Pacellfier turned Hammerpede Xenomorph

So Digital Culture has been an adventure in 3 dimensions the last couple of weeks and I never would have imagined the learning curve in this digital realm to be so intense.  My original goal was to create a sculpture that was a dimensional representation of my paintings.  This turned quickly into a commentary on modern screen based parenting.  I have seen terrible uses of touchscreen devices used to pacify children in situations that would otherwise exist for bonding and building relationships.  The best example I have seen of this was at a Clippers baseball game where I saw a kid with his parents not watch a single pitch of the game.  He must have been around 7 or 8 but I never saw that kid look up or speak to his parents unless he needed something from concessions.  Thus the Pacellfier™ was born. A device that cradles your phone and sucks the living soul right out of your child with the use of a patented pacellfier energy leeching mouthpiece that transfers energy directly to the device for extended battery life that last as long as your child has the energy to live.  Never be distracted by the obvious opportunities to bond with your child again.  Is your kid making too much noise all the time?!?  Is your kid constantly stomping around driving you crazy?!?  Think there is no answer?  There is! Pacellfier™!!!

First I started by creating a physical model out of high density foam.  That was the easy part.  Next I attempted to create a 3D render with the use of an application on my phone called 123D Catch which takes thirty or so images and puts them together in 3D space based on content.  This took about 5 trials with comedic results before I figured out how to get the software to work correctly.  There was cleaning to do.  My digital render had extra artifacts present that needed to be chopped off of the intended object.  So I toyed around with that in 3DS Max 2016.  I had a really hard time figuring out how to rotate the object let alone chopping pieces off and shaping my object.  I am pretty advanced in programs like photoshop but this is a whole other beast.  Beyond that it would have taken something like 30+ hours for a 3D printer to make my creation so for the sake of time John and I decided that it would be best to create an object with the use of the laser cutter.

The goal was to use 123D Make to map a cutting pattern of horizontal slices that together would make my Pacellfier™.  So I gave 3DS Max another go and figured out how to clean up my render but when I attempted to open the edited object in 123D Make it was rejected because of file format.  3DS Max cannot save files as Standard Tessellation Language (stl) so I was left with my original file.  I ran it through 123D Make and created a PDF that I later converted into an Adobe Illustrator (ai) file that would be printed on quarter inch plywood.  

I was running around campus and everything is going nicely until I get to Battele to find my scrap of quarter inch plywood. There was none, so I had to improvise.  The next best thing was half inch plywood but I really needed it to be quarter inch.  To make it work I ran my half inch ply through the door sander about ten times sanding away the layers until it was the thickness that I needed.  Then about 40 minutes before work I ran the piece of wood over to Kinny and got the print underway.  The first second and third attempts at cutting my pattern failed to go all the way through the wood sheet but after the third pass I decided that the parts could be punched out of the wood.  After I freed the 105 parts from the board I organized them on the table and started gluing the stack together.  What I created was something more out of Riddly Scott’s Prometheus then I initially intended but the form is there.  The idea of it being a facehugger type creature from Alien is along the same line of thought though.  Thus the Pacellfier™ Xenomorph was born.