Volpin Props

Half Life 2: Gravity Gun

2012-01-04T21:39:00.000-05:00

Last month I posted some pretty pictures of the finished Gravity Gun, taken by my good friend Dan Almasy. At that time, the gun was newly finished and on its way to the Child's Play charity dinner in Seattle. I really had no idea what to expect this year - my Portal Gun sold last year for a whopping $14,500 - but its difficult to get a grasp on things when numbers start to reach a point like that. Was it a fluke, or is Portal just that big of a game?

For this year, I knew I had to keep up the momentum (or die trying!) A longstanding "someday" project of mine was the Gravity Gun from Half Life 2. I never had anyone actually commission one of these from me, so I decided the Child's Play auction would be the perfect place to release it. It sold for a staggering $21,000 - and here's how I made it.

Well, first, this is possibly the longest entry I've ever written. That's really saying something considering the length of some of my other write-ups, but I felt a warning should be in order. Get a cup of coffee and a comfy chair; its gonna be a while.

Alternatively, if you're like me and "patience" isn't something you've got in abundance, then please enjoy this less-than-two-minutes video of the finished product.

Onto the build!

The biggest problem with the Gravity Gun is the somewhat incomplete reference of the piece. The in-hand model only shows 3/4 of the backside, and the world model is woefully low resolution.

As luck would have it, when I brought the Portal Gun to the dinner last year, the guys at VALVe offered a tour of their facilities. While I was there, I met one of their designers named Tristan Reidford who had been working on his own very detailed model of the Gravity Gun. He gave me a copy of the files to work with, and now I had the best blueprints I could possibly hope for!

This project marks my first foray into the world of laser cutting. A lot of the geometry needed to be exact, so I spent about 4 days working out all the project parts in Illustrator. Parts were all cut by Ponoko, in various thicknesses of acrylic. Before I sent the files out though, I made paper templates to make sure all my designs were accurate. Below are two mockups of the main gun body - both were slightly off, so its a good thing I made mockups before committing!

While waiting for the laser cut parts to arrive, I started work on the handle portion of the gun. I started calling the cylinders toward the back the "drum assemblies" as I had absolutely no idea what they were supposed to be. Both would be molded then cast in resin. I started the smaller drum by vacuumforming the outer "cap"

The rest of this part was a hodge-podge of PVC and Sintra, beveled on my router for the funky edge along the inner section.

The inner drums were easier. Just lathe some MDF and cut out the middle on the scrollsaw.

Everything molded and parts pulled! These were molded in Smooth-On's Mold Max 30 and cast in Smooth Cast 320 resin. Took a little practice to get the parts hollow with a uniform thickness.

A few more details were needed for the handle area. The endcap was turned from MDF then vacuumformed like the larger drum cap, then set over a .75" PVC connector.

The .75" connector allowed me to make the handle removable in order to ship the thing. That bike handle was a pain to track down. In the end I bought 4 of them in case I ever repeat this project so I don't have to go searching again - they're an odd length, somewhere between an adult and a child's sized handle grip. eBay to the rescue! All of these parts are mounted on a piece of 2" PVC to get the angle and spacing of the elements correct.

At this point I still had some time to kill before the laser cut acrylic was delivered, so I set about making the prong-claw ends. The pic below is a vacuumform master (right) I used to make the curved shape of the prongs with in styrene. The rest of the shape was done with apoxie sculpt, some half round stock, and a 3/8" OD washer.

I didn't want to have to repeat that nonsense three times, so I made another mold. I'm pretty proud of this one, since I don't usually cast parts this small. These came out perfect!

The next day, these showed up:

Hoooooooly crap, I had a lot of work to do. This was about 2 weeks before the auction deadline, too.

When designing the parts, I made 1/16" holes in parts that were supposed to be joined together. The idea was that I would insert steel pins into these to act as guide holes and keep everything aligned during assembly. The parts below are the long rectangular brackets that sit above the glowing Xen crystals along the body of the gun.

I built this in three sections of acrylic to get the proper thickness. There was a lot of sanding to get all the edges flush (fun fact, laser cuts aren't exactly 90º!) but here is the end result, with some styrene accents.

Aaaaand more moldmaking! Lego mold box, because that's the way professionals do it (?)

I also set about assembling the various flat-packed IKEA-style Gravity Gun into something a bit more recognizable. All of these parts had to be sanded before assembly, since the laser makes a slight lip around the edge from heating the plastic which would keep them from layering correctly. Also, lasers do cut glass-clear on their edges, but not glass-smooth; all of the facing edges also had to be sanded to remove the tool marks.

The main barrel assembly. For this part alone I was happy to have gone with laser cutting. 8 total layers make up this part, and each of the claw arm bases around the perimeter are another 8 parts a piece. 32 parts worth of acrylic, some only 1/8" wide... I'm really glad I didn't have to cut all of these by hand!

More parts. This is the assembly of the rear body.

The rear larger drums intersect with the main body in a fairly odd manner. After struggling with a good way to get these parts to fit together, I eventually settled on making a jig out of sintra and cutting the funky angles on my bandsaw. Went together better than expected!

Not everything was planned in advance though, a few parts still had to be scratchbuilt from raw material because I had NO idea how to make them until the rest of the gun was assembled and in front of me.

The lower heat fins, for example. This was a really fun part to piece together by hand! The black parts are all leftover acrylic, while the white fins are .060" styrene.

The pic above also shows the completed handle, which was cut and shaped from a block of sintra and some styrene/acrylic/wood mishmash for accents.

The handle fits over a 5/8" threaded bar bolted to the rear drum assembly. This in turn is bolted with a similar bar to a piece of PVC that the Xen crystals, barrel, and long rectangular brackets mount to. Its a delicate balance, held in place with about 60 screws and bolts!

I had originally intended to make the Xen crystals out of laser-cut MDF, but the "not-quite-90º-cuts" made this plan a loss. I remade the Xen crystal master out of a sintra block, and cut the "M" shaped bevel with my table router. That was a bit of a nervous experience, but it worked!

More moldmaking! To get the pieces to show light, I drilled out small pucks to act as lenses in the material and scatter the illumination from a series of LEDs that would be mounted underneath. The parts themselves were cast in Smooth Cast 325 plastic, which dries translucent white.

The LED boards, designed in Eagle and printed at Batch PCB. The free version of Eagle only lets you design in a 5"x5" work area, so the 7.5" long boards needed to be sectioned in two halves and jumpered together after assembly. Fun!

More illumination was needed for the "vent" piece on the main body. This panel has 2 rare earth magnets inside it, securing it onto the battery tray on the side of the gun. Illuminated battery doors, why not?

With almost all the parts finally cast and assembled, it was time for a test fitting!

There was light at the end of the tunnel, but still some parts left to be built.

The barrel needed some modifications - I had neglected to make the mounts for the brackets when I had the acrylic cut, so these were added with more scrap acrylic and screwed to the barrel surround.

There was also the matter of that little gauge near the handle. Emphasis here on little - this thing isn't even 3/4" in diameter! Its secured to the gun with duct tape in the game, but using actual duct tape would be a poor idea. It will shrink over time and leave behind a gross residue. I needed something more archival. By mounting the gauge to the handle drum with painter's tape, I blocked out a rough shape of the tape form.

I used this as a sort of mold to lay strips of resin-soaked cloth on top of. Once the resin was fully cured, I popped it off the tape and cleaned up the edges. Just needs a little paint and we've got faux duct tape!

A fellow forum member on the RPF extracted the texture of the gauge face for me, which I remade in Photoshop and had printed onto adhesive-backed vinyl. Some people think the "U2" in the upper right should have read "200" but its debatable...

Teeny tiny screws were pirated out of a dead walkman (never toss out old electronics!) and the needle is made from a shaved down roofing staple mounted to an earring back pin. Hacked-together? Yes, but it looks the part!

Those were the last parts that needed to be built, so it was onto paint!

...after I scribed some deeper panel lines first.

Okay, now paint! Everything got a layer of gray primer first...

Followed by a whole bunch of silver. The metals on the various parts of the gun are a whole bunch of different colors, so some parts got darker basecoats than others. There were somewhere around 60 separate parts that all had to be painted individually before weathering, then assembly. This stage took the better part of a week.

While I was waiting on those bits to dry (I need to occupy myself during that time, I'm the sort of person who will get fingerprints all over wet paint due to my complete lack of patience) I turned my attention to working on the weathering for the Xen crystals.

Each part was painted first by dabbing black acrylic paint over the entire surface with a piece of rolled-up newsprint. After this dried, I went back and scratched off sections in vertical strokes along the length of the part to give the surface a bit more variation. When lit, I was hoping for the effect of red-hot metal, or perhaps lava. The results were great.

The clear section of the barrel also has LEDs - these illuminate the small windows in the barrel front and pulse in time with the Xen crystals. Parts like this are also what makes laser cutting such a great solution for propmaking.

Lastly, I wanted something to look at if you were to stare down the barrel of the gun. This little assembly is more hackery with found parts - 6 LEDs illuminate a plastic solder spool salvaged from my "spare plastic" bin. The effect at the base of the barrel section is pretty cool to look at.

Only two more steps (ha!) before final assembly: weathering and wiring. Its really easy to rush here, but I think weathering will make or break a prop. I had to summon as much of my non-existent patience as possible.

I think of the Gravity Gun as a utilitarian piece of technology. It seems like something that may have been at home in a lab, but has been re-purposed by the resistance in the world of Half-Life and forced into more heavy duty than it was originally intended for. I don't think the scientists behind the design would have spent time with rust preventative paint a fancy finish. This is a piece of tech meant for work, not aesthetics.

The rust here starts off with a basecoat of purple acrylic airbrushed around seams and screw holes. These areas would see the most "wear" and stripping of paint, so they would be the first to start rusting. After the purple dries, a dark red is stipled on with a small coarse brush. This is followed with a lighter orange, and eventually yellow on top of that.

Certain areas (like the seam line in the image above) also had a small amount of water dripped onto the wet paint to give the surface rust a little bit of a run.

All of the parts were weathered and clearcoated individually before assembly.

Assembled, the rusted joints start to (hopefully!) make some sense.

Sub-assemblies started to come together, and for the first time I felt confident about making my deadline! (note the red button there - another salvaged walkman part!)

The electronics in the gun are controlled by an Arduino mini. Each of the light bars has 12 LEDs that pulse in 4 random patterns along the barrel. The arduino is turned on and off with a small switch on the underside of the main gun body.

First test fire! I used some screen mesh material to give the barrel interior a little more texture between the LED circuitboards.

Details, details. At the last minute I remembered I had forgotten the handle wrap and the valve pressure lines!

This is a HUGE post, and to anyone who has read this far I salute your perseverance. Believe it or not, there's actually lot of this build I've left out of this entry. If you want the entire play-by-play, then check out my Flickr stream here for more images and notes on the project. I could easily fill 2 more entries of similar length to this one with the nitty-gritty, but I have a feeling that may be overlkill...
The finished product!

