Mesh Mashup: Selection and Refinement

Megan Janett
January 27, 2020
OBDF 110
 

Laughing Pill

     When it came down to deciding which object I wanted to refine it came between a flower pot shaped as a turtle with a human skull as its shell or a pill with a laughing face coming out of it. In the end I went with the laughing pill idea. This concept came from the phrase take a chill pill. So instead of taking a pill to chill out someone may want to take a pill in order to have a good laugh.

Original object in tinkercad:

Refined object in meshmaker:

When showing my ten objects to the class it came down to two items, the flower pot turtle or the laughing pill. Though the feedback that I was given most said that the laughing pill would be a good one to play around with since it is so random and actually funny to look at. Originally I had envisioned the face coming out of the pill as if the pill was being split into two, but when I got talking to people they said that it would look better if the face was attached to the outside of the pill allowing for a more unified look. In order to do this I had to curve the head around the pill which was frustrating at first because I couldn't get it to transfer nicely from the forehead to the top of the pill. In the end I used the move tool to pull the top of the forehead backwards and down and then going with the blending tool to make it look a little more smoother.

Another comment I got was that it reminded them of laughing gas. So instead of it being administered though a mask, one could simply take the pill. Another problem I encountered was getting the pill to be two separate colors. When I first attempted to line the two pieces up there was a weird line where the red and white merged together weirdly. I ended up having to flatten he middle edges of the pills so that they would line up more seamlessly, which seemed to help. The last bit of advice they gave me was to stretch the face out more since the pill was so long. I think that this ended up helping the design look better than when the face was more circular. I also think that it helped the face to look like it was actually suppose to be attached to the pill allowing for the concept to be understood better.

This relates to remix culture because I took the already existing models of the pill and the face in order to combine them into something new. and by doing this I gave these objects a new meaning. Before they were separate pieces that I would say didn't have too much meaning to them. The pill file was meant to be used as a container when printed out, that's why there was only one half of it. And I'm not entirely sure what the purpose of the face was. It also relates to the read and write aspect of remixing because not only did I use existing files, but I made my own as well. When looking for tears I couldn't find any existing files that I liked so I created my own and incorporated them into the design. I guess you could also classify it as a juxtaposition since you don't usually associate pills with laughter and happiness.