Low-Poly Dinosaur

How the Low-Polygon count dinosaur would have looked.

What

A larger than life-size model of a velociraptor dinosaur wit a low polygon count.

IDEA

WASTED TIME

REVIVAL CHANCE

Why

Firstly, I loved dinosaurs as a child. When I was a young adult in 1993, I saw Jurassic Park. It was completely breath-taking when the early CGI dinosaurs appeared for the first time. It was just astonishing to me that we could achieve that level of realism, although by comparison now, the effects are not even that good. So yeah, dinosaurs have always been lurking in the back of my mind and making something would always have been good. Making a full size accurate model would always be well beyond my capabilities, but I saw some of the works of Ben Foster who makes low-polygon count models of animals. They look quite nice to me, so a basic but large model of a dinosaur, probably for my garage roof felt like a good mix of the two things I liked.

When

August 2018

The animal sculptures of Ben Foster were part of the inspiration for this project.

Development & Progress

I got a 3D model of a velociraptor and reduced it down to low polygons. I then put the adjusted 3D model into an application for making paper models, and that would be enlarged to make facet patterns that could be joined by some sort of sub-structure. I hadn’t decided how that would work. (Basically, it wasn’t going to.)I printed, cut and joined lots of facets for one of the hands with a view to sizing up the most detailed part to see if it might be practical or possible to then make it with plastic. I had no idea what I was really hoping to achieve.

These plain simple sculptures somehow make them more interesting than a classical representations.

Reason for Abandonment

Eventually, it was obvious that without a better idea of how it would be made, it made no difference if the size testing worked or not, and it was ushered into the “ABANDON SHIT!” category of projects.

Chances of Revival

I’m not sure. It would be slow, expensive and difficult to achieve this whichever way I might go about doing it. And I suspect the final product might not stand up to the winds I get even if it was well reinforced with an internal framework. I’d still like to have the angular sculpture though. It could morph into something else other than a dinosaur, but that would be my first intention for this. There’d be some kind of 3D printing association if this ever went ahead but filament is expensive and 3D printing is extremely slow for small projects. never mind big ones so it would be some kind of messy time consuming hybrid that I really can’t justify at all.

Legacy

The paper hand was hanging about in the spare bedroom for over 2 years until i took a photo when I typed up the first version of this page in October 2020. It then went in the bin.

Regret

Not much.