If you haven't seen Dan's awesome photography already, be sure to check out that entry here. Below are a few more close-up shots of the finished gun that show off more of the details.

Thanks for reading, and happy 2012!

Gravity Gun for Child's Play

2011-12-07T09:20:00.001-05:00

Last year, I got it in my head to put together a Portal Gun for the Penny Arcade Child's Play annual charity dinner in Seattle. Child's Play is an awesome cause, and one I am very happy to support. Gamers often get a pretty bad reputation in media and the public eye, but this organization has been pulling together millions of dollars for children's hospitals for years now and has really shown what our community is capable of.

Well, last year went fantastically, and the auction is coming up again tomorrow. I really went down to the wire on this one, but this year I'll be bringing a Gravity Gun from Valve's Half Life franchise for auction.

The Gravity Gun has been a little bit of a combination of white-whale-unattainable and Sistine-Chapel-level-intimidating for me ever since I thought about getting into propmaking. Its complicated, intricate, and if I didn't get it just right, I'd have about a million gamers ready to tell me exactly why.

Normally I don't toss up show-off posts with just pictures, but as the auction is tomorrow, I really wanted to get the word out about this piece. If you'd like to contribute, certain lots will be available for proxy bidding over the phone. This means you don't necessarily have to be at the dinner in order to bid! If you're interested, please contact Jamie Dillion at jdillion@childsplaycharity.org to learn about remote participation.

I should note that the Portal Gun fetched a little more than twice what my car is worth, so if you're planning on proxy bidding then be prepared!

I will have a process blog post about the build of the Gravity Gun, as per my usual style, in the coming weeks. Until then, please enjoy these fantastic photos by my friend Dan Almasy. (Facebook in the link, Flickr here)

Finally, thank you to everyone in the gaming community for making things like this happen.

Thanks for reading, and happy holidays!

Thrall's Doomhammer, Warcraft

2011-11-13T23:31:00.001-05:00

A friend of mine who takes costume commissions (Check out her work at God Save The Queen Fashions!) sent me an inquiry a few months ago asking if I had any interest in helping her put together a few accessories for a World of Warcraft project she had coming up. The character was the Warchief Thrall, and he needed his iconic Doomhammer.

There are a lot of versions of this weapon floating around, but it was decided that the source would be the Doomhammer as it was shown on the cover of the novel "The Shattering"

From this reference and a couple others, I put together some blueprints in Illustrator. The finished result would be formidable and quite large, but just a bit shy of gigantic. 30" tip to tail, to be specific.

To keep things as lightweight as possible, I decided to construct the head of the hammer in hollow sections. I used 3/8" sintra sheets to make the main box of the head, then angled the sides with a 45º router bit.

The diamond-shaped faces of the hammer head started out as this styrene block. This was then molded to make 4 copies that would become the hammer faces. The mold is made from Smooth-On's Mold Max 30 silicone.

After pulling castings, the seams were taped shut and more resin was poured into the hollow inner cavity to join the two halves together. This created a little bit of cleanup after the fact, but the finished part is lightweight and hollow.

An early mockup. Fancy!

The bands on the hammer were made from more 3/8" sintra. Countersunk holes were made before these strips were glued in to house the large gold rivets which would be added later. With sintra, the best adhesive is cyanoacrylate - super glue. It actually melts the parts to one another, fusing them into a solid part.

To get the hammer faces to mount to the main body, more sintra was cut into a plug which would be glued in place after painting.

More mockups! Coke can shown for scale reference.

More details were added with styrene sheet. To get these parts symmetrical, 4 sheets were adhered together with double-sided tape. The part was then cut on my bandsaw, then the 4 sheets were separated. Instant symmetry!

After a coat of primer, I spent the next 2 days painstakingly carving cracks in the surface of the hammer head. While the sintra is easily carved, the styrene put up a pretty good fight. The results of this process were well worth it though!

In the shot above you can see the top nut placed on the hammer head. This was lathed from a single piece of casting resin. Unfortunately, the blank it was tooled from was not degassed properly, so I had a lot of tiny little air bubbles to fix before it was ready for paint

Filling said bubbles. I also added more accents with half-round styrene bar.

Other lathed bits included the handle, head stock, and pommel. The first two were cut from laminated maple boards, while the last one was cut from another block of casting resin. After the maple was turned, the parts were stained dark brown and sealed with urethane varnish.

Its worth mentioning that these started out as 4"x1" planks. After laminating, cutting these shapes from 4" blocks was a nightmare on my crappy Harbor Freight lathe. This project really did a number on the lathe head, so I think now is a good time to upgrade.

Parts after staining and sealing. Before staining the head stock, oval-shaped recesses were carved with a dremel for rivets similar the the ones used on the hammer head bands.

The pommel after lathing. It was necessary to make this part out of solid resin to counterbalance the enormous hammer head and keep the weight centered on the handle.

Recesses carved for rivets, as with the upper head stock. Not having any woodgrain to deal with, this is much easier to carve out of resin.

The side of the hammer features a snarling wolf, and I know my sculpting skills aren't stellar enough to make the same part look good twice. Instead, the piece was sculpted on an acrylic base and molded for copying. On the right below are the masters for the rivets used on the hammer. I needed 20 round ones and 10 oval-shaped rivets, and there was no way I was sculpting all of them by hand!

Some copies! These were cold cast with aluminum powder to polish them up later. The green ones were cast with brass powder; these were a test for another project. None of these have been polished in this photo - cold castings always look somewhat dull until buffed with some steel wool.

The "compass ring" as I started to call it was made by lathing a disc of resin into the circular shape, then adding the points in apoxie sculpt and molding the part. While the resin was curing, I placed steel bar into the plastic to make mounting points. You can see those poking out of the mold on the left side below:

Same parts as before with aluminum cold cast powder, and with some time spent buffing with steel wool. Eventually I decided to polish these up a little more uniformly to give them less of a "brushed" look.

The hammer head and stock with rivets mounted. Each piece was cast in SmoothCast 320 resin with gold metallic filler. Rivets were glued in place with 2 part epoxy, but fit snugly enough in their recesses that no clamps were needed.

The upper stock with some carved damage and a coat of paint on the "metal bands." At the top of the shot is the large threaded rod that runs the length of this entire piece and into the hammer head.

Painting this piece was different and a new experience. I haven't painted a rock like texture before, so the whole process took a bit of fiddling around. I started with a coat of flat black, then sponged on layers of acrylic paint, in various tints of gray. 5 layers were used to make a varied texture, then I used my airbrush to fill in some low spots with darker browns and blacks.

The wolf head and compass after polishing. I use aluminum wheel polish for parts like this.

The last part that needed finishing was the handle wrap. I used several long thin strips of pigskin leather braided over top of one another to create the crossed pattern here. Took a long time to get right, and it was kind of a shame to cover up all the pretty stained wood, but it feels great to hold.

I also tossed some little bits and baubles together for the rest of the Thrall costume. If you'd like to see the final result, check out my friend Cathy on FaceBook at God Save The Queen Fashions.

The final piece after assembly and clearcoat! Final dimensions of the piece are 30.5" long, with the head measuring 7"x9"x11.5" - total weight is a pretty manageable 8.5lbs! Not bad for such a giant prop.

If you're looking for more process photos (or the final shots in higher resolution!) check out my flickr page - there's a lot more there which aren't included in this write-up.

Thanks for reading!

Daft DeLorean photoshoot!

2011-09-17T23:55:00.001-04:00

If you're just arriving on this page, please be sure to visit parts one two and three of this build, which showcase the sculpting moldmaking and electronics aspects of the project.

I haven't done a photoshoot post since 2009 with the Big Daddy suit at the Aquarium, but the Thomas helmet brought in some of the most beautiful shots I've ever had taken of my work. Pair this with the fact that Catherine of God Save The Queen Fashions created an absolutely perfect replica of Daft Punk's "Human After All" era leather costumes, and the overall illusion is simply spectacular.

As with my other entry, I would be remiss to neglect mentioning all the help I had with this project. It would not have come together without the efforts of the following people:

Coding for this helmet (Arduino and iOS) was handled by James Moss
The Daft Punk leather suit, which you see below, was fabricated by Catherine Jones of God Save The Queen Fashions
Chroming of the helmet and gloves was handled by Creations n' Chrome
Photography on this page is courtesy of Dan Almasy
Custom circuit board printing was handled by Batch PCB.com
Awesome DeLorean provided for the photoshoot by Derek Lukaschus

First, the recap video because if you don't want to read the process, at least you can watch it!

Now, onto the pictures!

Thanks for taking a look!

Want more pictures? Higher resolution? Check out my Flickr stream!

Daft Punk Helmet (Thomas) Final!

2011-09-17T23:55:00.000-04:00

Its been a long road, but not nearly as long as my Guy Manuel project. I learned a lot from Guy, most notably what NOT to do, which allowed me to streamline this process considerably. The end result was more solid, more polished, more professional, and about ten times a complex as the Guy helmet, and it gives me a special pleasure to announce it finished.

Before I get into the "how-I-did-it" thing, some credit is due to fantastic artisans who assisted in helping me bring this project to light. Below you'll find each specialist's web page, and I can say their work is of the absolute highest caliber.

Coding for this helmet (Arduino and iOS) was handled by James Moss
The Daft Punk leather suit, which you see below, was fabricated by Catherine Jones of God Save The Queen Fashions
Chroming of the helmet and gloves was handled by Creations n' Chrome
2 photographs below and the last on this page, courtesy of Dan Almasy
Custom circuit board printing was handled by Batch PCB.com
Awesome DeLorean provided for the photoshoot by Derek Lukaschus

If you're just arriving on this page, please be sure to visit parts one and two of this build, which showcase the sculpting and moldmaking aspects of the project.

Don't feel like reading? You're in luck! 4 months go by in 3 and a half minutes:

And, if you'd rather just see more pretty pictures like the ones below and skip all the sawdust and soldering, feel free to hit this link to see more fancy photowork.

Onto the build! The last time I had an update on the project, the mold had been finalized and I had one prepped polyester resin casting heading out for chrome work.

While this was out at Creations n Chrome, I got to work on the visor LED matrix. To check for some semblance of visibility, I made a mockup printed on transparency film of where the LEDs and wire traces would be situated. Nothing exact, but good enough for a proof-of-theory.

Vision was adequate, which was very encouraging!

I decided the actual structure to hold the matrix in place would be built from 2 sections of 1/16" aluminum plate, with the drilled-out subvisor tension-fit between them. Below was the start of all that ambition.

After scribing all the lines, the plates were cut on a scrollsaw. The two large holes in the plate are where two vent fans are situated, which pull fresh air in through the lower nose vents on the underside of the visor. I can't say enough how much these saved my live when wearing the helmet, especially in the Atlanta heat in summer.

