Five 3D printers are printing an elephant at Schiphol Airport, Amsterdam right now to raise awareness for abuse of elephants. Blender artist Dolf Veenvliet was involved in the project and reports.
Dolf writes:
All the way back in June I received a message from Joris Tubergen asking if I was interested in doing a project for the World Animal Protection agency. I'd worked with Joris before, and he's one of the few people who.... like myself, likes 3D printing big! Little did I know... this one is turning into something huge!
To draw attention to the horrid treatment of Elephants the WAP is having a petition... And we're not gathering the names signed on a stack of papers... no... we're making them part of a lifesize 3D printed elephant. Yup... over 2 meters tall! For this Joris created an innovative system that suspends 5 Ultimaker 3d Printers up side down on a construction with rails.
I designed the Elephant in Blender... and used lot and lots of reference images. I took extra care to make it clear we're printing an Asian Elephant... And learnt a thing or two along the way. Did you know Elephants have a different nr of toenails on the front and rear feet?
The biggest challenge for us turned out to be level of detail. To create the text in the skin of the elephant a custom font was created... the names are then put in a large (at least 2K) uv mapped image. This image is used to displace the skin. But to create a 2m high column with readable letters at 2cm tall... we had to export with a level 7 subsurf!! This results in multi Gigabyte files! It really would be great if we could find a nicer way to do this... perhaps something like "dynamic topology displacement"? btw... one little trick I applied... I changed the export code so it uses the "render" setting of modifiers, not view... that way we could view at subsurf 2 but export at 7. This is a tiny change to the code that I think I'm keeping!
The elephant is being printed right now in a pavilion in front of Schiphol airport... She's already standing on her front feet. If you're flying in or out of Amsterdam this month, go have a look! And... sign the petition to become part of our life size print!
1 Comment
lol at "raising awareness". always makes me remember this gag article: http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/2008/01/23/18-awareness/
"An interesting fact about white people is that they firmly believe that all of the world’s problems can be solved through “awareness.” Meaning the process of making other people aware of problems, and then magically someone else like the government will fix it. This belief allows them to feel that sweet self-satisfaction without actually having to solve anything or face any difficult challenges."
The good news about these sorts of pretentious people trying to morally preen to African animals is they're all sexless and childless, so they're evolutionary self-nullified.