I think it will be a good idea to start designing the bike out of paper now, as I think this will be a very time consuming job. I don't have a specific concept for my design just yet, however I'm assuming I will by the time I have made the bike. This was the first wheel design that I came up with. This whole process was very trial and error, as there wasn't a tutorial to follow of how to make a bike. This wheel wasn't successful, as I knew I wanted my wheels to spin and this particular wheel didn't have a place to put pegs.
This wheel seemed to look a lot better. The main difference from this wheel and the previous, is the fact that there is an extra hidden cut out circle, meaning the peg had a place to sit. However, I found out it was very difficult to spin the wheel, which would make filming the bike very difficult, as I would have to really fiddle with the bike each frame of the animation.
I then cried to create the same style of wheel, by using different colours of paper for different details, such as the inner wheel frame and the gears. I thought this might help make the bike more stable as it wouldn't be quite as flimsy. This idea did work, and the bike did feel a lot more stable than the previous design, however the main issue with this idea was that it wouldn't stand up on its own, or lie down flat. This gave me another idea - to create a 3D wheel.
This was my first attempt at creating a 3D wheel. This wheel did actually stand up on its own, however it didn't look very pleasing to the eye, and this specific design wouldn't allow me to add more detail because of the way it was glued together.
I took to Youtube to see if there was a way to make a free standing wheel, and happened across this video below, which I found incredibly helpful as it showed how to put a wheel together by just using the outside of the bike. This was very useful, as it meant I could still put detail into the wheel.
I then started this refined idea of the wheel design. Firstly, I started by making some inner rings that would fit inside the bike wheel. I thought this would be a useful thing to do, as it would make the paper with the intricate design on twice as strong. I cut these using a circle cutter, which was actually a lot more difficult to do than I originally thought it would be, as the paper kept moving as it wasn't the thickest stock. I got around this by cutting the inner circles first, and then cutting the outter rings.
I then did the same kind of method for the intricate part of the wheel. The inner circle was far too small to cut using a paper cutter, meaning I had to do it by hand. I didn't cut the inner circle, instead I just scored it, meaning the design would match the rings I had previously created so they wouldn't show through the wheel.
I then cut out the intricate design. I designed this free hand, as it would be close to impossible to measure out the design to be completely perfect. This did make the wheel feel a lot more flimsy, so it was definitely useful that I cut out extra rings to thicken up the design and make it more stable.
I then cut out this long strip and added folding tabs along both sides - I made sure that all of these tabs wouldn't be visible through the wheel by testing them on the extra rings I created.
Then came the final step of putting all of these pieces together. It was an incredibly fiddly process, and quite messy too as glue ended up pretty much everywhere, however the final product was definitely worth it, and definitely an improvement on the other wheel designs, as it stood up on its own and it also looked a lot more like a bicycle wheel.
It also made really interesting shadows, which it always a bonus and might be interesting to experiment with when filming the bike stop motion.
Designing the wheels took a lot longer than I originally thought they would, especially as I already knew that paper cutting is a very time consuming process. However, I think the end result was definitely worth the extra time I put into getting the perfect wheel for this project.
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