Uprights were cut from 3/16" aluminum hollow tube, and tapped to accept a machine screw. 5 of these hold the plated parallel to one another.

This styrene plate was the mockup for the subvisor. You can see the tabs on the top which align with cutouts on the mounting plates. This has a double feature of keeping the subvisor bent on a gradual curve as well as keeping the entire thing in place without the need for any glue joints.

Quick test with my mockup helmet to make sure everything fits!

Then came the drilling... All the holes for the subvisor were drilled by hand on my drill press. The material used was .060" PET plastic.

More mounting points were drilled and tapped into the subvisor frame to allow for the circuit boards to be mounted later. If you go this route, make sure to insulate your boards against the aluminum to prevent dead shorts and the dreaded blue smoke.

And then I polished them. Because, why not?

The subvisor with protective plastic still in place. 320 holes!

These are the chips that drive the matrix. Each holds one MAX7221 multiplexing LED driver with input as well as output sides of the board to make this a scalable design. Each will drive one 8x8 matrix and are designed to be daisy-chained together. Boards were designed in CadSoft's Eagle PCB editor. They're not a bad design, but there are improvements to be made in future designs.

You can see the 2 small 5V fans situated on the subvisor frame below.

Since I needed to bend the leads on 320 red LEDs, I made a small jig to keep things a little more precise. Using this, I only had one in all 320 wired backwards when it came time for testing! If you're looking for LEDs for your next project, I get mine from SuperBrightLEDs.com

A second jig was made in some scarp aluminum square tube for soldering the columns together. Since the subvisor curve is a simple (that is, one axis) curve, I was able to do these solder joints outside the assembly.

Repeat 40 times.

Once the columns were in place, I was able to solder the rows together.

Since nothing was glued in at this point, I was able to push the LEDs back out of the subvisor and wire up the rows and columns without worrying about getting crud all over the clear PET sheet. At this point, I also painted the backs of all the LEDs black to reduce the amount of light leaking back into the helmet, and the wearer's eyes.

And then mounted back into the subvisor frame. A lot of tidying up to do.

This was an exercise in frustration. Next time, I'll be sacrificing board size in order to have slightly larger solder pads for the matrices. Bleh.

A comment from a fellow member of the Replica Prop Forum asked if I was going to be adding Thomas' ear LEDs as well. I hadn't planned on it, but the more I considered the idea the more I wanted something there. These are simple I/O boards which illuminate a clear disc mounted in the ears with 7 different colors. The final effect was well worth it!

I also tossed together a quick mold of for the side light bars. Easier than building 2 from scratch and trying to make them identical!

In the end, my fancy boards for the side lights got pushed out of the way by my slightly ambitious 8x40 matrix. I made some simple I/O lights (literally days before the debut of the helmet at Dragon*Con in Atlanta!) to fill the gap left behind. The lead arrangement on them isn't my most stunning work, but they get the job done.

To bolster my spirits somewhat after this small letdown, I got the following photo form Creations n' Chrome. Stunning.

Still more to do! I put together a visor buck from MDF and styrene sheet for the PET visors. My first attempt at vacuumforming went alright, but the draw distance was rather far and the final piece was a bit too thin.

Instead, I strapped a 2.5" tall sheet of PET plastic to the buck, then heated it with a heat gun until it held shape. Perfect!

At this point, things needed to start going into that shiny chrome bucket. First went the ear lights, shown here being tested off a breadboard until the power supply was finalized.

Then the visor went into place. I don't have much in the way of documentation on this process, but if you're interested in using RIT dye to tint PET plastic, check out this post on the RPF. Tekparasite uses one of my helmets in his project, and came up with a really great method of getting superb results without all the finisky nonsense of niteshades spray tint.

The matrix is controlled by an Arduino Yellowjacket. James cooked up an iOS program that allows the helmet text to be changed over WiFi, as well as allowing the user to select certain patterns. For Dragon*Con, a switch was implemented that ran down my sleeve so I could toggle through animations more easily. The hardest part isn't seeing or controlling an iPhone with the helmet on, its actually getting it out of your pocket with those glove plates in the way!

This switch plate, mounted to one of the ear pucks, controls various parts of electronics. From left: 5V regulator, YellowJacket & matrix, corner & ear lights, vent fans.

The aforementioned voltage regulator. After building my own linear regulator (and finding out it would probably set my hair on fire) I decided to order this one from Pololu. 7A continuous current and up to 24V input! My helmet ran on 11.1V 3S LiPo batteries, but could have easily run on a 7.2V 2S as well.

Vent fan placement - remember, if you live anywhere that gets above 50ºF outside, you need these!

A few images of the final wiring getting tidied up.

It works! With the LEDs off and with ambient lighting, you can see the matrix behind the visor. Since I decided against using video glasses or a camera, I needed the visor to be as light as possible to avoid light reflection back into the helmet. For those who will ask - you can see very well with the helmet on! The brighter it is outside, the easier it is to see as the incoming light is stronger than the ambient light inside the helmet.

That said, if you try to wear it in pitch black, you're pretty much blind. Still, it looks cool!

Below are just a few of some of the amazing pictures my friends have taken of this bucket for me. There are more on my Daft Punk Thomas Photography blog entry, so be sure to check that out as well!

Images courtesy of Bill Doran: (see his Flickr for more images here)

Images courtesy of Anne Almasy: (see her Flickr for more images here)

If you'd like to see more photos of the build process, be sure to check out my Flickr stream here.

Thanks for reading!

N7 Rifle, Mass Effect 3

2011-07-24T23:56:00.003-04:00

Its been roughly a year since I worked on anything from the Mass Effect universe, but E3 2011 was ripe with news from the third installment of the franchise, due out next year. I'm a huge Mass Effect fan, so when the guys at Bioware asked if I'd be interested in making a weapon for them as a part of the press push for ME3... well, I think you can figure out what my answer was.

This is the N7 rifle (which, at the time of this writing, I don't think has even been formally announced yet!) It's an Assault Rifle which takes cues from the weapons included in the collector's edition of Mass Effect 3. Its style mirrors the already-announced N7 pistol, shotgun, sniper rifle and SMG.

The guys at Bioware wanted theirs ready for San Diego Comic-Con 2011, which gave me roughly 14 working days. LETS GO!

I started in a very familiar way - drafting out line art patterns onto MDF. These shapes here are what I decided to call the "main body" of the rifle.

The idea was to make the rifle in several different parts which would be molded and painted separately, then assembled and weathered as the finished rifle. Here you see parts for the main body and rear stock cut out.

These layered parts were glued and clamped to dry.

On the rear stock, a shape trimmed from 1/4" sintra marks the area where the rifle edges curve up to a flat facing surface. This will make a bit more sense later.

To add dimension to the side of the rifle, a channel was carved out of the top layer of MDF with a dremel tool. Afterward, a piece of styrene is dropped in to make a flat surface - this is much easier than trying to sand something smooth in a tiny area.

In the shot above, you can see the "step" in the MDF body of the rifle has been filled with green foam. This was then skimmed with bondo to make the large bevel seen on the trailing edge of the main body. I'm missing photos of it, but the rear stock was treated in the same way with the sintra layer acting as the upper edge.

The rest of the raised detailing and panel lines for the body of the rifle were made by cutting .080" styrene sheet. These pieces were first joined with double-sided tape before being trimmed on my scrollsaw, to make sure they were perfectly symmetrical.

Here's the styrene plates in place on the rifle body.

Gluing styrene to wood is odd, but I've found that if you brush a coat of sealer (in this case because of the fast timeline, I used superglue) over the MDF, then getting a strong bond is much easier.

The edges of the channel were still raw MDF, so I filled them with apoxie sculpt to make a clean beveled edge. The first shot shows getting the clay in place, and the second is after some smoothing out with clay tools.

The upper details on the main receiver were a mishmash of acrylic rod, PVC, styrene and sintra. If you have the space, keep all your little plastic scraps - there's no telling when they'll come in handy!

Case in point, the "drum magazine" shape at the back of the lower barrel was created by bending .040" styrene sheets over sections of acrylic tube I had left over from my Portal Gun builds.

The rear of the magazine was made from 1/2" sintra shaped with a dremel.

The grip shape started out as a rough spine cut from 1/2" sintra. The trigger area here has been created with a piece of .020" styrene. This makes it easier for me to sculpt later.

The actual grip was shaped with Apoxie Sculpt. By mocking in the trigger area earlier, I just had to push the clay into position around it. Much easier than trying to get a clean even curved shape like that by sculpting!

After this addition, the main rifle body is starting to look fairly complete. Certain seams have been filled in with apoxie sculpt in preparation for molding. You have to make sure that there are no open seams which can trap silicone and cause tears in your molds later on. Its tedious, but saves a lot of time in the long run.

With the main body fleshed out, I started work on the barrels. The lower barrel came first, as it was a fairly simple piece to construct. There are 2 PVC pipes nested into one another to create the stepped look, and section of styrene create the beveled edges.

Towards the back of the barrel, additional details were created by making some styrene boxes. Bondo was used to smooth the details into one another. On the backside, I added a PVC connector to sink into a recessed section on the rifle body. This post will make the eventual glued joint on this piece much stronger.

The PVC connector slots into this cylinder, mounted at the front of the rifle body. You can see the connection in the second pic below.

Next up was the lower grip. Since this has to fit to some very complex contours, I decided to make a "base" first which would slot up into the lower barrel and rifle body. By making this piece span across both sections, it provides strength to the final assembled rifle. It is also a section which will be handled fairly often, so it had to be strong. This is the first part, with the front curved section mating to the lower barrel bottom and the back connecting to the rifle body.

The actual textured part of the grip was first cut from a block of sintra, then several cuts were made to mark the position of the oval-shaped grip lines.

Cutting these in first made sure the lines were in the correct position after the piece was trimmed to shape. The grip was cut down on the sides and front on my bandsaw, followed by some shaping with a dremel.

The cavities left from the cutting were then filled with apoxie sculpt to form the recessed cuts. I repeated a similar process for the grip texture on the rear stock. The D ring on the front of the grip is made from 1/4" sintra, and the rest of the recessed details are more layered styrene.

In the first shot above, you can see some work on the upper barrel. With the deadline looming, I unfortunately omitted a lot of the photography of that component as it was being constructed. The upper section is a piece of 3" PVC pipe with styrene vacuumformed over it to increase its diameter and create panel lines. Both lower sections are 1/2" sintra shaped on a table router.

The rather chunky sight rail is made from 3/8" sintra (it really feels like I'm repeating myself...) as well as the front beveled details. After a few bondo touchups and some sanding, the upper barrel was ready!

There were a few small other details needed before getting the components ready for molding.

The rear stock needed its finned mounts added...

...the main rifle body needed a couple hex bolts countersunk into the surface (I also scribed a few detail lines in the channel above the trigger and spent a lot of time smoothing the seam lines)...

...and the barrel muzzles needed to be lathed out of some resin blocks.

