Meshmixer -- a Flying Cat Statue

In this week, the professor taught us about how to use Meshmixer as a tool to create and modify models. Therefore, we were recommended to pick models from websites, merge them together, and create a new interesting creature. From websites TurboSquid and CGTrader, I chose three different models to achieve the final model as shown above. The model I created is a statue of a flying cat. The inspiration behind the the model's creation is ancient Egyptians' worship toward cats.

Here are main steps I went through:

• Chose Objects Needed
• Import Objects Into MeshMixer
• Modify Objects
• Merge Objects Together

The followings are the links I used for my model:

• For the cat: link
• For the wings: link
• For the diamond: link

Based on the idea of creating a flying cat statue, I originally chose a cat model and a goose model from the websites. I decided to utilize the goose's wings for the cat by cutting the main body of the goose away in MeshMixer.

After downloading the models that I needed, I imported the models into MeshMixer and started to modify them. My focus was firstly on the goose because there was no much modification needed on the cat's body.

I used "Unwrap Brush" to select the parts that I did not need for the goose's body and utilized "Erase & Fill" to remove the unneeded parts. After detailed removal of various parts, I started to move the wings to the cat's body with the "Transform" tool. I utilized top view and side views to make sure that the two models can be merged perfectly.

However, when I selected both models and desired to merge them together with "Boolean Union" tool, the program warned me that there was a fatal problem that it could not solve. I was reminded of using the "Inspector" tool to check the problem I encountered.

I analyzed both the cat and the wings. Then I found out that it was the wings that included too many holes. If I chose to fix it with "Auto Repair All" tool, the wings would not be wings anymore (as shown in the picture). I tried several times to solve the problem, but I failed. As a result, I made a decision of selecting another model from the website to get the wings for my cat statue. The model that I chose for the new set of wings is Napoleon Eagle.

With the eagle model, I repeated the same process that I went through before -- cutting unneeded parts of the model, modify the model to make sure it can unite with the cat's body perfectly. Based on previous failure, I learned a lesson, which is checking the feasibility of the imported model. Therefore, right after importing the model, I utilized "Inspector" tool to see if there was any problems with the eagle model. Luckily, there was tiny problems that I could solve without bringing great changes to the model itself. As a result, I utilized the model and modified it to fit with the cat.

To make the statue look more superior and valuable, I not only used a metallic shader for the cat's body but also downloaded a diamond model from the website. I changed the diamond model's scale so that it could be settled at the center of cat's chest. Another trick I learned was that when we transform the position of the model, we could press the "up" or "down" key on the keyboard to increase or decrease the scale of the transformation. After the settlement of the diamond, I applied a transparent shader to the diamond to make it look like shiny.

I also utilized "Drag Brushes" to drag the cat‘s sharp nails out from its toes to make the statue more realistic.

In the end, I created the flying statue that I desired. Above are the pictures of my final piece from different views.

Based on this experience of making this model, I realized that it is necessary to use "Inspector" tool first after importing the model because by doing so, we could tell if the imported models are suitable for creating our own model. It was a great pleasure to apply the tools that I learned from the class to create the model I wanted. In future, I hope that I could build more models with more innovative ideas.

Thank you for reading :)