Laser Cut Puffin- Rhino and Pepakura

This 'bird' project helped us to learn a modeling program called Rhino and to introduce us to the laser cutters.  The first half of the project was to create a Rhino model of a bird that was native to the location of our precedent house (The Wall House, The Netherlands).  My group of three chose the Atlantic Puffin for our bird. 

Each of us constructed a different part of the bird and then we joined the three parts together; I built the head and the beak.  The following image is a screen shot of the puffin model in Rhino.

After combining our separate parts, we brought the Rhino model into a program called Pepakura, which assessed all the faces of the bird and unfolded them into flattened polygons.  This was the file that we sent into the laser cutting program.  The screen shot of the Pepakura program is below. 

We sent the unfolded version of the bird to the laser cutting program, and set the laser cutter to cut the bird out of 4-ply bristol board.  The following images show the laser cut bird after it was fully assembled (with some difficulty, he is only about 7" tall!)