On my second time taking the 3D modeling/animation class at OSU, we struck up a deal with Columbus-based Laser Reproductions to cheaply produce stereolithographic rapid prototypes at a student-affordable rate. These aren’t those fragile plaster things you usually see, either. These are a translucent plastic formed from thousands of liquid layers cured with a UV laser.

Preparing models for prototyping is a bit of a challenge. There are angles that can’t be reproduced, and everything has to be perfectly solid with no normals or vertices misbehaving. Since some folks in the class were doing 3D for the first time, it was my job to clean up other people’s models in addition to preparing my own.

Enuma was my first model produced. The character is based on Marduk from Babylonian mythos. From within this primal god’s shell, a tiny dodecahedron is produced as a reference to the 3D modeling process.

Tralfamadorian Predation shows a pouncing Phidippus Audax, a type of American jumping spider, in many points of its jump simultaneously. This is my take on the class’s instructions to model an animation in a single frame.

4 Viewports represents the modeling experience. In most 3D modeling software, the user sees a standard four viewports, each a different camera pointing at the subject from another angle. The most common angles are Front, Side, Top, and Perspective. This model takes a human figure and places it in those four views in physical space.

I slipped this model in to a production run after finishing my assignments. I based the model off of a sketch I borrowed from a Columbus, OH Artist and good friend of mine. I love the style of her character sketches, and I had to see one in the “real world.”