As a summer intern in the NCMNS Visual World Lab I pursued a summer long project developing a 3D model and life size print of the claw of the museum’s giant ground sloth. Being unfamiliar with blender at the start of the internship, the lab coordinators guided me to a level of fluency in the program and assisted in the trial and errors phase of my 3D printing journey. The most challenging part of this project however, was not the modeling or the printing but the engineering that went into making each joint in the claw articulated. This took many rounds of revisions and experimentation with printer settings and filament types.

At the completion of this project the full scale multicolor claw was put on exhibit in the Visual World Lab for guest interaction. I made a half size copy to keep and painted to look as close as possible to the original.