Digital Bodies¶

Reconstructing a Dancer¶

This week, I explored creating digital bodies.

Both my mother and my uncle were professional dancers, so the human body has held a special meaning for me since my earliest memories. Dancers spend years training not only their bodies, but also their minds and spirits. The lines created by trained muscles—the extension of a leg, the curve of a back, the articulation of a hand—become both their artistic language and a source of pride.

Yet a dancer's body is also temporary. Eventually, age changes what it can do, and movements that once felt instinctive may no longer be possible. In the last few years, I have often noticed a trace of sadness in my families eyes when the body they spent a lifetime cultivating can no longer move as it once did. This project begins with that dab of blue sorrow: How can we preserve the memory of a body—not simply what it looked like, but how it moved?

So for this project, I chose to honor my uncle - who dedicated his whole life to ballet. When I was growing up as a kid, he is like a hero to me. He performed in the United States as principle dancer at Ballet West (Salt Lake City) for nearly 20 years. I was a child living in China back then, and never was able to see him live on stage unfortunately. But I remember the fond memory of whole family getting together admire the postcards of his beautiful poses.

So I found one of my favourite archival photographs of him dancing, I want to create something special using the digital fabrication techniques we are learning in this course to honor his unique human body, and for all his artistic pursue and legends.

My workflow explores:

Photograph → Digital Body → Computational Slices → Fabricated Body

1. Concept & Inspiration¶

Rather than focusing only on anatomical accuracy, I wanted to preserve the qualities that identify a dancer:

• posture
• gesture
• balance
• extension
• movement
• silhouette
• the relationship between body and costume

These are some of my uncle's old archived photographs that I used in creating my human-body model:

I especially wanted to explore contour slicing sculpture style like this:

Source: Birch Sculture by Anna

I like it because it gives a beautiful metaphor for reconstructing a person from fragments of photographic information and memory. From materials wise, I can also interate this from cardboard, plywood to eventually do this with precious plastic.

2. Creating the Digital Body¶

I tried the MakeHuman Project workflow in Blender - this is a powerful way to create any kind of digital avatar.

However, I liked the workflow of leverage new AI toolings to generate the 3D model better, as I was able to create a digital body from my uncle's archived photograph images.

I think it is a powerful way to bring memories and personal histories into new physical forms—transforming photographs that once existed only as records of the past into digital objects that can be explored, modified, and eventually fabricated.

Tripo3D's was very use to use, and there seems to be API options available to more advanced developer flow as well to bring it into a native product. However, there is a limited quantity of token that comes with free tier. I was able to get a first draft of 3D model file though.

Tripo3D Generated 3D Model

Tripo3D Generated 3D Model

I tried other AI software as well, such as hi3D. Some had a very interesting ChatGPT-like interface. But most of them all have weird billing issues like below.

3. Manipulating and Repairing the 3D Model¶

Before fabrication, the mesh needed to be cleaned up/repaired.

I put the first 3D model file in ChatGPT and it said: the mesh contains about 204,000 triangles, its proportions are approximately 0.652 W × 0.199 D × 1.000 H, and the STL appears to be normalized rather than stored at a real-world scale. So if you make the dancer 1700 mm tall, the overall envelope would be roughly 1108 × 338 × 1700 mm. The mesh is currently not watertight and contains about 20 disconnected components, so I would repair/merge it before generating final cutting files.

Geometry Repairs¶

There could be a lot of detailed mesh manipulating work around: - hands - feet - costume folds - extended leg

Left Hand

Right Hand

But for this project specifically, I didn't spend too much time on the details, understanding the process was more important, so I mainly was aiming to make a fabricatable model.

Making the Mesh "Watertight"¶

So the most important aspect end up being making sure the model was watertight. A watertight mesh forms a completely closed volume, without holes, open boundaries, or problematic non-manifold geometry.

I used 3 tools to do this operation (inspect, clean, and repair the STL)

MeshLab

First, I removed unnecessary or problematic geometry by using:

Filters → Cleaning and Repairing

Then I ran the following filters:

• Remove Duplicate Vertices — removes vertices occupying the same position.
• Remove Duplicate Faces — removes overlapping or repeated faces.
• Remove Zero Area Faces — removes degenerate faces that have no actual surface area.
• Remove Unreferenced Vertices — removes vertices that are no longer connected to any faces.
• Repair Non-Manifold Edges / Remove Faces from Non-Manifold Edges — addresses geometry where an edge is shared in an invalid way.

After all these operations, I visually inspected the model and then used MeshLab's hole-closing tool (Filters → Remeshing, Simplification and Reconstruction → Close Holes)

and here's the new output STL

Blender In Blender, it's really easy to inspect the holes by using the 3D print toolbox. By using the toolpane and "check all" on the model, it will tell the exact # of holes. The "clean up" tool "make manifold" is able to fix some holes, but in this model couldn't fix all, which led me to explore the next tool - MeshMix.

Meshmixer Meshmix has a very simple and straightforward interface and able to fill all the holes in the my model quickly.

4. Creating a Stable Base Plate in Blender¶

Another important feature to prepare the digital body for fabrication is its stability, I needed to create a base plate in Blender that would allow the figure to stand securely. Since the pose is asymmetrical, the model's center of gravity can be found in Blender rather than simply placing the base underneath the geometric center of the figure.

Importing the model and selected the model in Object Mode and use:

Object → Set Origin → Origin to Center of Mass (Volume)

This moved the object's origin to its calculated center of mass, assuming a uniform material density. I then used Shift + S → Cursor to Selected to position the 3D Cursor at this point, giving me a reference for positioning the base.

Next, I added a new mesh (I tried both square and cyclinder) to create the base plate and adjusted its X, Y, and Z dimensions. Using the front and side orthographic views, I moved the plate vertically until its upper surface aligned with the lowest contact point of the figure.

What is interesting is that - this moment reminded me of when I get trained with my uncle on human-body balance. When I saw that the Center of Gravity (CG) showed up on the screen where it's perfectly aligned with his supporting leg - all his words made a lot of sense how a ballet dancer stand on their toes.

5. Ready to Fabricate¶

The next step was to translate the continuous 3D form into 2D profiles that could be fabricated with a laser cutter.

Formslice

I first experimented with FormSlice, an open-source web application that converts 3D models into fabrication-ready slices that we learned from our tutorial AI to Fabrication Workflow

FormSlice allowed me to explore two different construction methods: stacked slices and waffle construction. Although both techniques reconstruct a three-dimensional body from two-dimensional sheets, they create very different visual and conceptual results.

Stacked slices reconstruct the body through a sequence of parallel layers. As the layers accumulate, the volume of the original body gradually reappears. For this project, I think of this as memory accumulated in layers.

Waffle construction uses two intersecting sets of profiles to describe the volume of the body while leaving much of it open and transparent. Instead of reproducing the surface, it describes the body's occupation of space. I think of this as the body as spatial information.

Autodesk Slicer

After experimenting with FormSlice and understood its limitations, I switched to Autodesk Slicer for Fusion 360 for the fabrication stage.

While FormSlice was useful for quickly exploring different construction strategies, Autodesk Slicer provided a more mature workflow for controlling parameters such as:

• construction technique
• material thickness
• slice direction
• slice spacing
• object scale
• sheet dimensions
• part layout and nesting
• assembly order

This made it easier to move from a visual experiment toward an actual fabrication-ready cutting layout.

6. Final Fabrication and Assembly¶

7. Reflections¶

8. Other Research References¶

9. Final Fabrication Files¶