What do you do when you’re short on time for a Final Project and need to do a slide? This assignment!

My final project, last year, went through several evolutions. It started out as a language lab in a box. I set out to do for linguistics what Nadya Peek and others did for digital fabrication. I roughed out a sketch and used GIMP to compile a concept of a brief case/laptop. It was a cool thought, but a laptop in a brief case is a bit more of Bunnie Huang’s speed and not my own.

The second iteration of my final project concept was a ceramic pot with a stylized spider. I used Inkscape to do this rendering. I used shape tools and gradients to give the design a bit more of a 3D look. The spider was traced from a Bitmap in Inkscape. I like working with vectors graphics that you can scale to use on small projects like thermography on business cards or cut vinyl for signs.

My third iteration of my final project concept was a stylized alligator toy. I wasn’t too sure what the project would do, or how a person would interact with the toy. I started thinking of ways to incorporate skills, but in a way that didn’t mean much. I pictured 3D printed cheeks that would accent holes for speakers. I hand drew the basic geometry and scanned in the art. I then imported the picture into Inkscape to trace out an SVG. I imported the SVG into blender and got lost in a world of keyboard shortcuts.

As a tool for 3D modeling, I like blender because it’s free. That said, my original 3D models were either Doom levels that I made as a kid, or characters that I modeled in OpenGL or 3D Studio Max while I studied Video Game Design at Full Sail. I liked those processes because I was able to code my designs as opposed to modeling by hand in a GUI.