The office bear is a project i took on while we were redecorating our office at DESIGNISDEAD.
We visited some stores with designer and concept pieces but its all expencive and not so exceptional anymore. I saw a big icebear at a retailer but is was some thousend euro's, way over our budget... I really wanted that bear and started looking online for a secondhand bear, didn't find any bear online. So the next thing is building one myself, full scale !
Recently i was building some sculptures for projections so i had lots of cardboard at my disposal, its easy to work with and when used correctly its very strong and durable. Small scale papercarft is easy, you onley have to print it and ready.
Getting the 3D model flat and correctly scalled on cardboard was somewhat of a challange. I played around with the polargrapgh (an opensource project from Sandy Noble) and with some tweaks it was perfect to draw directly on the cardboard surface. The next level should be automated drawing and cutting at the same time.
The picture above of me and the bear right after assemebing it. A full scale black bear at 10 feet or 3 meters.
The video recap above shows the drawing and the building of the bear, really liked the procces but its a lot of work.
After building the bear fullscale we printed one for our desk, could be a nice future client gift.
A test print to check if the folds were accurate and if the shape didn't deform to much.
Creating the 3D model is the first step, from there everything begins.
This shape will be mounted on a wooden plate and can double as an pencil holder or stress bear.
Precission vector drawing with the polargrapgh
Cutting out the pieces along the full stroke lines (oscillating stroke styles refer to the bend direction)
Assembly with my trusty hot-glue gun
The structure was pretty heavy so i had to construct additional support so it could stand straight up.
Some additional 3D shots i was playing with to create a 3D build up animation, someday an animated series prehaps...
