Ideation
This project was hard to find a starting point for but eventually started running in a positive direction. My project partner and I came to the conclusion of doing sea creatures and reptiles as our sides, but there was an issue finding a relationship between these two sides. We settled on doing land roaming sea creatures as the other side, as to push an actual narrative.
After this we went our seperate ways to design our creatures, giving progress checks to make sure we had harmony between the pieces.
I had decided my creatures after quite a bit of pondering the roles of them in an ecosystem, as well as their shapes.
Pawns- Prawn Rook- Swordfish Knight- Seahorse Bishop- Squid Queen- Shark King- Whale
Initially I wanted to do fish eggs as my pawns, as pawn promotion came up and I wanted something that made sense with that, but as it went on prawn made more sense since this is the basis of a lot of life in the ocean as a food source, as well as being its own creature.
I also had wanted to do octopi as my bishops but squids ended up making more sense for my form factor, and their shape and behavior correlate more to a bishop in chess.
My knights took a bit to figure out what to do but as you can see I ended up being very literal with the translation and using seahorses.
I chose a whale for a king due to it’s power in the ocean, but also its vulnerability.
Sharks as my queen for their role as predators in the ocean, paralleling the queen being the most powerful piece in chess.
And lastly I chose swordfish for their stature and method of self-defense relating to a rook in chess.
Production
My visual design process was really complicated and drawn out, but it was a workflow from Illustrator to Blender to Cura, and then I 3D printed my pieces and assembled them.
Here are the vector drafts of my pieces:
I imported these into blender and created the frontward pieces with extruded circle curves that connected the profile pieces. This was the most time consuming process until I got a groove going, creating boolean modifiers for each gap that needed to be there for the parts to connect.
After that, I exported the pieces to Cura as STL files to begin slicing my print files.
Printing was also very time-consuming, but not in a workload manner, each piece took an hour and a half to print so the process of getting each piece off was quite slow.
As I waited for these prints I made a mockup for an ocean themed chess board that I would use for a digital render of our chess set:
I wanted to create a nautical theme that incorporated aspects of both sides, as Alizeh’s side’s pieces were:
Pawns- Penguins Rook- Walrus Knight- Arctic Bird Bishop- Sea Lion Queen- Polar Bear (female) King- Polar Bear (male)
Because of the arctic setting I wanted to include the floating ice on the board.
As the prints continued I wish I could have fine-tuned them a bit more, the final pieces ended up looking very draft-y and they were too big, but on the time crunch I was on I couldn’t just take the time to change my whole material or reprint them in a smaller size, so I ended up with not the best looking final pieces. I did however have full 3D models of each piece to render out to fcombat this however, which I believe demonstrates an ability for creative problem solving. I rendered out my chess board with all of my 16 pieces on it in a studio space I had previously built for displaying objects of this sort.
This is the result and I think it looks pretty stellar and demonstrates what I wanted this board to look like and what I intended the final pieces to look like.
Sadly, my outcome in real life didn’t look so perfect, but they are still functional:
Final Thoughts:
I would have spent some more time fine tuning the prints if I had time so they matched what the 3D models were.
I think it works really well in a virtual space, and if I could I would have stopped doing 3D prints for my pieces and laser cut them out of Bristol instead to give a similar effect that the digital render of this set does.
I really like how the digital version came out, I know it’s not a requirement for this project but I just really wanted to include it to show what it was supposed to look like in its finality.
The final real outcome is still cool, it’s just not in the realm of how final and clean cut I wanted each piece to look.
Final project: Chess Redesign