Paper-craft First Prototype - Lightsaber

 

        For this assignment, I wanted to create a lightsaber from a not so famous franchise called Star Wars; more specifically one of Obi-Wan Kenobi's lightsabers- because one, I am a child and want to own a cool lightsaber, and two because Star Wars is a franchise that my family all enjoy watching with one another, which allows us to connect and talk. We even went so far as to make this tradition where we would go watch new Star Wars movies in theatres despite all of our hectic schedules and whereabouts. 

        The two images below was the model created in Rhino7, and what the paper model was supposed to look like.

        Unfortunately, this first prototype is ROUGH. So much so, that I didn't really want to work more on it unless I restarted the folding process. Because of all the mistakes I found, I was very unmotivated to continue without addressing how to fix it.

        As you can see, I ended up taking away a lot of the details from the original image. This was mostly because I had originally thought that this model is just hexagons so if I can make one part of the structure I can make the rest. Big surprise- I can't make hexagons very well. Which was a bit of a problem...

        The biggest issue I found, were these large gaps that would appear on the piece after gluing. Which would then made the whole structure weird and tilted. You can see above- the forth hexagon, I tried something a little different to avoid this problem- which was to add tabs onto the sides and glue those first. Unfortunately, that did not work either. What would happen, is that the paper would instead cave in and make these unpleasant bumps on what's supposed to be a flat surface. 

I'm not sure if my glue was just bad, or maybe my cutting and folding lines weren't as precise as I thought, or maybe the pieces were too small, but I definitely need to figure out how to solve this, and try to make the lightsaber look cleaner. 

        The second problem I had was trying to glue these pieces together. I found that because the hexagons were hollow, when I would try to stack them, they would press into each other, and make the hexagons dented. Now for this, I'm pretty sure its a glue problem, but if it isn't I might have to find a way to make the paper strong enough so it can stack more easily without sagging.

        There are a couple pieces I need to just make multiple of (without tabs) and then stack them together. Which can be seen above with the tiny hexagon and the little ring in the middle. The large flat hexagon that the tiny hexagon and ring are set on also needs to change. I think I can make it a bit bigger so it fits nicer inside the larger hexagon, and would remove the unnecessary gap. 

        Overall, there is a lot to change in this prototype. And just some problem solving that needs to be done. But I'm really hoping that it will turn out better next time I create it.