With these details complete, and after a couple dozen hours filling small cracks and divots with spot putty, the gun was ready for silicone!

I opted to mold the two barrels and lower grip in simple box molds, while the (much larger) main body and rear stock would be brushed on. The boxes themselves were made out of 1/4" sintra. MDF would have been cheaper, but sintra glues very quickly and has no pores for silicone to seep into. With time a precious commodity, I went with what was available!

The masters were embedded into one half of the box molds with clay, and sprayed with mold release. After brushing on a thinned coat of silicone (Smooth-on's "Omoo 30"), the boxes were clamped together and filled with rubber, then allowed to cure overnight.

After the first half cured, I repeated the process to the other side. Mold wax was used to keep the silicone from curing to itself. The finished molds were easily some of my best, and yielded fantastic results.

For the body and rear stock, I trimmed sheets of foamcore to fit around the outside of the master. These were then secured in place with a thin clay wall.

I used Rebound 25 silicone for the brush on molds. If you've seen any of my helmet molds, the process is very similar. Thinned brush coat first followed by regular coats, then thickened with registration keys.

The foamcore really made sure I had a clean even edge for both the mold and the mold jacket. After 12 hours of cure time, the pieces were flipped and I molded the opposite side.

The mold jacket is made with Smooth-on's "Plasti-paste." A tip about working with it: taking a large stiff brush and going over the surface with rubbing alcohol will smooth out any jagged edges and make the final cured piece much easier to handle.

A few shots of the finished molds, in use, and with their first pulled copies. The final pulls needed very little sanding and had almost no trapped air bubbles. I think I'm finally getting the hang of this!

The painting process was, unfortunately, another area where my photo documentation suffered in order to make the deadline. All parts were first painted with satin black, then masked off in various areas for topcoats of silver and texture.

The grip texture was accomplished by first painting the selected area with Rustoleum Multicolored Textured paint, then topcoating in flat black. This creates a much better textured finish that is far more durable than the Plasti-dip spray I used on my prior M8 rifle project.

After the base colors were dry, vinyl decals were used to mask off areas for the N7 logo, as well as other text details and line markings.

Finally, the rifle was epoxied together into one solid piece! There are three long pins securing the grip into the barrel and rifle body, and a 1" wide spine runs the entire length of the seam between the rear stock and the rifle body. After the epoxy set, I was able to pick up and handle the rifle by any one of its individual component pieces; even the D-ring on the front grip is functional!

Weathering the rifle was a blast - with heavily worn replicas, this is always my favorite step. If you're interested in the process, you can check out my time-lapse video detailing the weathering of the M8 Avenger. The process is largely similar, though for the N7, an airbrush was used for some areas.

The final step was a coat of clear, to make sure the acrylic weathering job wouldn't wear off with the handling the piece would get at Comic-Con. If anyone happens to watch "The Pulse" episodes on Bioware TV, this is the gun that David Silverman is waving around all convention long. I guess he liked it!

And finally, some beauty shots of the finished product!

Some more detailed close-ups

There's many more process photos on my Flickr, and in much higher resolution for those interested in seeing more detail. I may be returning to the world of Mass Effect very soon, so keep an eye here or on my Facebook page (which I try to update as often as possible with WIP shots) for more info.

Thanks for reading!

Daft Punk Helmet (Thomas): Part 2

2011-06-24T11:24:00.005-04:00

Ah, where were we?

Right. I had a nice shiny master sculpt ready for molding. This entry will provide some details on the molding process and start laying out the details on the electronics.

To start with, I had to seal off some of the thin areas and unfinished undercuts on the helmet. The bottom side got built up areas around the backsides of the ear cutouts as well as the chin - these were done with clay and some scrap styrene.

This mold is going to be a 2-part. I learned from the Guy mold that single-piece jacket molds are very difficult to remove the cast parts out of once you're finished. Thomas' mold will have a front and a back section, which will make removing final pieces much, much easier.

You can see the clay wall separating the front and back halves in this shot. This pic also shows the first part of molding; a layer of silicone mixed with silicone thinner to create a "print coat" - this helps to ensure no bubbles are trapped in the final mold. I'm using Smooth-On's Rebound 25 for this piece.

Then the second coat. I added some thickened rubber to the ear indents to build them out a bit

I'm trying something a bit different with the registration keys this time. On Guy, I made them from thickened silicone sculpted into pucks. This works fairly well, but sometimes the rough surface on the pucks themselves causes them to push a couple millimeters out from the mother mold. This time, I took a paint palette and filled it with excess silicone as I was making the first coats.

These little egg yolks were popped out when still slightly tacky, and "glued" to a tacky brush coat with some more thickened silicone. Just as a warning, I did get some small air bubbles trapped behind these in a few spots - if you employ my methods, its best to place these in on top of a wet-ish coat of silicone to make sure you don't get any trapped air.

I used 15 of the little bumps in all on the back half, and they're nice and smooth so hopefully they'll keep registration better than their hand-sculpted predecessors.

After waiting 24 hours for the back half to dry, I started work on the front. Keep in mind that silicone sticks to silicone, so you'll need to put something between layers to make sure you don't glue the halves of your mold together. For separating the two halves, I use this cleaner wax. Smooth-On makes stuff called "Sonite Wax" for this specific purpose, and when this tub runs dry, I might look into that. For now though, this stuff works great.

Make sure to test homebrew stuff like this first! The line of painter's tape on the helmet in the background is to protect the primer, as this cleaner wax will dissolve it and damage the finish. Always test first!

In prep for molding the front, I added a filler panel underneath and some clay dams along the chin. I also added a small "maker's mark" which will be trimmed off in the end. Not sure how much plastic will even get to this spot, but oh well.

After that it's print coat, thickened coat, and keys. Second verse, same as the first.

The MDF seams in this shot will be for the mother mold. These will make a more even flange, ensuring the sections of the mold jacket stay aligned. The front part of the helmet is split into 2 mother mold halves as well - similar to how my Guy helmet has one front section and 2 back halves. This was made from 1/4" MDF and secured with a crapton of wingnuts and screws.

After setting these in place, I filled in the gaps between the MDF and the mold with clay. This prevents the mothermold material from bridging this gap and fusing into one solid piece

For the mothermold, I decided to use Smooth-On's Plasti-Paste again. This one is a fair bit thinner and smoother than the one I made for the Guy helmet, so its a lot easier to pull copies.

The mothermold sections removed, showing detail on the inside. The MDF rings make re-aligning the sections much, much easier. I think I'll be doing this technique from now on.

Interior of the Rebound-25 mold. Great detail. There are a few small areas where some air was trapped under the registration keys - most notably on the right cheek. In the future, putting some thickened silicone underneath these will alleviate this problem. It makes for about a 1/32" dent in the final casting, but nothing a small spot of filler can't fix.

First pull!

The ear puck molds were much simpler. For these, I used a piece of PVC pipe as a mold jacket and glued the ear puck to a base made out of MDF.

This was filled with Smooth-On's Mold Max 30. Pop the master out and voila!

To cast these, I employed a trick I learned when making the barrel for my Portal Gun. To make the ear pucks hollow, I've poured about 1/4 cup of resin into the base of the mold and allowed it to cure around a cardboard ring. Once the lower section cures, you fill in the cavity between the ring and the mold, and BAM - hollow cylinder.

Outside of a finished pull

And, lastly, some shots of the helmet with the ears inserted. I can't tell you how happy I was when they just plunked right into place. Almost as if I knew what the hell I was doing.

The white casting above was done with Smooth On's Smoothcast 65D rotocasting urethane plastic. This caused issues with the Guy helmets in the past, as part of the chroming process involves a high-heat baking. A byproduct of this was some sagging in the urethane plastic, and I ended up losing about 4 helmets to various deformities. The guys at Creations n' Chrome did come up with a solution to this issue, and were able to send me a couple flawless pieces by the end of things.

This time though, at the recommendation of my friend David over at 2 Story Props, I decided to try casting in fiberglass and polyester resin. The benefits are much lighter weight castings, much thinner, and nearly impervious to baking heat. David has some good tutorial videos up showcasing his process. You can check these 3 vids out here(1) here (2) and here (3).

Fiberglass casting is a totally new experience for me, and the cast parts were probably a B+ success. Not bad, but I still have a lot to learn!

The "X" markings are to show me where I've laid down a second coat of fiberglass cloth, making sure I've got a durable, thick and strong cast.

The ear pucks were done in a similar manner, with a T nut inserted into the fiberglass for mounting them later.

The ears will have the ring of lights embedded into them, so they were cut in half and the base piece was glued into the helmet base. I swear this will make more sense later!

You can see there were a few spots where the helmet needed a little bondo work to get right. The polyester resin pulled away slightly from the mold while I was making it, resulting in odd little dents here and there.

After plenty of sanding, filling, priming, and more sanding, the final coat was wet-sanded down to 2,000 grit and sent off to Creations n' Chrome for its very special and very shiny topcoat! The cardboard panel in the visor area makes sure that no pressure during shipping is transferred to the thinner areas around the visor and nothing cracks on his cross-country journey.

Part 3 will cover the final chromed helmet as well as the most complex electronic project I've ever taken on. 496 LEDs! WOO.

As always, there are more pics available on my flickr page. Also be sure to check out my YouTube for updates and videos!

Thanks for reading!

GLaDOS Potato, Portal 2

2011-06-01T11:19:00.004-04:00

This was a fun project, done as a small add-on to the third (and final!) Portal Gun commissioned by the guys at VALVe Software in Seattle. While the additional potato-GLaDOS wasn't a requested item, the release of Portal 2 prompted me to put one together before delivery.

Due to the very short timeframe, I opted against sculpting a potato from scratch. During a grocery shopping trip, my wife scoured the produce department to locate two likely candidates to live on the end of the ASHPD.

These two spuds were tossed into a mold box and molded in Smooth-On's Omoo silicone. If you're noticing the lack of a pour spout, these were designed to be hollow cast pieces. Once resin was added, the potatoes were slush cast in 65D resin to make lightweight replicas.

GLaDOS's "eye" was made on a lathe using laminated sheets of 1/2" sintra. The oversized chip on the side of the potato was cut from sintra as well.

Smaller details were added with wire and roofing nails. The whole of this build is mostly stuff that can be sourced at a local hardware store. In order to keep the scale correct, some things (like the alligator clips) had to be cut down.

The eye of the potato was molded in more omoo and cast with SmoothCast 300. After this, more wire details were added.

I found a textured Krylon tan paint that worked pretty well for a basecoat. The surface had a sort of satin feel to it.

Layers of dirt and discoloration were added with an airbrush and acrylic paint. I found that lightly scraping the high areas with a damp paper towel pulled this color off and simulated peeled potato skin rather well.

