Composite Dog House in Sydney Opera House Style. Part 1

Idea

Our house in the village is guarded by 2 dogs - we decided to move one of them from the tiles in the yard to a separate equipped area.

I wrote about the area separately in telegram in one of the first posts, in short - it's artificial grass with a separate area with sand for sanitary purposes (there's no sand here yet):

But the current post is about something else. The current dog house has deteriorated, hastily knocked together from pine boards and has problems with thermal insulation, especially in winter.

A normal winter dog house project usually looks something like this:

That is, a separate warm room with thermal insulation and a cold vestibule. I was oriented towards approximately these dimensions when designing (2 meters by 1 meter in external dimensions).

At some point I considered 2 options, one of which was relatively simple - to make a dog house from plywood/sheet material and clad it with red brick (the house in village was built at the beginning of the 20th century from red brick). The image was generated by my request, of course, everything would look different, but it didn't reach the project stage.

But then a more ambitious idea overcame me. I always liked the Sydney Opera House building:

And I decided to make the dog house based on this reference too. Initially I tried to repeat the same pipeline I followed when developing the Caretaker - AI design and 3D modeling, but I was in for a failure.

The images were generated not as I expected to see them:

The last one is the maximum I could get in terms of similarity to the original building. As for 3D - things were even worse here:

Modeling

So I had to remember polygonal modeling in Blender, only from scratch. A model of the opera from some early stage was found online, which I took as a basis:

Well, we simply take and trace it, fortunately all projections are here:

A separate difficulty was to connect all this together and draw the entrance, but in the end the model turned out quite good:

Next Steps

Actually, this was probably the first question before I even started modeling.

The dimensions of the dog house are 2.20 x 1.20 x 1.30 meters. My main working hypothesis was initially 3D printing.

But according to rough calculations, this would take about 12 kilograms of plastic and about 100-150 parts even without considering supports and provided that each part would occupy the full printing area. I even managed to write a Python script for Blender for automatically cutting the model into parts of specified dimensions.

In practice, the first test print showed that from a height of 10 cm, a thin-walled part begins to bend strongly and significant deviations appear. And then all this would need to be glued together - so this implementation option was abandoned.

Shell

Especially since I had a brilliant idea - to glue the dog house from paper, since there are few polygons in the model. Software for obtaining sketches for cutting the model was found - Pepakura.

We load the model into it, in my version an stl file - and get automatic cutting:

Moreover, you can interactively edit the cutting:

• make cuts or connect joints;
• move "ears" to the other side of the sketch;
• and of course arrange parts across sheets.

In the right block, dotted lines highlight A0 sheets (drawing paper, 16 times larger than A4). This is quite a lot. It's hard to imagine how much this is in your mind, so look at this:

Then all this is glued with PVA, at least that was the original plan.

Frame

But paper alone cannot handle an object of such dimensions, we need a frame. Here 3D printing will still help. But first modeling.

Minimum plan - only straight frames:

I started with it, but during assembly it turned out that arches without support also don't hold, so they were also modeled:

Well, it all ended with a complete frame (the intermediate partition will not be made of plastic):

And here are some of the printed and glued with a 3D pen elements and an example of layout for printing:

And the current state of the project - everything is assembled with glue and masking tape:

Ahead is strengthening the frame and shell, composite, putty, insulation and aesthetics. It should be long... but interesting.