Modeling - Final Project

So, after we decided that we were going to construct a Wendy head, we defined the scope of our project and split up the tasks. I will spend the majority of the rest of this blog detailing the parts that I was responsible for, the eyelids and eyebrows, and the parts that I played a major role in developing, namely the eyes. I will also touch upon the parts that I did not have a direct hand in, namely the jaw and the structure of Wendy, which Hande was responsible for.

A preliminary sketch of Wendy (sketched by Christine)
Note: this was sketched after Lyn walked by and
after we had scrapped our two-dimensional eye ideas, as modeled below.

So, first we thought about our particular parts individually.

The eyebrows were fairly straightforward because they are isolated from any other moving parts and my first idea of having them made out of delrin sheet plastic, but having a (tight fit) hole in the middle to put a rod connected to some connected gears, one of which would be hooked up to a rotating motor. This design would change as time progressed, but only slightly. These changes will be outlined later.

The eyelids were not as straightforward and their design completely depended on the design of the eyeballs. Christine's first idea for the eyeballs was to have them be two-dimensional. As you can see in the prototype below, the cornea of the eye would be a gear, perhaps covered in paper or something. Then the whites of the eye would be paper. The eyes would move when the gears moved across the track. The two-dimensionality of the eyeballs I tried to reflect in my design for the eyelid. I imagined them as an almost like the curtain in my dorm room which would roll in and out when she blinked her eyes. However, before I worked out all of the details, our professor walked by and suggested that we try to make the eyelids/eyeballs three-dimensional. This totally changed Christine's design, which turned into balls rotating on sticks. I decided to punt the design of the eyelids until after the design of the eyeballs, as to design the eyelids, I needed to know the constraints that the eyeballs would add. However, we needed to buy supplies (a task that Hande took on) and so I arbitrarily decided that the eyelids would be made out of ping-pong balls. However, I also knew that if ping-pong balls didn't work out, then I could try to work something out of materials scrounged out of the craft table in the lab. 

An early prototype of Wendy