Illumination is controlled by the switches in the back of the Portal Gun itself, and GLaDOS turns on and off with the rest of the illumination. A set of power and ground lines run up through the claw and into the hollow potato for the LEDs

I wish I had taken time to document the rest of the build, because things take a bit of a jump here - unfortunately, my short timeframe meant that I spent more time cranking on the little angry spud and less time behind my camera. Illumination was provided by two 5mm yellow LEDs and two 3mm red. These are routed in the hollow cavity of the potato and shine through the chip and eye area.

More acrylic paint was added to the nails, alligator clips, and eye to weather the piece to match the (by now) ancient Portal Gun.

Better video will be coming soon, but potato GLaDOS is capable of speech! Until then, enjoy these final product shots.

The completed gun now lives at VALVe HQ, make sure to say hi if you ever get a chance to visit!

More pics available on my flickr page, thanks for looking!

Cassandra's Digamma Sword

2011-04-18T11:37:00.004-04:00

Yes, MORE SoulCalibur love!

Having already created Cassandra's Nemea Shield and Pauldrons, I rounded out the set with her Digamma shortsword.

Its a bit of an odd piece - the blade is extraordinarily thick and decorated with raised Greek lettering. After gathering a lot of reference, I created a set of blueprints to reference during the build.

A friend of mine in propmaking, BlindSquirrel makes a TON of anime and gaming swords. One of his preferred methods for blade shaping is to glue two sheets of wood across a steel core. Blatantly stealing this process, I laminated two sheets of poplar around a 3/16" steel threaded rod. The threads will help the glue adhere to the core better than they would if it were just a smooth piece.

After the glue dried, I cut the basic shape of the blade with my bandsaw

The taper of the blade edge was done mostly with a belt sander, with further refinement performed with a sanding block and 80-grit paper.

In order to make sure the depth on the side cuts was uniform, I used my dremel tool to cut small "depth fillets" in the side of the blade. When all of these were sanded flush with the rest of the bevel, I knew I had the correct angle I needed.

For the handle and pommel, I used a piece of pine turned on my lathe. A small step was placed at the end to make a lip for the eventual leather wrapping. The end piece was sanded to a point by hand after turning.

For the cross guards, I decided to sculpt one piece out of wood with styrene accents, then mold it for an identical opposite side copy. Starting off, I took some of the scrap poplar from the blade leftovers and cut it to the shape of the wing-a-ling.

This was shaped on the beltsander until I had the desired teardrop profile.

By using blue painter's tape, I was able to trace the pattern on the blueprint, then transfer it to the cross guard.

For lack of a better term, I called these the "feathers." After removing the tape from the crossguard, I laid it over a piece of sheet styrene and trimmed the pattern out. The styrene parts were heated and glued onto the surface of the wooden master.

Symmetry!

The last detail was the raised line across the feather pieces, which was made from half-round styrene

Onto molding and casting! I used Mold Max 30 silicone and SmoothCast 300 resin to produce the duplicates.

The crossguard cap (can you tell I'm just making words up?) was molded in a similar way, as I needed two of these as well. I started by making a master in MDF, then vacuumforming the shape in .060" styrene.

You can see the master in the back of this shot. The shape in the front is the start of Cassandra's Medallion she wears on the bottom of her blouse.

Here's the piece trimmed from the styrene. I pulled two of these and set them inside one another to create the beveled interior edge.

And after adding more styrene details like with the wings, it was ready for molding!

The long raised detail on the center of the blade was made out of a thin strip of sintra, shaped on my belt sander. The small bead along the edge is more half-round styrene.

Hand carving the Greek lettering on this piece would require a level of precision I don't possess, so I employed a neat trick I've seen some modelbuilders use. To make raised panels on small model ships, sometimes a sheet of vinyl will be cut into squares and molded over, making a very lightly raised edge in the cast piece.

I created a set of vinyl decals based off some of the game art from SoulCalibur 3 (references for IV were almost impossible to read!) and laid the lettering out onto the master. Don't bother translating; its all gibberish.

This piece was then molded in more Mold Max silicone. Perfect detail!

The final pull shows the results. Crisp lettering with each pull, and SO much easier than trying to inscribe a uniform set of lettering into both sides by hand!

Base painting was done with Krylon hammered silver for the blade, and Testors Antique Gold for the raised center and hilt pieces. Shiny!

A bit too shiny, really. To get the lettering to stand out more, I airbrushed acrylic over the center section, then wrapped a piece of 600 grit wet sandpaper around an aluminum block. By gently going over the tops of the letters, the gold was brought out from the brown "weathering" and stood out much better.

The rest of the sword was treated to similar weathering and accent colors.

The final element was a blue-leather wrapped handle and some light dirt accents in the recessed areas of the hilt and blade accents. I haven't built many bladed weapons, but I really love how this one has turned out.

And together with the Nemea shield!

Higher resolution images are available on my flickr page. Thanks for reading!

Daft Punk Helmet (Thomas): Part 1

2011-02-26T23:56:00.011-05:00

I suppose it was an inevitability. Just like you can't have Link without Zelda, Big Daddies without Little Sisters, and Master Chief without Cortana (well, except for that stretch in Halo 2, but we can all agree that was the weakest one in the trilogy) my Guy helmet was only half of the full set. After catching my breath from the holidays, I got to work on Thomas in early January.

I started out by drawing up some blueprints, taking note this time to do more than 2 views. The width on the Guy helmet was something I struggled with, and more detailed blueprints would have alleviated that.

I learned a lot from Guy, most specifically what not to do. Often times, these are the most potent lessons of all. I started this project with a lot more experience, which has shortened the construction times of many things considerably. This bucket won't be knocked out in a month, but I think I can take a pretty good chunk out of my 1.5 year build time from the last helmet!

Right off the bat, things changed. The paper template I made for Guy was lacking in several ways. For Thomas, I created sectioned ribs from 1/4" MDF. These built on top of one another to form a sort of interlocking skeleton.

The cavities in the MDF frame were filled up with polystyrene insulation foam, carved to a rough shape with a coping saw, then sanded to the general shape of the dome with an orbital sander.

Pink foam acts badly when exposed to polyester resins (bondo, fiberglass, etc) so it was sealed with a few coats of urethane casting resin. This gives me a tough, lightweight shell to work on top of without worrying about it dissolving the foam base.

After scuffing the surface of the foam with some 60-grit sandpaper, I coated the urethane resin with a few bondo passes to refine the shape of the dome. The visor and chin sections will be built out later, but getting the base shape correct was the biggest goal at this point.

A contour gauge, passed down from my grandfather, makes getting the compound curves of the surface much easier. Take the shape of one side, flip it over to the mirrored side, and add/remove material as necessary…

…and there was quite a lot of this add/remove process.

My plan for the visor was to make the shape as a standalone piece, adhere it to the finished dome, then blend the upper and lower sections in. The upper and lower sections were cut from styrene, and spaced apart with upright inserts.

The dome was then slotted to hold the visor sections in place so i could check the symmetry and alignment.

More styrene was used to make the "chin" and "cheek" sections, which rounded out the front removable section of the helmet.

Now that the visor had a place to sit, I could build the ears for the helmet. Thomas' ears change pretty frequently on his helmet from version to version, so I decided to make the ears on this helmet removable. In the future, I can make new pucks and replace the ears in the helmet to represent a Discovery, Tron, or Human After All style helmet.

The ears themselves were lathed from a stack of MDF. For this helmet, I decided to make the ears "Electroma" style.

Quick mockup!

To fit the ears, recesses were carved into the foam base. Styrene "caps" were placed over the rough edges, and the interior surface was smoothed out to make a tight fit with the ear puck.

Getting back to the visor, I started working on blending the edges upward and downward into the front of the helmet. In order to make sure everything ended at the same point, I added a thin ridge of styrene at the upper edge of the visor intersection with the helmet dome.

Much like the domed shape, polystyrene foam was placed in these cavities then sanded to shape.

After coating the foam, I skimmed bondo over these bevels and sanded them to a smooth curve. I also added the front and side visor sections in as well at this point, with more styrene.

Details around the edges and at the chin, which were harder to accomplish in bondo, were made in Apoxie Sculpt.

The remainder of the beveled edges around the bottom of the chin were made with about a hundred paper templates, then eventually trimmed out and glued into place with styrene.

Even though the helmet was a solid piece, I couldn't resist a little photoshop testing. I set up a tripod and the timer on my Nikon, then set up the helmet on an adjacent tripod and took a few shots. By standing in the same spot and snapping a couple pics of myself, i was able to get a pretty good idea of the scale. It was perfect!

At this point, it was a bit difficult to see problem areas that needed filler, so the bucket was painted with some brown primer. Having a uniform surface makes fixing problem spots much easier.

After a few thin skim passes with bondo, details like the sharp visor edges were refined.

For the mouth of the helmet, I made a styrene box and countersunk it into the chin of the helmet. When castings are pulled, all you just need to hit the backside of this cavity with a dremel to open the mouth up - no tricky carving necessary!

The lower "nose vents" were scribed into the bondo with an etching tool. These didn't get the same styrene box treatment as the mouth, because making those curved edges would have been a solid pain. For these, some hand-sanding later on down the road will be necessary.

There's a seam line that runs from ear-to-ear on the top of the helmet that was a bit tricky to get right. I tried scribing this line with a tape stripe at first, but it ended up being very curvy even after several tries. I eventually figured out that using a piece of string yielded a perfectly straight result.

For some reason, this is my favorite look.

But all things must change! After another primer pass, a few small areas were marked for very thin spots of filler.

Despite the freezing weather in January, I was able to get these primer coats on thanks to my new portable spray booth. This was built mostly from scraps, but it is a fantastic addition to my shop. Now I can paint in the rain, at night, even in the cold with a space heater!

After the last coat of primer, it was time for the super-awesome-fun-wetsanding stage! I started with a sponge to get the shape as uniform as possible, then moved up from 400, 600, then 1,000 grit sandpaper.

To get the form as smooth as possible in anticipation for the molding process, the primer was buffed to as mirror-shiny as primer gets.

Total time to build the completed master this time was only 4 weeks! Seeing as how Guy took me 5 months, I'd say I'm actually starting to figure out what I'm doing here.

More build pics, and higher resolution, available on my flickr page! As with the last project, this will be broken up into several sections. Look forward to steps 2 and 3, Molding/Chrome and Electronics. If you're interested in getting more play-by-play updates, check out my Facebook page. I try to post as often as possible when I have new work to show.

This one is going to be a whole new level from my last build. Check back soon for more, and hope you enjoy the read!

Cassandra's Nemea Shield

2011-01-20T10:38:00.002-05:00

A continuation on a theme, as it were. I'm kind of backlogged with a few entries I need to write; this project was actually finished in September 2010. As I mentioned in the Cassandra's Pauldron's post, my original project was to make the Digamma Sword and Nemea Shield from Soul Calibur IV. This post will detail the shield construction.

Blueprints! Again, drafted in Adobe Illustrator and printed full scale. Cassandra's shield doesn't actually have any mounting points in the game - no handle and no strap - so I had to make those up. The ones pictured here changed quite a bit before they were final.

