Wildcard Week – Inflatable Baymax!
Table of contents
Design Inflatable Baymax!
I am a huge fan of Big Hero 6 by Disney in 2014, especially the cute and inflatable personal companion robot – Baymax!, who owns a standalone movie in 2022 because tons of Baymax fans around the world. A fun fact is that our lecturer Neil is acknowledged for serving as the scientific consulting role in the movie Big Hero 6.
Echoing the theme of this wildcard week of making inflatables, I decided to design and make my own Baymax!, without actuation (which worth doing as a final project!) for now.
Firstly, I grab an off-the-shelf 3D model of Baymax from Fusion 360 Gallery, and use it as the base structure to design the 2D layout for inflatable Baymax.
model courtesy: Brian Mongkolpoonsuk from Fusion 360 Gallery.
It’s really challenging for me to design a fully 3D and unfold it to multiple pieces of 2D layout, considering that I am not familiar with Rhino3D and my time constrain, our inflatables TA Miana suggested to use two pieces of simple base outline and sew them together as the inflatables. And Miana helped me a lot along this design process.
Two-dimensional layout for inflatable Baymax!
Fabric Cutting
Then I exported the 2D layout as DXF file for fabric cutting. I used white fabric and resized the hight of the object to 50 cm (which turns out to be a bit smaller than expected and the fabric actually allows me to make a 1-meter-scale Zemax! if not even larger). Alfonso helped me to cut the fabric using Zund cutter.
 Fabric cutting using Zund cutter |
 Cutted and dispatched fabric |
Fabric Sewing
Then I sewed the two pieces together using sewing machine. I used a simple straight stitch to sew the fabric together.
It’s my first time using the sewing machine and I found it pretty challenging to sew it nice and neat. After several simple trials, I found that the key is to use a relatively low stitch length (2-3) and sew it slowly and evenly. This will give a controllable sewing path along the silhouette of the fabric.
Another useful and interesting skill that I learned while sewing is how to do threading. Simply following the trace (or step numbers to be exact) printed on the body of the sewing machine, and quick test on each substep. This interesting and intuitive instruction feature also inspired me to understand Dieter Rams’s ideology – Ten principles for good design, where Good design makes a product understandable.
Inflation – Baymax!
Finally, I inflated the Baymax using a USB-powered mini-fan.
 Inflated Baymax! |
 Inflated Baymax! Up |