problems.  Other tools I began experimenting with were: Rail Revolve, Sweep 1 and Sweep 2. Although I know many other students lofted lots of parts for their project… I generally avoided the tool as Hulk’s individual parts weren’t exactly symmetrical.

My generally strategy for creating him was simplifying his parts instead of trying to model large pieces. I’d model the bicep, abs, chest, parts of the back separately for example instead of attempting to create the whole torso or the arm through one command.

My partner Bianca and I chose the toy Zero, the little ghost dog from  the Nightmare Before Christmas. We thought that he had enough complexity to require a good range of techniques to replicate, but not too complicated to make our lives miserable. We chose to cast him into resin instead of the spray foam,  to get a more consistent and clean finished product. To cast him into resin, we made a small box out of acrylic that was just large enough for Zero to fit inside without touching any edges, but as small as possible to avoid wasting resin. We cast the resin in layers, pouring one layer before inserting the toy to get a base of resin underneath it. In the future, I would place the toy first. We thought that we would be able to get him to sit at the proper angle, but as the resin cured he shifted slightly off centre. The resin casting took about 5 hours, we found that the ambient temperature had a large effect. It was too cold for the resin to cure if we left it outside.

After 24 hours the resin was set, but it was still tacky to the touch. We left it for another couple of days before cutting it. We weren’t sure about how the cutting would go (whether we would be allowed to in the woodshop), but it was a very smooth process. Using the bandsaw, we first did a test cut to check how the resin held up, before cutting into the toy in two places.

We made one cut in section view, and one cut in plan view. The horizontal cut gives us information about the depth of the eye, which was one of the only things we couldn’t get from the intact toy.

My first forays into modelling were based on photographs of the intact toy. We set up a black background and took the most accurate photos we could orthographically. I centred these photos and made them consistent between the views, then set them up in Rhino to work from.

I attempted to model the head of the toy using a filletedge function, to see how close I could get just eyeballing and to test out modelling the shape. It’s not quite right, so I will be using information from my cast pieces that I will scan to be able to use a rail revolve function. 

This is a test model of the toy’s ear that I made using a sweep2 function. I started with the shape of the ear from the top view, then broke the shape up into 3 discrete curves. The two side curves became the rails, and the short curve that attaches to his head became the curve that sweeps between them. I turned on the control points to adjust the curvature in the Z-axis, while maintaining the points where the curves meet. I used the sweep2 function and got the surface for the top of the ear. I will continue the shape by creating the bottom surface of the ear, and then lofting between the two to make it an actual shape. I will fillet the edges to soften them, and then attach the ears to the toys’ head.