I started with 1/4" MDF. The goal was to make this as light as possible, as it was going to be a convention piece and worn for a while. Layered rings of MDF were cut so the middle of the shield could be kept hollow.

These were beveled on a table router, then clamped and glued into place.

In anticipation of the straps and handle mounting, I added t-nuts to the backside of the shield, with their mounting brackets facing inwards.

The cavity in the center of the shield was filled with foamcoare, then topped with 2" insulation foam. I used gorilla glue to hold everything together. After it dried, the insulation foam was sanded into the "domed" shape of the shield front.

A lot of cosplayers struggle with the best way to seal foam. Extruded polystyrene foam is easily dissolved by polyester resins as well as the accelerants in most spraypaints. I have used a product called UreShell in the past, but ultimately I didn't like the fact that it wasn't sandable when dried and felt slightly rubbery. After doing some tests to make sure nothing would melt, I decided to coat the foam on the shield in urethane casting resin, specifically SmoothCast 300. Applied with a sponge brush, it dried to a strong and sandable outer layer without deforming the foam at all.

The resin has been tinted with red dye for this process, so it was easier to see where I'd brushed on layers.

After this, I put down a coat of primer and began filling divots and pits with bondo.

The raised filigree on the face of the shield was another interesting challenge. To do this, I printed out the filigree pattern on paper, then trimmed it to shape. The raised piece was then sculpted on top of the paper in Apoxie clay, using the edges as guides.

While the clay was still wet, I transferred the paper over to the face of the shield. The clay was heavy enough to weigh down and conform to the contour of the shield front, while the paper backing kept the clay from adhering to the shield itself.

The benefit of this is that after the clay dried, I was able to remove the decorative element and sand the edges to a much smoother finish. This also made it possible for me to paint the pieces separately later on, making the finishing process much easier.

Continuing with the Apoxie sculpt, I added the raised detail edge to the side of the shield, and blended the corner bevels into one another with styrene parts and more clay.

Sculpting finished on the front!

For the back of the shield, I started off lathing the back dome out of MDF, then vacuumformed it in .060" styrene plastic.

The back panel of the shield was trimmed out of more styrene, and lines were scored in the surface with a lino block carving tool to simulate the individual sectioned plates.

On to paint! The face of the shield was painted an alarmingly bright shade of fuchsia, then the area for the detail inset was masked off. This was then sprayed with hammered metal textured paint to give the surface a metallic look.

The filigree was painted separately, then epoxied in place after base coats had dried. Like I mentioned earlier, painting was much easier because of the modular build approach. Masking this thing off would have been a nightmare.

The edges of the shield as well as the back were finished with the same dull aluminum paint as the raised detail. I used Testors enamel to hand paint the purple trim.

For the back, a handle was made using bar stock aluminum, trimmed and bent to shape. For the strap, I bought some leather hide and cured it over a round form to get the curved shape seen here.

The surface of the shield was lightly buffed with automotive wax before weathering to give it a dull sheen. After some light passes with the airbrush, here's the finished product!

There's one more installment on Cassandra's equipment coming up - the Digamma sword. Look for this in the next few weeks, as its currently undergoing some minor restoration after taking a few hits at Dragon*Con

Higher resolution pics are available on my flickr page. As always, thanks for reading!

Cassandra's Pauldrons

2010-12-18T14:46:00.004-05:00

The SoulCalibur series has been one of my favorite gaming franchises for a long time. Since SC2, my go-to character has been Cassandra, as much for her fighting style as her snarky commentary and character design.

Don't make excuses. A loss is a loss. - Cassandra

Classic.

As a personal project of mine, I had decided at one point to make Cassandra's sword & shield from the latest installment of the franchise, SoulCalibur IV. My wife mentioned "If you make the armor, then I'll do the rest of the costume."

And thats where we find ourselves now.

The "armor" amounted, really, to a pair of shoulder pauldrons. I liked the challenge of this project - it seems like lately all I've been making is guns, and the chance to do something organic and sculpted. It may not be the world's best method, but I started out by making some 2D illustrated flats of the pauldron and arm cuff. Since they're symmetrical front to back, making a single pauldron and molding it seemed like the best course of action.

Starting off, I made a base from sculpting armature wire and mesh.

This shape was skinned in a thin layer of apoxie sculpt to define the shape and give me a base to work over.

I wish I had a more scientific method of doing this, but from there I pretty much just eyeballed the blueprint drawings onto the surface of the form. after working with a dial caliper and ruler on my more "geometric" builds, this took some refining to get where I liked it.

More apoxie sculpt followed (and I was trying to use the very last of that awful tub of orange colored clay I had) to build up the shape of the filigree.

Since my sculpting skills are a C+ at best, there was a lot of sanding to be done after the clay had dried.

After shaping the feathery bits, the edge was also added in more apoxie sculpt. The whole thing was starting to get pretty weighty at this point, so its a good thing I decided to go with molded pieces for the final.

Sanding...

Spot Putty...

More sanding...

And some primer...

Then we're ready for molding!

The arm cuff followed a similar process. I measured the circumference of Emily's bicep to figure out how wide the base piece had to be to wrap around her arm. A piece of sintra served as a base to sculpt on top of, and the top parts were made with apoxie sculpt. Sparing you the details of sand/bondo/repeat, here's the jist:

The pauldron molds were made with Rebound-25 silicone, while the arm cuff was done in Mold Max 30. The pauldron part was suspended on a PVC pipe for the brush coat first.

This was followed by thickened silicone, registration keys, and finally a jacket mold made from plasti-paste.

Look! A Hanar!

Originally, I had intended to make a front and back part to the piece, then join them and pour in resin to be slush cast. I was hoping this would make a nice, lightweight, hollow piece.

I was wrong. These were my first two attempts. I got better from the first to the second, but the piece is so thin that the resin wasn't flowing completely to all parts of the inner cavity. The first piece wasn't thick enough to hold its own shape, and the second one was so thin in some parts you could see through it.

My third pass was done by removing the back part of the mold and slush casting the piece. MUCH better.

Progress?

With the practice out of the way, I started on the final pulls. The mold was dusted with aluminum powder first, then I slush cast the pieces in Smoothcast 300, dyed black.

Before I pull the cover on that though, you might have noticed that I sculpted the arm cuff as a flat bar. This might seem odd as most people's arms aren't two-dimensional, but sculpting something on a curved surface gave me a headache just thinking about it. I had an idea when making this part; a bit of a gamble, but it really paid off in the end.

The mold was first done over the flat sculpt. Before pouring the resin, I made sure the mold rubber was completely level and on a flat surface.

When pouring this piece, I used the same aluminum powder and black dye as before.

As resin cures, it starts to change color. At this point, its not 100% cured, but still rigid enough to maintain its shape. If you remove a pour from a mold too early, it can deform rather easily but still look similar to the desired shape. When the resin in the arm cuff mold started to change color, I picked up the rubber and wrapped it around a 3" steel pipe.

After about 30 minutes, the resin was fully cured and I was able to remove the piece - now perfectly cylindrical!

Here's the two pieces together after buffing the aluminum coating lightly with some steel wool.

From here, I used shoe polish as a base coat of weathering.

This was buffed off the higher parts to leave the underside dirty. After that, an airbrush was used with layers of dark brown and black to further knock back the recessed areas.

Apoxie Sculpt was used to level out the inside area of the pauldron, and the cuffs were epoxied in place.

The finishing touch was a coat of rub-n-buff wax in "antique silver" and the *light red ribbons affixed to the middle of both pieces.

There are no straps that hold these in place. Each pauldron weighs just under 1lb, and since the arm cuffs are designed to be the same circumference as the wearer's arm, they stay in place via friction with only a small strip of 1/4" foam to take up any slack. They also do not affect the ability to move your arms in any direction, which is a LOT more than I can say for most videogame armor.

Posts detailing the build-up of Cassandra's sword and shield to come, and more pics of the build process for these can be found on my flickr page - thanks for reading!

Portal Gun for Child's Play

2010-11-22T17:47:00.008-05:00

On January 20, 2009 I took a photograph of a project. At the beginning, the intent had been to get it done in time for Halloween 2008, but that deadline came and passed far too quickly for me to make it in time. Instead, the piece was quietly wrapped up over the holidays. Before going to bed one night, I tossed that picture and a few others up on Cosplay.com

The result has, quite literally, changed my life.

Anyone who has stumbled past my humble little blog here has no doubt heard of Penny Arcade. Linking to them from here is almost silly, like asking a fish if they've ever tried water before. Back in 2003, Penny Arcade founded a charity, run by gamers, called "Child's Play" - a gaming industry charity dedicated to improving the lives of children with toys and games in a network of over 60 hospitals worldwide.

It's hard not to be cheesy when you say something like this, but making these replicas has changed my life for the better, and I wanted to do the same for someone else. Ever since I finished my first Portal replica nearly 2 years ago, I had it in my head to make another specifically to benefit this cause. This particular replica will be auctioned off at the Child's Play charity dinner in Seattle on December 7th. Along with it will be a custom base signed by the guys at Valve!

With that heaping pressure piled on, I really had to make sure this thing turned out good.

The final product!

What follows is a more involved build log of the process, now that I know what I'm doing a hell of a lot better than when I first took a stab at making the Portal Gun.

Initially, my aim was to duplicate as many parts of the original Portal Gun (we'll call this "V1" for typing purposes) as possible. I popped off the front and rear casings and set about making a few molds.

These were made with brush-on Rebound 25 silicone, and the mold jackets were made using fiberglass.

After pouring in some smoothcast 300 resin, I had some very nice pulls. Only some minor cleanup was needed (which you'll see more of, below)

While the whole project was blown apart, I molded some of the smaller detail pieces as well. These are the prongs and center barrel chamber plates from the original build.

At one point, I tried to mold the entire barrel of V1 so I could pull an whole assembly as a single piece. This, in retrospect, was one of the dumbest things I've ever tried to do prop-wise, and only succeeded in wasting 2 gallons of silicone, a week of my life, and severely damaging the barrel trying to extract it.

I had to try something new... Or, rather, try something old that I knew how to do a lot more precisely this time. Reaching back to the way V1 was constructed, I went to purchase some PVC pipe. 2 pieces were notched and set inside one another to create the "middle" section of the barrel.

One of the more annoying things encountered when making V1 was cutting the squared recesses into the front of the barrel. This time, I glued small styrene dams in place, sanding them down at an angle before filling the middle cavity.

The space between the PVC was then filled with apoxie sculpt and sanded flush.

For the front most barrel section, I glued 7 discs of MDF together and settled in for some quality time with my lathe. This "plug" wasn't made hollow; that would be a hurdle taken care of during the casting process.

A bit of primer and sanding later, toss on the raw pulls of the casings, and it was starting to take on a very familiar shape...

The casings weren't perfect though, and needed some filler to even out a few flat spots.

