2. Digital bodies¶
Research & Ideation¶
Discovering the layout of the week02 page and understanding I might have put my all life inspirations at the wrong place in page week01.
In the news this week, I have been questionned by Botter spring 2023 ready-to-wear collection which has "gloves". See here how they made them.
Changing shapes and bodies, what do we have? What are we capable and authorized to transform? World famous French female artist, Orlan is the best example of change on the human body with her work that she applies to herself and how heretical it can be.
References & Inspiration¶
This week has been renamed "dealing with frustration". Digital bodies, makes me think of "human robots", maybe cause I saw the movie Chappie at the same time so my first reference was the movie clip of "All Is Full Of Love" from Björk in which she is built as a robot (left). We understand that she is the robot because it has her face (same in the movie Chappie) even if the body of the robot is universal.
Work¶
The week started with the discovery of three new softwares : Rhino 3D, Make Human and Slicer.
First, 3D scanning with the kineckt. This is interesting if you don't have strong skills in 3D modeling or when you want to model something complicated or very unique such as a human body.
Overview of my work this week, featuring Make Human (three pics on the left, grey background), Rhino3D (complicated experimentations on the right) :
Then, 3D Slicer, trying different options of cutting (stacked, intersection, radial):
Tools¶
Process and workflow¶
1 - Make Human¶
Learnings
Make Human has been very attractive by the quantity of its naive librairy of poses for human body. After few tests, I stopped on one pose which was funny despite itself because the hand meant to be on the knee passed through it.
This situation reminds me of the early version of the video game Tomb Raider and how the body of Lara Croft was designed at its maximum but looked like a diamand with multiple facettes. (Ref not so far from the I-conic corset Jean-Paul Gaultier made for Madonna). Then all the bugs we could encounter while playing : the body melting in the set, but some players found it useful for upgrading the game.
I decided to keep only this part of the body as the revelation of the computer's error. What if IA got fails ? Does it bring itself closer to the human intelligence ? Do humans build IA as vulnerable as themselves ?
2 - Rhino 3D¶
Learning Rhino 3D to modify a body.
What's expected :
What I managed to do :
Too hard to manipulate this software : not only the tools are different, but also you have to control everything with commands.
I only used the meshtrim and fillholes commands to cut a part of the body and close the cuts to obtain a full volume like a sculpture.
Model downloaded on sketchfab :
3 - Slicer¶
Importation of the volume in Slicer to decide how to cut it to make the model.
Depending on the type of slicing, we have quite a lot of pieces that remain complicated or too fragile. We were supposed to work with cardboard (6 or 2,5mm), so it would have been easy to fold it to embed every slices together.
Parts in blue means they are attached to nothing so it's important to make the necessary changes to keep them included for the assembly or decide you abandon them.
Parts in red have bigger problems such as "obviously I'm out of the board".
First, I would have choose the stacking cutting, but it would have used too much planks so I changed for the radial cut. It was interesting to have the center near the detailed part (fingers) to get a more concentration of layers in this zone, and less in the bigger parts.
Unfortunately, we ran out of cardboard so we changed for stronger card -which is good-, but way different than the first option, and we had to resize also the boards because their size was not the same as the one parametered in the Slicer software.
Trying to avoid this kind of distribution that wastes too much material (left)
I had a lot of pieces (131) distributed into 6 boards, which still was big so I started to puzzle to optimize the layouts and reduce the waste (point very important for me). I worked on Illustrator for this part.
I succeed with 5 boards but they were very dense so each one took at least 23 minutes for the laser cutting. Then, it was necessary to carefully detach each piece from the board without damaging them. (Helped with manual cutter).
4 - Trotec Laser¶
Laser cutting
Some say, you have to stay close to your friends, closer to your enemies, and the closest ever to you laser machine.
Steps to use the machine : switch on the computer, the compressor then the laser.
5 - Assembly¶
Slicer gives an assembly instruction to follow :
Detaching all the pieces from the jig was very time consuming, especially at the end where the laser cut more and more badly, whether in curves or straight lines.
Good cut / bad cut
We can see the curves are not engraved either.
I classified the pieces and followed the assembly order, pretty tough with the smallest ones. It took me much more time that I thought, because the assembly was not easy to understand -despite what Slicer showed me-, but also because the radial slices had to be forced to get into the notches because of differents angles (specially the vertical ones).
Even though I tried to modify vectorials on some pieces which had too thin links, as I was not sure of the result, I don't wanted to move too much things, and in the end, the main piece which start the assembly was too thin in its center so it broke while assembling. That's why my model is in two parts instead of one big.
In the end, I'm not so unhappy about the result considering the multiple difficulties that accured during this week.
Result¶
Leftovers¶
Might be useful one day...
Fabrication files¶
board 1/5
board 2/5
board 3/5
board 4/5
board 5/5