Part I | Concept
For my concept, I thought it would be interesting to make a chess piece come to life or turn into something else.  I thought about the part in Alice in Wonderland, the movie, produced by Walt Disney studios in 1951, the male playing card servants that had a head and arms.  It was a creepy part of the movie and I thought I would do something similar with a king chess piece scan.  I would give the scanned king chess piece arms and later print it on the MakerBot Replicator.  I based my idea primarily on the surreal author of Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll and his attraction with chess sets.  I took a king chess piece from a chess set I own and brought it into scan on the Makerbot Digitizer 3D scanner.  It made a digital 3D model out of my king chess piece object and the results turned out good.  To begin using the Makerbot Digitizer, it is essential to pay attention to lighting and make sure there are no bright lights in the camera’s field of view.  I learned how to use the MakerWare for Digitizer software to scan my object.  There are three light selections to describe your object, and I chose medium and then clicked start scan.  The chess piece began to rotate, and the lasers made a mesh of my object.

Part II | Iteration
To iterate my concept, I used the surreal chess set example as motivation for my design. There are a lot of cool looking examples for surreal chess piece sets online. I began drawing sketches on paper to populate how I envisioned the chess piece to look. Next, I imported the chess piece scan in MeshMixer. And to continue with my drawing idea of a surreal chess piece with arms, I used the icon on the left panel, Meshmix, to add an arm. I selected the second-choice style of the arm and put it into place on the chess piece. I closed all holes in the arm using the Analysis selection tool on the left pane in Meshmixer, then chose the Inspector option and selected Auto Repair All. Getting a second arm on the other side of the chess piece was tricky for me. To add a second arm to the surreal object, I had to choose Edit and then Mirror the object. This took some time and patience to get the arms positioned right on the chess piece. Once the arms were on, I thought it came out just how I envisioned it would. Next step was to print it on the Makerbot replicator machine.

Part III | Final
To wrap up and finish my Meshmix of the king chess piece with arms, I selected the entire object, made it into one solid, and reduced the polygon count to 7,000. I exported and saved my king chess piece file as a .OBJ format. I took the file to the Makerbot Replicator machine to print my 3D surreal object. From the three Boolean functions in modeling, I used the Union, also known as Join function as emphasis to my model. The arms and the king chess piece had a total volume of both pieces fused together as one object. Moving onto the Makerbot Replicator machine, I learned how to change out the filament and run it through the extruder. What the machine does when the file is to be printed, is heat up to 215 degrees Celsius, which is equivalent to 419 degrees Fahrenheit in order for the plastic to be melted and used. Next the extruder moves into position and begins printing the filament. My object took about an hour and a half to print. When it is all complete, the machine will ask you to print again or go back to the menu, so I chose to go back to the menu. Next you can remove the plate and work with a chisel tool to pry the object off of the plate. This was the most dangerous part of the job. After I pried my object off of the plate, I then removed all of the supports.