Frog

Emma Flanagan

I chose to work on my music frog for the final project. I started by scanning the frog with the Einscan, however the frog was a wooden material with a dark-brown (nearly black) stain. The object was so dark I had to turn the brightness for the scanner to the highest level to see the object.

This caused a few problems. I had thought the mostly matte finish on the instrument would make scanning easier, but because the brightness was so high there was some reflection back at the scanner. This resulted in a few warped areas and some odd textures I had to smooth out with Blendr.

The brightness also picked up some of the grey circle on the Einscan turntable. I was able to remove most of the circle, however I clearly missed a spot because when imported into blender, the frog was not positioned at origin. The frog also

rotated around a point between the frog and the mysterious unseen pixels, making repositioning the frog incredibly challenging.

I began with trying to make the frog more hollow, like the original instrument. I knew this may not print well, but I wanted to try to challenge the print and see if printing a hollow object like this with internal supports would turn out.

The externals of the scan turned out better than expected, but the internal supports could not be removed. I am going to attempt to print him again with my friend’s resin printer to see if a hollow shape is possible at all. Ideally I would be able to play the frog and test out different materials to see what they sound like, but I may be limited with the medium. I think the frog would have turned out better if I printed him on his butt looking into the sky instead of on his belly looking forward as he is now.

The body did have some warping from the scan, especially with the top of his head on the left side when facing you. I mimicked the other side by using the clay tool, adding mass, then removing material with both the scrape and the multi-plane scrape tool.

The majority of my time was spent making the little frog hollow. Initially I attempted to spilt the frog in half, hollow out each side, then sandwich them back together before printing.

I began by duplicating the frog and hiding one of the duplicates. Then I created a box and positioned it over the bottom half of the frog. I then used the modifiers tab (the little blue wrench) and selected the Boolean tool to remove the area of the frog that was inside of the block.

When I then deleted the block, all that was left was his face. To me he looked like he was submerged partially in a murky swamp and was peeking his head out to say hello!

I then repeated that action but with the lower half of the frog model.

At this point I attempted to place the frog halves on top of each other to see if this method would be a good option before I even continued to try and carve out the frog, but it was nearly impossible to line the two halves again (in part because of that scan issue I mentioned earlier).

Instead of continuing with this I chose to begin with a whole frog and take an ovoid boolean out of the center of the complete frog. This worked much better and I was able to continue from there. I used the smoothing tool and ran it over the entirety of the frog to get rid of some small lumps and bumps preset over the entire scan. Finally I finished the frog by adding one more rectangle in the frogs mouth and used the Boolean to remove some lumps left over from the original scan.

I recreated the wand used to play the frog in TinkerCad. I tried to scan the wand, however when the Einscan turntable would move the wand would shake and it was impossible to get a clear scan. The wand was built out of a cylinder, two donut shapes, and a second longer cylinder with gently sloping sides.