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Bike Brains: Creating and Applying the Vinyl


I began by vectorizing my brain bike helmet drawing in adobe illustrator then imported the file into rhino 

After importing the drawing i exploded the shape and began marking all the points to find where i could cut the shapes in order to prevent issues with the vinyl bubbling or warping on the compound curve of the helmet.


I then began to start cutting up the lines that make up the texturing of the brain and disconnecting them from the outline of the brain to reduce overall stretch stress on the vinyl sticker.


I then also transformed my three sister mountain sketch into vector through Illustrator and began to search for a place to integrate these mountain lines into the brain.


Here is the design after some alterations to include the silhouette of the mountains mimicking the brain texture.


I then went over the outline of the brain breaking up the perimeter with circles using the arc tangent to other curves tool.



I then added a occipetal lope to my brain and a stem to make it look a little more brain like using the control point curve and  handle curve tools, the 2D model is finished.

Here is a concept render of the vinyl on the helmet created in Rhino.


Here i have loaded up my .Ai file the "Sure Cuts Alot 3" program, with a regular and mirrored version to apply to the both sides of the helmet.


The vinyl plotter begins making weird sci-fi sounds and plotting...


Once cut, I painstakingly weeded the vinyl ans cut it out.


I bought this "Glad press n seal" from my local grocery store as i read its a cheap and effective transfer adhesive for vinyl. Too bad my vinyl is cut so thin and the adhesive did not work whatsoever to pick up the vinyl pieces for transfer. :'c


So i then got a bunch of strips of masking tape and applied it for transfer.


Here's the masking tape with collected vinyl applied to the helmet.


And finally after some very carefull surgery we are left with just the vinyl, my technique of breaking up all the pieces sort of worked though the brain has slightly shrunken in size due to the compound curve and some pieces of vinyl were destroyed in the transfer.


Here is helmet on my head, quite happy with the result though i think my brain may be a bit small aha... this was a great learning experience, i hope to use the plotter in my future projects.

Comments

  1. Bryan Cera15 October 2017 at 17:39

    Ahhhh, I can't believe how well this turned out! You did a fantastic job. Clever use of AI for grabbing the geometry, and awesome how you divided things up in rhino so the concept would work in vinyl. love it!!

    ReplyDelete

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