This project was part of setting up our apartment in the East Village. I made one piece for our place, and later that year I made two more as Christmas gifts for family.

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The idea was to have a 3D printed giant gorilla astride the Empire State building, with tiny planes buzzing around him. I found a .OBJ model of King Kong, that looked like it may have been from the video game adaptation of the Peter Jackson film. After a little rigging in MAX, I was able to pose it like I needed, and then optimized the mesh to give it the faceted look I'd envisioned. I test-printed on our Makerbot and the black PLA print is the one in the final product. The planes were a lot easier - I just found a model on Shapeways and had them print it.

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For the building I couldn't find a high-res enough image, so I eventually live-traced the largest one I could find, and then passed it through Rasterbator to get the halftone printing effect at large scale.

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For the other colors, I had the model printed at Shapeways, and the color prints at Kinkos. The packaging was a bit of a challenge - the cardboard rolls needed to be large enough to hold the printed ape and the extra hand, but they came out pretty cool in the end.