Paper Hell

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 I Love Rotate3D <33

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**I meant to post this Monday but Blogger did not want to insert images for a very hot minute. Also I updated some parts Tuesday anyways, that I wanted to record!

I can see the horizon of this project,, it's so close and I'm kind of dying but that's okay! I spent my week and weekend unfolding this monstrosity of a polygon model. I used commands like rotate3D and Orient for the most part, to make sure things sat flat. There were a few times, like with the torso, where I had to bring it into blender and just make a way simpler version of it. Because while the extruded details work fine for blender, they do not work in Rhino when I'm trying to flatten them lol.

I also kept reducing the mesh in some areas like the head, hair, legs, etc. Anything to have less polygons to mess with. This wasn't done manually, I used the reduce mesh function lol.

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Examples of reduced mesh (You can also see how unnecessarily complicated the torso ended up when brought over to Rhino.)

Then I began to unfold this thing. And it was painful. I had to dedicate quite a few late nights and watch a lot of movies so I wouldn't die from boredom. Of course I used Rotate3D, but Orient helped me place faces flat on the plane so the surface would be flat when unfolded. In some cases I would also manually simplify faces, reducing them down so they weren't like 5 faces in one. Some of those lines represent very subtle bends in the surface, simplified from Blender. Some I kept as reference for folding lines.

Example: I know this boot is flat, it just had some edges leftover from sculpting in Blender.

Sometimes I'd get really stuck, so I'd used the Unroll Surface command. I never relied on Rhino to unroll things automatically for me because quite frankly, it kind of sucks for this project. Some things had to be flattened with rebuilding it in mind, rather than just squishing it flat. But it was useful to see visually how parts might come apart as a starting point. 

Then, tabs! Oh tabs. In some cases I was unsure where to add them. So my general working rule was if in doubt, add a tab. Because they easily can be cut off when I'm assembling this. Adding tabs is sort of like adding icing to a nightmare cake, a peaceful way to end a moment of suffering (I think the more sleep deprived I get, the more dramatic these blogs become.)

Once everything was flat, I could think of printing. I decided to scale everything to the largest paper available to me: 11x17in. So I made a rectangle that size and began to think about how to organize this.

Flat Stanley core

First I squished them all on one page, because conserving paper is good. But when I printed it, I realized some of these tabs were microscopic...and my figure would be very very tiny. I'm glad I printed it before I moved on with anything else. The next day (Tuesday) I found time after class to rescale my model. I made sure to scale all pieces at the same time, so the chance of something being different was low. 

I divided the pieces into 4 pages this time. They printed at a much nicer size, and while it will still be small, it will not be tiny. If I ever want it bigger, it wouldn't be too hard to simply scale up and divide the pieces again.

First Copy (the file was in CM and not Inches, hence the comically small parts in comparison)

Final Print (for now??)

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Now my task is to assemble. I'm actually very excited. My plan is to make a rough version throughout the week, then dedicate my weekend to finishing up a final model. The rough one will be primarily to troubleshoot, and doing it while I have class days means if I have to adjust something it won't be too out of my way.

I'm so excited that this is almost done! I also have started sketching for the next project, which I'm excited for.

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