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Blue Foam Polywigs
For Halloween my friend Stefan and I decided to go way geeky and make some wigs out of blue foam using the Eyebeam laser cutter. Stefan and Karl have been working on scripts in Maya to automatically divide a 3D surface into profile curves suitable for rapid fabrication so this is proof of concept for ongoing work. It’s also silly. We took digital photos of Stefan’s head from different angles, then imported them into Maya to use as reference for creating a 3D surface. Then Stefan’s script generated the profile curves and we exported them to CorelDraw using the Maya vector renderer. From there we manually tweaked the curves to get the spikes and shapes we want (in future this will be algorithmically driven) and cut them into 1″ blue insulation foam on the laser cutter.
Unfortunately mine didn’t really turn out. I got the scale wrong by about 25% so it was larger than intended. Must have been the foam fumes.
Many thanks to Eyebeam for giving us time on the laser cutter!!
(Technical notes after the jump.)
Notes:
- blue insulation foam (Styrofoam) 1″ thick — Prince Lumber — $25 for 4′x8′x1″
- laser settings for cut — 60% power speed 70% speed, 500ppi — 15 passes
- higher power settings caused foam to melt/burn
- can duplicate vectors in CorelDraw by cut and paste to get more passes
- at light settings, possible to create emboss effect — foam actually rises
- fumes are kind of nasty
- reducing points in curves reduces cutting time
- curves from Maya using vector renderer — generates eps
- have to use shapes, not curves
- in renderer, say you just want edges
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November 13th, 2006 at 10:11 am
[...] After creating some crazy wigs out of blue insulation foam through the highly inefficient process of 3D modelling and laser cutting it turned out my wig was too big. So I took out a few panels and cut it down with a Leatherman (to a tolerance of a few thousandths of an inch…. sure). Long live the Foamhawk! [...]