3D Models From "2D" Materials
Almost a year ago I started modeling the sclerites of a honey bee in Blender. I knew I wanted to use this model to construct a to-scale sculpture. My 3D printing venture was fun, but in a manageable scale, the details of insects are challenging for FDM methods. I had learned a little about UV unwrapping for texturing 3D models in digital arts. I also knew others had experimented with using these UV patterns as templates for sewing projects. I decided to explore this as a method and use craft foam.
Craft foam honey bee ~18” X 18” X 4”. I cut the shapes from foam using a template generated by my 3D model of a honey bee.
Blender allows you to cut seams into a curved model so the unwrapping feature can avoid stretching. This is akin to a 2D map of our globe. Some maps cut the northern and southern hemispheres into pie segments, which folded in, world roughly produce a sphere. I did the same with the various curved sclerites of the honey bee exoskeleton. These patterns can be manipulated with image editing software and printed. I used a blade to cut these shapes out of craft foam. Each piece was then glued together to produce the curves and join sclerites.
The 3D model of the honey bee. Seams in the mesh allow curved surfaces to unwrap flat and produce a UV pattern.
The wings are produced by soaking bass wood and bending the pieces to a pattern held with many pins. Once totally dry, the wood mostly holds the shape and can be glued together. After layering paint and finish, I sandwiched tissue paper between these wood veins and coated with resin and more gloss finish. This makes the fine tissue paper more translucent. To achieve total transparency, a lot of resin must be used, which isn’t very wing like in my opinion. I used resin sparingly in favor of a thinner and lighter weight wing.
There are many pros and not too many cons with using a 2D template. The pros boil down to wider range of materials, and producing a hollow and light product. The cons are increased “labor” I suppose, and more waste material to cut away.
The UV unwrapped 3D model of a stingless honey bee exoskeleton. The head on the left transitions similarly to insect anatomy towards the abdomen on the right. Legs also ordered from front to rear.
Last October, I created a balsa wood frame hexapod and that frame could have a foam skin which resembles an insect exoskeleton. It is anti biomimicry to use an endoskeleton to create an insectoid robot, but the overall design and kinematics would still be biomimetic. The challenge remains to use accessible and affordable motors to produce a “small” insectoid robot capable of organic movement.