Process Description

Process in Modeling and Printing a 3-part Stop-Motion Puppet Head

1: First, I created 3 polygon primitive cubes in Maya. I drew up several model sheets of my character’s head from the front, side, top and back view, in order to give myself a frame of reference while modeling.

2: I moved and scaled these polygon cubes to correspond to the back of head, top of face, and bottom of face respectively of my character. I then scaled each of these cubes down by half, so that the left faces of each cube rested on the y-axis. This is to enable me to model both sides of the face simultaneously, by selecting each cube and clicking Edit: Duplicate Special (making sure in the settings it is parented to the original object as set as an INSTANCE), setting the object’s scale to -1 on x-y axis, and to 1 on each of the other axes. If this doesn’t work then you may have to experiment with the settings to see which axis the object is being mirrored across, and see what fits.

3: after each of the three polygons was mirrored across the y axis, I added edge loops to each one in places that seemed necessary, then simply moved vertices around, added edge loops and extruded faces as needed until I had a low-poly model of my head.

4: I then extruded the inner part of each of the pieces, so as to have a hollowed out inner shell. When I liked how it looked, I deleted the duplicated objects on one side of the y-axis that I created earlier, selected the original 3 objects that remained, and used Mirror Geometry on each one in turn to simultaneously mirror and merge them across the y-axis.

5: I selected only the faces of each piece on the part of the head that is visible to the eye when all pieces are put together, leaving the faces that touch the other pieces and the inside hollowed out part unselected, and used Edit Mesh: Smooth to smooth out each piece. This creates some polygons with more than 4 sides, which Zprint doesn’t like, so after smoothing I used Edit Mesh: Cleanup, checking only the box that says “faces with more than 4 sides”.

6: I checked my model to make sure there were no holes or 5+ sided faces, and to make sure that each of the three pieces fit together seamlessly, then exported each piece separately as an OBJ file.

7: I then opened each OBJ file in Rhino, exported them as STL files, and imported them into Zprint, where they were (hopefully) ready to print!