Monuments – Process Special

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‘Monuments’, my design for Team GB’s skeleton squad for the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympic Games was created using 3D Mapping software, this is because I wanted to make portraits that give the look and feel that the portraits are set in a futuristic stone; heroic, olympian and monumental.

3D scanning is more common to rapid-prototyping in engineering and product design, the particular scanner that I used (on loan from Rapidform RCA) was a Z-Corp Scanner. Basically the scanner works by sending out two lasers that are reflected back by special patented stickers into a seperate camera. The scanner looks at any time for three of these stickers to triangulate back an image of the three-dimensional surface, and slowly puts together a 3d file by slowly painting the lasers over the 3d object (in this case the athletes).

Here you can see a couple of videos of the shoot in action, (apologies for the quality as they where created with an ipod in a windowless room!)

The tricky bit after the shoot was how to translate a 3D sterelithography file into a 2D image. The file that the Scanner makes is (with editing) ready to print into a 3D object, however I wanted to create essentially 2D image. Working in MiniMagics, I edited the raw file to make more sense with Rapidforms technician Hannah Terry. Whilst the portrait could have been smoothehen and made to look perfect it was my objective that these portraits to look as if they could have been cut from stone, the imperfections of the scan suited the job and they were kept, more imperfections where cut into the 3D file too. Later the file was exported to Rhino to create and image and then later Photoshop, but only to manage colour.

Editing Amy’s portrait in Magics

Amy Williams portrait detail:

Reference shots:

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You can see the final project here.
You can see the different design for the World Cup I designed here

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Published:
10.02.10 7:55
Category:
Working Process