I also decided to make a more precise edge for the upper indicator light. On V1, this piece was made using a hand dremel tool. Now that I have a lathe, I wanted a true circular part with an even edge, so a new piece was made from sintra and epoxied into place.

The barrel pieces then went under the rubber to have some molds made. The central barrel was the trickiest, but thanks to the guys over at the Replica Prop Forum lending me some advice, I was able to get it figured out.

The front barrel was molded from the back side while the "front" was used as the pour area.

By pouring in a very small amount of resin, then inserting a 2.75" diameter tube, I was able to create the hollow area in the middle of the barrel. After the small resin at the base cured, I poured in more around the surrounding edges, eventually making the entire hollow form. You can see the inserted tube in the shot below as a different color black than the resin surrounding it.

The rear-most section of the barrel was created, as before, with two 4" PVC couplers epoxied together. I created a myriad of mounting points with T-nuts and sintra so the entire replica could be painted in sections and assembled later.

I started referring to this part of the build as the "chassis" since all of the electronic components will live here and it serves as the mounting point for all of the rest of the gun pieces.

The claws were modified from V1 rather heavily. A reader on my blog (who happens to be building his own ASHPD as well) sent me some very high-resolution pics of the claws and their mounting areas. I used some components, and rebuilt others, to get the pieces below.

The biggest change in the claws were the wire "cages" that encase the hoses running the length of the gun exterior. These were built from brass wire and brazed together.

Quick test fit of all the components!

Before paint, I had to sort out electronics. This gun would light up as V1 did, but I wanted to include the sounds from the game as well. There would be a "boot up" noise when turning the gun on, individual firing noises for blue and orange portals, and a "fizzle" noise when turning it off. This gun is being created for a very special cause, so I wanted it to have some very special features.

The LED board were made from simple perfboard and ribbon cable, using 5mm "piranha" style LEDs for illumination.

replicaprops.com handled the creation of the sound chip. All I had to do was provide .wav files and let them know how I wanted it triggered, and a week later I got my pre-programed chip & amp in the mail. Great guys to work with and very fast service. Below is a video of the first "proof-of-theory" test fire.

A 2.5" speaker lives at the base of the central barrel. The cool thing about the gun design is that the long, continuous chamber provides rather fortunate acoustics, amplifying the volume of the sound effects really well and projecting them forwards.

From the back of the gun, this switch plate controls the illumination and sound effects. The red switch on the right turns the gun on and off, while the two black switches on the left control which portal color is selected, and the sound effects for firing.

Now that the electronics were good to go, the rest of the parts got their paint topcoat.

As with V1, an acrylic plunger handle was sourced to serve as the central illuminated chamber. 8 LEDs situated at the ends (4 of each color) keep the illumination clean and uniform. The piece was "frosted" for better light diffusion by buffing it with 600 grit sandpaper.

The revised upper indicator received a similar treatment. All of the LEDs were set into PVC sockets so they could easily be plugged into their acrylic rod parts.

Decals were, as before, made with water-slide decal paper printed from a laserjet printer. These work best over light colors. Weathering to the decals was done in photoshop - they're actually printed to look used.

The rubber lines running the length of the side of the gun were made from automotive windshield washer tubing with sculpting armature wire inside to keep its bent shape.

A paper spindle provided the the barrel insert as a finishing touch. I had used one of these in V1 but the barrel on that gun is nearly .5" wider. There was a lot of trimming involved to get this thing in there. For added texture, I used some thin gauge sculpting mesh as a "screen" behind the insert. Foam padding was used to diffuse the LEDs into a more even glow.

Illumination and first test-firing after final assembly!

V2 then got a very light coat of weathering, and I decided to not include the blood splatter from V1. This is a piece direct from the game, and as much as I love the narrative that detail gives my own personal ASHPD, I decided to keep this one "clean."

I'll need to update this post in about a week, as there is a custom base in the works as well. This will be signed by members of Valve (and me!) before the final gun goes on auction at the Child's Play charity dinner, December 7th. I'll be sure to post an update as soon as the auction is over and let everyone know how it went.

Some shots of the new Portal Gun, V2!

And a couple next to her twin. Hard to believe its almost been 2 years already. To everyone that subscribes, comments, follows along or even comes by the page, thanks for helping to build my little corner of the internet. You definitely motivate me to do great things.

More pictures available on my Flickr page. Thanks for reading!

Daft Punk Handplates

2010-10-25T12:08:00.001-04:00

It just makes sense, really. If you have the helmet then you're going to need the gloves to go with it.

You might recall my vacuumformer build from a few months back. My reason for creating that tool was to eventually create a set of Daft Punk glove pieces. This all stemmed from a very helpful post over on the Replica Props Forum where a member had noted he had worked on a set of handplates for Daft Punk themselves while they were on tour! The originals, as it turns out, were vacuumformed. This information was perfect, and I set about creating a set of vac-forming masters.

After a lot of research, I made up these blueprints to nail down the scale and shape of the plates.

First off, I got some alginate and cast a couple of copies of my hands. Alginate is great for single-use lifecasting and I had 2 exact copies of my paws in a couple hours. The finals were made with Smooth Cast 300 resin.

Once these were fully cured, I sculpted the hand plates over the finger sections with Apoxie Sculpt.

I only sculpted the finger plates on one hand, as they would be used for both fingers on both hands. The only parts that needed to be sculpted separately were the large back plates.

The next step was a bit unnerving. In order to use these pieces as vacuumform masters, they needed to be separated and the bottoms sanded flat. In order to do this, I cut each of the fingers off the palm on my bandsaw, then cut the fingers into individual sections.

These little hotdog slices all ended up looking very similar, so they were labeled to keep everything straight. The handplates, noticably different, were labeled as well. I get confused easily.

The first set of pulls went near flawlessly. These were done in .060" styrene plastic.

After removing the masters from the pull, I labeled the inside of the plates and cut them out roughly on my bandsaw.

My preferred, or at least "settled-upon" method of trimming the edges to shape was to clamp my dremel tool to my workbench and shape each piece individually with a sanding drum. It took a while (4 hours!) but the results were worth it.

The result - all pieces trimmed, the edges smoothed with 1000 grit paper, and ready for chrome!

In order to set these up for spray chrome, I made a few parts trees (similar to model car kits) out of my scrap styrene. The plates were glued to the trees with a small dab of superglue, which would make them easy to snap off later after paint.

First photos from my friends over at Creations n' Chrome. Beautiful!

Unfortunately, I don't have a photo available for the "mounting" part. I ended up cutting small pieces of craft foam to fit into the recessed cavities of the concave glove plates. These were superglued to the styrene side. To affix them to the gloves, I used 3M black weatherstrip adhesive. Highly toxic and difficult to work with, but once it sets, the pieces are on there for life!

Note: I glued these in place using a friend of mine (Thanks, Dr. Roundtree!) as a stand-in hand mannequin. If you decide to do the same, have your hand model wear a set of latex gloves underneath the cloth ones. You do NOT want to glue this stuff to your skin.

For gloves, I went to a camping store and bought some thin black glove liners. These have no markings and are lightweight as well, so nothing would get in the way of the design.

Some final shots of the pieces, all shiny and ready for Halloween!

Thanks for reading!

Ultramarines Bolt Pistol - Warhammer 40k

2010-10-06T21:44:00.009-04:00

I got an email a couple of weeks ago, followed by a phone call. You'll forgive me if the exact details are a bit fuzzy, but the conversation involved an inquiry into getting a replica bolt pistol from the upcoming movie Ultramarines, based in the Warhammer 40k universe. It went something like...

Them: "Any interest in creating some Warhammer 40k replicas? We'd need them by New York Comic Con."
Me: "Sure! I'd love to - always liked the style of 40k. When is NYCC?"
Them: "In about 2 weeks. We'd need it a fair bit sooner than that."
Me: "...oh"

And so I found myself looking (figuratively, for the time being) down the barrel of a 9-day Warhammer pistol build. This project is to be a featured item at the Ultramarines booth at NYCC, and will also be handled by hundreds of convention attendees as they pose for pictures with it. It needed to be strong, durable, huge, and built in less than a week and a half. Here's the nuts and bolts.

Here's what we're after; specifically, this Bolt Pistol belongs to the character Severus in the Ultramarines universe.

I started, as most long time readers are familiar with, by setting up some Illustrator blueprints. The exact details of the gun were still in discussion at this time and eventually the script lettering was abandoned in favor of a shell eject port.

As I continued with the project, I decided to take "closing shots" of my day-to-day progress. Anyone who wants the short, short version can check the following 9 photos:

Day 1 Day 2 Day 3 Day 4
Day 5 Day 6 Day 7 Day 8 Day 9

The idea here was to make an ultra-rigid (ha! Ultra! Get it?!... ok, nevermind) frame from MDF. This would form the skeleton of the pistol, and the details would stem from this inner structure.

The basic components were transferred to MDF and trimmed on the bandsaw.

Inner panels were cut to create "chambers" on the inside of the pistol. These served a double purpose of adding rigidity while also creating mounting brackets for the grip, clip, and barrels.

Barrels started life as lowly PVC pipe. I have never purchased even a single inch of plumbing hardware that was used for its original intent.

After the frame was complete, the structure was skinned in 1/4" black sintra. These panels were coated in epoxy on their MDF facing side, then secured in place with a brad nailgun.

Additional panels being fitted to the rear of the gun

The raised lip on the barrel was added using styrene sheet. The seams were filled with bondo and sanded flush.

Another favorite of mine - Apoxie Sculpt - was used to create the handle shape. This was rough sculpted, then sanded to shape after drying.

For the curved lower part of the gun, I shaped a piece of 1/2" MDF on the belt sander, then sectioned it into thin strips to create the "cutouts" below the barrel.

Additional sintra sheet was added to the clip and clip receiver to build out those shapes to their proper dimension. Before adding the side details on the clip, I primed and sanded the MDF beneath it to save myself some very annoying detail sanding later.

Lower clip and grip details were created from sheets of MDF laminated together. The clip underside was shaped, rather frighteningly, on my table router.

Those were the last of the big details, so I started working on accent pieces and trim. The raised edges all around the perimeter of the gun were made from 1/8" thick sintra, hand cut to 1/4" wide.

It was at this point that the shell casing eject port was determined to be the detail needed for the left side of the pistol. I didn't want to risk raking my jigsaw across the side of the piece, so I "cut" the piece out with a series of .5" drilled holes.

Not the prettiest solution, but I had a plate to cover up the hacked up gouges.

The right side of the pistol features a large "U" surrounded by rough sculpted filigree and containing the front half of a tiny human skull, sans jaw. I seriously lucked out getting this project so close to Halloween, and the skull was purchased from a local craft store and modified to fit the panel. The raised edges were added with apoxie sculpt.

Additional details were added in styrene bar, then it was off to the first guide coat of primer.

This revealed a lot of cracks that still had yet to be filled by my first bondo passes, but also showed that I had a lot more details to add. The large side rivets were made by lathing pieces of 3/8" sintra to shape.

