chess set update!

    I started to try designing some of the new pieces, the first set of trials is the key identifier. I chose Pikachu for these ones since it has some of the most recognizable set of features. I came up with three options, ears, tail or tail and ears, this is one of the original bases that I also used for the pawns. For now, I'm setting them up as bishops, but that will probably change if I don't just go with another idea. 

    I ended up deciding to go with the idea of the teams you catch in the games. I ended up pulling out two Pokemon books that I got when I was much younger and my 3ds just so that I could see which Pokemon I had, based on my favourites from the book, and since you can change the view of the Pokemon you catch in the game, I took the top, side, and front views of the ones I wanted to use. I had to be a bit more careful when I was cropping the images since that changed the size of the picture when put into Rhino. So far it has worked out, with some minor issues.

    I've been trying out a lot of things that haven't actually completely worked yet. I started by making shapes that seemed like they would fit the figure, but that wasn't working, there were angles that I couldn't get, so I decided to look at this as if I was woodworking. Cut out the front view, this worked very well, the front view looked like it could be a cardboard cut out, and that's when things started getting difficult. I tried using the boolean difference and intersection to get the rest of the shape to be what it had to be, and that kinda worked, it was more the shape it needed to be, but it has two extra legs and the arms are unnecessarily thick, and the head was very very weird looking. SOO, I went back and figured, why not try to chip away at it like with hand carving instead, cut out small pieces at first to get the shape before going back and refining the figure. It's a much slower process, but so far it is working very well, and I'm excited to see where it goes!

    (Also, I just had one of those shower moments where I realized part of the reason it looks weird around the legs, is because I forgot it has knees, but hey we're getting there)