The Big Buddha
The Big Buddha from Eugenie Emory
The Big Buddha

This project involved building two 20 foot statues scaled up from a 5 foot clay sculpture. The original art was ditigitized in my workspace. The digitized data was processed into a basic 3D model. Missing features (artist had not fullly completed original art piece) were created in CAD. This included hair curls, ears, stupa and left foot. Once accepted by the client, the 3D model was ported to a research prototype machine that cut 5 x 4 foot foams layers based on .SLC export. This system was moved to our facility and used to build both statues.
Individual layers were then hand-laminated to create the 20 foot model. Each foam model was sealed and painted. One model was shipped to California and the other model was sent to India.

Foam model before painting. The statue was taken outside my facility for a photo shoot and for a media event. It did get featured on the local news - for about 30 secs between the Turkey Trot and the Green Jello Diving competition stories.
Digitizing the artists clay model.
Digitized model. Note the features that had to be added in CAD and the number of sections that had to be closed to create water tight 3D model.
Wireframe and rendered version of statue's hand.
Closeup of hair curls. The hair curl was modeled separately in CAD and then exported as an STL file. This file was used to create a pattern for soft tooling. The hair curls were molded using an expandable fast cure foam.
3D rendering of the finished head after merge of digitized data with CAD modeled features.
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The Big Buddha

This project involved building two 20 foot statues scaled up from a 5 foot clay sculpture. The original art was ditigitized in my workspace. The digitized data was processed into a basic 3D model. Missing features (artist had not fullly completed original art piece) were created in CAD. This included hair curls, ears, stupa and left foot. Once accepted by the client, the 3D model was ported to a research prototype machine that cut 5 x 4 foot foams layers based on .SLC export. This system was moved to our facility and used to build both statues.
Individual layers were then hand-laminated to create the 20 foot model. Each foam model was sealed and painted. One model was shipped to California and the other model was sent to India.

Eugenie Emory
Engineer UT