Pavia Prize - “Dark Matter”
The “Pavia Prize” was a collaboration of the Art Department and Props, and I was tasked with the actual modeling of the thing, for 3D printing. It’s supposed to be the trophy for a prestigious international science award, sort of like the Novel Prize.
The shape is a three-sided mobius toroid, inspired by the sculpture that sits outside of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, IL, about 40 miles west of Chicago. It was built by Director Robert R. Wilson a few months before the laboratory opened. Original image source: Village Crier Vol. 6 No. 27, July 18, 1974
MANY iterations were made, and I would render stills of different varieties for the Production Designer Patricio Farrell to choose from. Here you can see some versions where I haven’t gotten rid of the seam yet, and where we tried to more closely imitate the inspirational statue with a texture of squarish bumps and indentations, which was discarded because it made the whole thing look too much like a car tire.
The coin on the bottom was designed by our Graphic Designer, who supplied me with the .fbx file for the renderings (done in Rhino).
I modeled the sculpture in Rhino3D, using the Grasshopper node-based programming interface. The trickiest part was getting the seam of the toroid to come together perfectly smooth, so there was a lot of trial and error attempts.
Our carpenters built the base and the scenic painters painted it to look like marble, which looks great on screen (the turnaround time to have actual marble cut and ready was just too long to make the cut). The picture in the background is actually how the 3D printed part came from Bridgewater Studio, with a base coat of silver paint that our scenics later finished.
