Stacking Efforts

 Here we are. The final stretch of the project. First lets start off with laser printing. This was a tough one concidering the magnitude of my project, but I managed to get through it by bashing my head against a wall for 5 hours (joke), but eventually I had all of the files ready to lasercut. Of course, having heeded the warnings given to me by... everyone, I decided it would be a brilliant idea to book the laser cutter for 5 hours. I later learned that you can't do that. Anywho, here are some funny pictures of the rhino part of the process

(I know, hilarious)

Back on track, I get to campus the next day and begin the long and arduous journey of turning this

Into this

Shocking I know

The process was pretty long in reality, but explaining it is pretty simple.

1. Find the pieces. Start big and get smaller. Use the engraving lines as reference
2. Put it together, to make sure you have the right pieces
3. Take it apart and set the pieces in order of layers
4. Scratch the piece
5. Glue the pieces together
6. Repeat

This took a while, so here are some pictures of my process:

(sorry about the weird ratio on the last one lol)

Finally, it was complete... is what I wish I could say, but that's not true. I still had a few unaccounted pieces to finish up. Primarily, painting... I'll just cut to the chase on this one.

Tada. Beautiful, I know. The painting wasn't all too bad all things concidered. I used some not-dollar-store acrylics this time, which, I will say, worth the hype. Not painting with pigment-balls is pretty good. Not only that, but the Gesso (first time ever using it by the way) was pretty cool. Definitely helped the paint look less bad.

Finally it was the home stretch. The part I had been dreading for the entire project. Putting together the dodecahedron. To put it simply, I messed up. The first problem was the material itself. The entire project was made out of 1 mm corrugate cardboard, which if you didn't know, isn't the best for folding. this meant that all of the faces of the dodecahedron had to be made by hand, which led us to the second problem, I didn't align the faces good on the cardboard, which led to what can only be described as a walmart-offbrand dodecahedron. It's not good, I can't lie, but I ended up getting through it and it was done.

Finally we've come to the end of this journey. Overall, a lot of things went wrong. The alignment of the dodecahedron, the paint mixing when I didn't want it to, the laser cutter taking 2 hours to print out all of the pieces (Thank you Peter for being an absolute godsend and helping me get it all done in one day btw) to even the assembly of the pieces. Sometimes I used too much force and crushed the pieces, sometimes the pieces didn't get glued well together, a lot of the smaller pieces were unusable because they were too small for the cardboard to hold it's triangular structural integrity. But with even all of those glaring issues, I'm glad I did it. It is a piece that I am going to refine and add on to for many years to come as Khaytia (my DnD world) progresses through time and changes. I'm glad I went through all of the effort which took to make it. Finally, to Greg Ball, although you tried to warn me, I went with it anyway.

And I did it.