Voxel Neko (for Mister 1)

Our friends' son had his first birthday recently and to celebrate the event I made him a voxelated maneki neko out of half-inch wooden rods. Arguably this is not a very practical gift for a one-year old but hopefully he, and his parents, will hold on to it long enough to grow to love it.

Originally I thought I might have it 3D-printed but the cost to have that done by a commercial vendor was prohibitive and to do it using a friend's consumer printer would have taken 43 continuous hours and exhausted about 15 kilograms of plastic which was hard to get excited about. I also entertained the idea of having the model extruded from a solid block of wood but it turns out that most CNC machines are still not able to handle a shape this complex. With the help of friend I did find some vendors who thought they might be able to do it but by then I had already ordered 200 linear feet of half-inch rods and decided to make the model by hand.

The model was derived from a 3D model of a traditional maneki neko that was voxelized using the Blender application. I can barely manage to open the front door, so to speak, in Blender and still haven't figured out how to export the coordinates of the individual voxels let alone stacks of them at any given x,y coordinate. Instead I simply counted each stack of voxels by eye and recorded their offset and height on a paper grid.

It did occur to me that in all that time I might have also been able to read and understand the voxel file format but I didn't and that remains a project for another day.

I am an impatient carpenter. This coupled with the decision to use an old and unforgiving mitre box meant that most, if not all, my cuts can only be described as shonky at best. Eventually I simply accepted that everything would be a little off including the fact that these inconsistencies would be further compounded by sloppiness and imprecision with which I clamped the rods together. There are at least three spots in the finished piece where no amount of glue and clamping will correct for the bowing without the tension causing splintering and shattering to occur elsewhere.

It's not as though I didn't appreciate the craft in John Powers' work before I started this project but I do feel like that appreciation runs a bit deeper now.

Once the model was complete I created a 3D model using the photogramettry tools described in the SFO Museum's Experiments in Photogrammetry blog post.

This has been great fun because it allows me to see what the model could look like at different scales and because I am going to send the model to all the people in Mister 1's orbit so that they might take photos of the voxel neko from all the different places they visit and send them to him.

Voxel Neko (for Mister 1), 2024. Wood and Chiyogami. 20cm x 28cm x 25cm.