From 3D to IRL

The IRL sculpture is coming together fine, I just finished transferring the 3d sketch to slices. Today I’m a man of few words, so I just let the pictures do most of the talking.

I started with my 3d model.

Sliced it up. The squares are A3 format paper with 10cm distance in between.

Printed the slices!

Cut them out (I'm very concentrated here)

Stacked the up as I went along...

Got scared that I'm making the whole thing to small.

Finished cutting, this is all the slices. Maybe this is the world’s shortest dolphin.

Pinned it all to the polystyrene.

So many parts.

Me posing with power tool! I'm bad!

Cutting out the slices 10 centimeters thick.

Put them in stacks trying to be organized.
Started to glue them together but that's another story. Over and out!

Does this work?

Hey!

Get off my back Jacob! Anyway is anybody even bothering to read this blog?

Later today; Cutting paper and posting a 3d movie!

Lost in 3-D?

Ola, you should be proud of your skills in 3-D technique. It's very impressive. However, I am a little scared that you spend more time in the "3-D universe" than in the real universe. Also there has been requests that you speed up the process a bit, or atleast post more interesting bits about dolphins and how they communicate with each other. The request is mainly from me at the moment, but I am sure many more agree that it would be interesting. Over and out/Jacob, editor.

Size me up!

For me to be inside a dolphin I have to figure out how big the dolphin should be. So I asked my brother to size me up, even though I rather work with professionals. I was 2.15 centimeters long including my feet laid flat on the ground and 60 cm wide over the shoulders. My brother was pretty impressed by my masculine body, so was I.

Then I created a digital representation of myself from a free character I found on Luxology’s homepage and sized my CG-dolphin so it covered VR-me. The full dolphin suite will be around 3,1 meter long and maybe 70 centimeters wide depending on how thick rubber I’m going to use… That’s ok because dolphin males range from 2 to four meters, I’ll be an average bottlenose dolphin.

Going to the construction material warehouse.

It’s been a couple of days since I posted something on the blog. Mostly due to another project I had to do in between but I’ve also been spending time in my new workshop that the landlord lent me for the project! Hurray for the best landlord ever! It’s just a couple of floors down but I don’t have internet there. Good for the dolphin project but bad for youtube. But don’t you worry youtube, I’ll make it up to you by posting some videos later.

Anyhow I lent a car from a friend and went shopping for material. First I filled the tank and then the silly gps guided me down into some tunnels and lost contact with gps… It was really crowded in the tunnel and the traffic was completely still because of some construction work. The Gps freaked out and showed me driving randomly inside houses narrated by a bad Homer Simpson copy even though I stood completely still. I was trapped in traffic for about an hour and a half and the warehouse almost closed before I could arrive. But I made it in time! So here are some pictures;

The new Workshop! Thanks supergreat landlord.Thanks Kalle S for the car!So much PolystyrenePolystyrene inside workshop, mission accomplished!

Today’s to do list

On today’s to do list there is a very important to do, I’ll have to buy material for the base sculpture. I’ve been lent a big car and later I’m driving to the construction warehouse to get polystyrene. Then even later, I’ll tell you all about it!

On tomorrow’s to do list I wrote “do nothing”. Take this advice: Never work yourself to death, don’t forget about life!

Welcome to the world computer dolphin!

Using the programs Lightwave and Zbrush I created a pretty realistic computer dolphin. I used Lightwave to build the basic structure and get all the fins and stuff anatomically correct. I found quite a lot pictures on common bottlenose dolphins online to use as reference. Not that surprising, if I saw a dolphin I would probably take a picture of it and put it online. There seems to be a lot of people thinking like me on this subject.

All the fine details were created in Zbrush. What a great program, so much smartness put into that piece of software. In just some hours I turned my simple mesh into something quite believable. Have a look:

Perspective

Top

side

front

First I just thought that ill use the renders for measurement reference on a paper, but then I surfed some trying to find a good material for the project and ended up on a site with some guy building a car from scratch. When he created the exterior, he made silhouettes for each tenth centimeter or so from cardboard, the silhouettes showed the basic shape really good when put in place. Then filled the blanks with something similar to polystyrene and the body was good and symmetric. So as soon as I bought some good material I’ll create and cut out paper silhouettes from the 3d model!

New hope for Yangtze River dolphin?

The probably extinct Yangtze River dolphin has been sighted by a Chinese guy! Not day fresh news but still news to me! Thanks for this hope building tip Lina T.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/30/world/asia/30china.html

Facebook group!

Join the Dolphin transform group on facebook!

What does a dolphin look like?

Dolphins basicly look like big grey fish, right? But I will be needing much more detailed information when I create my sculpture. So today I’ve been searching the local toy stores for a super realistic dolphin replica that I could use as reference. I found a couple and even bought one even though it wasn’t all that lifelike. Could still come in handy at some point, maybe as a gift for some ones forgotten birthday! Plastic dolphins make great gifts.

So for reference I’ll mostly be using pictures instead. From them I’ll build a 3d model to get the anatomy correct before starting to sculpt in polystyrene or some similar material.

So, next stop: Virtual Reality!

Welcome Editor Jacob!

Now Jacob is able to post and edit my posts on the blog. So from now on my blog isn’t the lawless land of the free it once was. I feel a bit like brave heart when he screams freedom just before the evil knight pull his arms ad legs off. Maybe I’m over reacting; Jacob is a nice guy after all. Welcome to the blog Jacob.