In the Design and Digital Creations Elective taught by Ian Klapper, students work with both digital and analog materials. In the fall and winter sessions of this class, four XIIs chose to experiment with 3D modeling to explore its various facets. Below Ian interviews those students about their process for creating their work.
Here's what they had to say:
Ian: What attracted you to explore 3D modeling for your project?
Max G: I had seen what people have made with 3D printing and I always wanted to try it. When I was 2 years old I discovered chess and I have been super interested in it ever since. I then thought I should try to make a chess set. For my first project I am working with making a simple design. So far it is working out pretty well.
Charlie: The group I collaborated with started off our Klombo project using Tinkercad (a 3D modeling program). It took a long time to get all the parts of the design completed. There were a lot of different shapes combined into the same model.
Ian: Why did you collaborate instead of working on your own individual projects?
Charlie: There were so many shapes and things to do it would have taken much longer if we didn't collaborate. There were something like 300 shapes to put the whole thing together. If we didn't collaborate, it would have been hard to get all that work done in a reasonable time frame.
Sebastian: I thought it would be fun to collaborate on a project because I had never worked on a project using 3D modeling before. It was hard to put all the geometric shapes together in Tinkercad, and make sure that the different parts that were different thicknesses printed out the way we had designed it. In the end, it was pretty fun to work on.
Ian: What research did you do? How did you know what Klombo was going to look like?
Charlie: Klombo comes from a game. So we had a reference point. I think he came out really well. Similar to what Klombo looks like in the game.
Ian: What was the reference that you used?
Jack: We used our knowledge of what he looks like in the game as well as finding images online to refer to.
Ian: When your model was 3D printed on the school's 3D printer, did it look the way you expected to?
Charlie: For the most part
Jack: Yes.
Charlie: Despite some of the small parts of the model having problems like the ears which were very fragile, they had to be made slightly thicker in Tinkercad, printed separately, and glued onto the finished model. Despite that slight problem, everything went the way we wanted it to.
Sebastian: I liked that we thought of making something beyond just making Klombo. We also made Klombo Berries.
Ian: Why did you want to 3D print your model as opposed to just keeping it only as a model in TInkercad?
Charlie: Because having the printed model symbolizes the work that went into it.
Jack: Yes, having an actual physical product of it.
Ian: Will you continue to work on the Klombo project?
Jack: We will probably paint our 3D printed model.
Charlie: I am now taking screenshots of the 3D model we made of Klombo in Tinkercad and animating it in Photoshop to create a movie.
Jack: I am moving on to making a plane in Tinkercad. I thought It was fun to make Klombo and have him 3D printed. So I thought I should make another thing I like, like a plane. I researched different planes and chose one I liked. I figured that the general shapes of planes are simple, it would be an easy second project to do but I could add a bit of detail to it
Ian: Why is it easy?
Jack: It is easy because Klombo needed a lot more shapes to create it. It made it easier as a group project to work on the different parts of the model together. The plane didn't take nearly as many parts to make it look the way I wanted to make it look. The wings and fuselage were fairly simple geometric shapes.
Ian: Were there any challenges in making the airplane?
Jack: Trying to align the wings was tricky. I realized when I thought I had completed my model that the wings were not placed where I thought they were. I like working in Tinkercad, I am learning more as I work in the program.
Charlie: I had worked with Tinkercad in past years at school so I kinda knew "the ropes" of using it, but I definitely improved my understanding of how to use the program with the Klombo project.
Ian: Would you ever want to work on another 3D printing project?
Charlie: I build RC trucks, so I can see myself maybe making adaptors and other things I may not have and use them with my truck model parts.
Sebastian: It was such a cool experience to work with other people and create a 3D model and then watch it be printed in real time on the School's 3D printer. If I worked on another project, I think I would want to try to make a poseable 3D mannequin.
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