Grace Surmon - Figurine Concept

This project was one of my first goes at figurine design, something which I’m focusing on as a year long project through 2022. It started out as more simple character design project, then a theoretical figurines sculpt and then this year I decided to use it as a test run for learning how to 3D print and render within blender, and starting to play around with getting sculpts ready for manufacturing. 

I was inspired by pop culture aesthetics of the soviet space race, and contrasted with their use of dogs for space travel and experimentation, something I had been wanting to play with since seeing an exhibition on it several years back.

While initially concepted as a general design for maybe a horror game or illustration I had started looking more into toy design, especially vinyl figurines and decided this design would be fun to translate into that style. This stage is where I left the project and submitted it to last years competition. Throughout the rest of the year I started focusing more on toy design as a career goal and filed this project away for a day when I knew how to take it further. 

This year as my honours project I decided to do a series of figurines suitable for resin printing, something I had never done before and realised with some tweaking I might be able to make this model work as a test run. I also wanted to play around with rendering in blender seeing the amazing tactile finish other toy designers where getting from cycles, which I felt had been missing from my Zbrush and Keyshot renders. I made some small edits to my render model, and then went about getting the sculpt ready for print within Zbrush, splitting up the model with booleans and pegs and finally working in Chitubox to get the final prints! As this was also testing for another project I printed at a rough 1/16 and 1/8 scale, with 1/8 retaining almost all of the sculpted details. To take this further in the next year I want to split the model further into colour sections and manufacturing proof the slimmer pieces, and as figurine production is the focus of my exegesis hopefully will be able to bring this concept back next year with more refined prototypes!

Sputnik 1 model by Adrienne Neef

Sputnik 2 model by Muklis Sadewo

Soviet Apartment model by Colin Greenall