3/8" sintra also makes up the sight on the pistol... which I can only imagine leaves something to be desired with regard to accuracy.

The small rivets and domed details on other parts of the gun are actually half-spheres meant for scrapbooking. I peeled off the weak adhesive supplied by the manufacturer and epoxied them into place. For the really tiny ones, this was an eye straining process.

Speaking of strain, my wrist was killing me after carving the diamond details on both sides of the grip with an engraving tool. A smarter man would have made these marks while the clay was still wet. Alas, I am not that man.

The last big piece needed was the large "U" on the left side of the gun, aft of the shell eject port. This was a lathed piece of 3/8" sintra, while the inset "U" was cut from .060 styrene sheet.

One more coat of primer...

...then its off to paint!

I started with a full coat of flat black; this was an idea I'd had for creating a more accurate "gunmetal" color for a while now and was eager to test out. Retrospectively, trying new things with 2 days left on the clock wasn't the brightest of moves... but nothing ventured, nothing gained.

The barrel and shell got a coat of Krylon metallic gold. The shell was an insert I'd created last minute when I realized that it would be quite easy to see all the way down into the barrel, given its shallow depth and wide opening. May as well see the next round in the chamber!

After the flat black dried, the raised edges and grip were treated to a coat of gold as well. Krylon spray for the grip and Testor's brush enamel for the trim. The two colors are remarkably (and luckily!) nearly identical.

Additional pieces, like the skull, some rivets, and the raised filigree, were painted with dull aluminum and white enamels.

The technique I spoke about earlier for achieving a better gunmetal color was gleaned from a papercraft Hellboy "Samaritan" pistol I stumbled upon several months back. (fantastic read for anyone interested in making one of those things!) Since I only needed a light metal shimmer to my black basecoat, I only did one very thin pass of stippling with some metallic dark silver acrylics.

Additional dirt and grit was added with further layers of acrylic paints drybrushed onto the surface.

The final weathering accent was a light helping of silver "wear" marks around raised edges and corners, done with Testor's dull aluminum enamel.

Once all of the above was dry, the entire gun got two coats of satin clearcoat to protect the weathering from the dozens of handlers it would have in the following week.

Glue in the barrels, and she's done!

For scale reference, here's my friend Tom holding the "pistol." It weighs close to 17lbs and is nearly 2 feet long.

From first cut on the bandsaw to dropping it in the case, 9 days total. This was one hell of a rush build, and I really wish I could have had a month with it, but it turned out great in the end. If you're going to NYCC this year, be sure to stop by the Ultramarines booth and have a pic taken with tiny here. I'd love to see it!

More pics of the process and final build (And in higher resolution) available on my flickr page.

As always, thanks for reading!

N7 Armor & Dragon*Con 2010 Recap

2010-09-10T22:34:00.003-04:00

Alternate title: How to make your very own Foamshep.

So, Dragon*Con 2010 (shameless link to an awesome recap video by my friends over at JumpKickPunch.com) loomed in the horizon and I had found myself without a costume. Long time readers may recall that last year I put together a Big Daddy costume from Bioshock, setting my own bar impossibly high for a repeat performance. The bulk of my time over the past several months has actually been invested in props for my wife's costume, while my own remained mostly undecided.

It was then that I ran across EvilFX's "Bioweapons" blog. David does some truly amazing work, and his material choices are innovative and perfect for their application. He was putting together 2 sets of N7 armor for himself and his girlfriend, to be debuted at Dragon*Con 2010. I had 16 days and an M8 rifle, so I decided to try it for myself.

Now, this entry is a bit sparse for a couple of reasons. #1, this is not my technique - if you want to know more about it, I highly suggest visiting the EvilFX blog and reading through some of the entries. #2, in a time crunch, my project detailing is not nearly as thorough as it should be.

I'll share a few tips that I ran across on my build for those interested in taking a whack at this themselves.

Credit for this pic goes to scenemissingmagazine on flickr
(original here - I did some touchup and erased the random con-goers from the background of the shot)

This material is called "EVA Foam" and can be purchased from industrial supply houses like McMaster-Carr. You've likely seen it used on Yoga mats and cheap flip-flops. Its durable, cheap, and comes in tons of fun colors. For this project, I used interlocking floor mats found on eBay, because their textured side simulates the "carbon fiber" look of the N7 armor fairly well. I wouldn't have time to paint the entire suit, so I ordered gray.

As with most of my builds, I did toss together a quick set of blueprints. These weren't nearly as detailed as I usually make, and only included the chest and back pieces.

The remainder of the pieces were patterned on the fly, from looking at multiple screenshots and my very best guesswork. I bought thin sheets of craft foam to make my patterns with, as these are also EVA and behave similarly to the thicker sheets.

The patterns had to be increased along the circumference of their bend by about 5-10% in order to keep the same curve as the thinner templates. This took some getting used to, but after a couple pieces it started making more sense. The arm bracer here was my first complete piece.

The thinner craft foam also worked very well for inset textures. Instead of trying to sand down an interior face completely smooth, I just carved it rough to shape with my dremel, then cut a piece to fit out of some 6mm craft foam. Crisp, even faces.

The "panel lines" in the armor were made by first using a hot knife to trace a line across the armor using a metal straight edge. After this, I retraced the line with a dremel tool, using a grinding wheel.

I was lucky enough to trade some lathe work with a friend of mine who laser-cut some of the more intricate spine and back details for me. Little bits like this would have driven me mad.

If you don't typically have access to a laser cutter (as I know I usually don't!) then I recommend a bandsaw. Most of my foam was trimmed using a medium wood blade on a 9" bandsaw with no problems at all. Thinner pieces can get pulled into the blade and down into the wheels though, so be careful. I never used a hotknife for cutting, though I know others have.

Rigging these pieces was a fun challenge. The bicep pieces (below, little more than foam rings, really) and gauntlets stayed in place by friction alone, but the shoulders, thighs, and chest/back took some thought.

The chest/back was held on with 4 velcro straps (2 on each side) and 2 nylon clips that went up over the shoulders.

The over-the-shoulder straps threaded through the loops on the inside of the inner shoulder piece, holding then in place. The larger piece is connected to this with a strip of elastic, and another inner piece of elastic keeps the armor in place around the bicep.

The thighs had three buckled straps a piece on the inside which somewhat held them in place, but luckily the guys at BioWare thought about them slipping down and gave us an out! There are two hip pucks that have a webbed nylon strap running through them, which attach to the chest and back pieces to keep them from sliding down.

I chucked up a piece of MDF on my lathe and popped out a quick master for some vacuumform pulls. These pieces were slotted to receive the webbing that holds the thigh piece up.

The thighs themselves were the result of a lot of heatgun and dremel work. If you're looking to get these pieces in a compound curve, its best to heat them from both sides with a heatgun and pull them over a domed surface. I had some spare PVC endcaps for some 2" pipe that worked really well for this. I also used my knee from time to time if the foam was cool enough.

Most of the shots above show hotglue holding the straps in, but that was the only place where hotglue was used. The foam itself was usually bonded together using superglue. I prefer the Gorilla Glue brand. These pieces held up for 2 days of use at DragonCon and none of the superglue ever let go. It can be a bit pricey though, as I went through 6 bottles for the entire suit.

The best tip I can give when working with this stuff is my painting technique. Since the surface is heavily textured and tape doesn't adhere to it well, I had to find a way to mask off the plethora of stripes I had planned to add to the suit. For this, I first laid out the pattern in tin ducting tape.

By tracing the edges of the tape with an exacto knife, you create a small indent in the foam. Using a brush, you can paint up to this line to create a clean edge. Its tedious and does take a significant amount of time (the stripes on my suit took me about 7 hours) but the results were worth it.

I had the same vinyl shop that did the decals on the M8 (Signs Now) put together some N7 vinyl decals for me to use on the chest plate. I used a piece of black sintra, heated and bent to shape, for the backing. You can see the red paint cracked pretty bad after the con in the shot below - the red used was laquer and the white was enamel. It seems like the enamel holds better to the foam.

Lastly, I added some blue EL wire to the back, running off 2 AA batteries. This was my first time using the stuff, and aside from that annoying high-pitched tone the inverter gives off, its a very cool lighting tool. Remember, if you can make something glow, its instantly cooler!

The completed suit! Not too shabby for a rush job, though there's a ton more I would have liked to do if I had the time (painted panel lines, textured the undersuit, made a helmet, etc etc etc!) For DragonCon 2011, I am committed to spending more than a handful of weeks on my costume! Overall though, Foamshep was a blast to wear. The EVA can get a bit warm at times, but its a comfortable, low-cost suit that looks pretty convincing. Also, you don't have to worry about breaking any pieces if you drop them.

Below are a few shots from DragonCon - credited with them are their respective owners on Flickr. I've got a photoshoot scheduled with the Jack cosplayer in the shots below, so look for that soon!

Credit: Chase Wirth on Flickr (Original here)

Credit: Brent1024 on flickr (Original here)

The reporter I'm punching in the shot below is Mark Meer, the voice of Commander Shepard in Mass Effect. I was a little tired of his disingenuous crap (Seriously though, he was a damn cool guy to meet in person!)

And another pic from Scenemissingmagazine on Flickr - Thanks again for the awesome shots!

(Original here)

As always, Thanks for reading!

Mass Effect M8 Avenger Assault Rifle

2010-08-24T17:42:00.004-04:00

It feels good to be able to build some stuff for myself again! The Daft Punk helmet was my last active commission for a little while, and for the next few months, I'll be concentrating on personal projects.... like this one.

I've been a huge Mass Effect fan for a while now, and with the release of the second game I knew I wanted to take a crack at building some of the weaponry from the ME universe. As a bit of a personal challenge to myself, I decided to construct this gun from as much of my existing materials as possible. That is to say, 95% of what you see here is scrap I had in my shop from other builds. In the end, the entire piece only cost me $28 in raw materials.

Note: if you email me and ask to buy this gun for $28, I will say yes; I will then take your money and mail you a box of wood shavings. You have been warned.

So, here's how it came together.

First off, as with everything I make, I drew up some blueprints. Those with a keen eye may notice that my illustrations don't match up 100% with the reference image above. This is because the M8 in the game renders and the M8 on the box art have several differences. My version above is an amalgamation of the two.

I had a huge honking sheet of 3/4" MDF left over from the Laser Rifle project; Onto this I sketched out the various parts. My plan was to have a central "spine" that all of the outer components would slide onto, forming the organic shape of the M8.

After trimming, parts that needed to be symmetrical were clamped together and sanded down along their edges to make certain they were as exact as I could get them.

Here's the rough parts laid out onto the center spine.

Next step was to glue and clamp these pieces together around thin strips of MDF that would serve as the center sections. This would eventually leave these pieces looking like a bunch of u-channel MDF chunks.

After drying

Additional details were added by either shaving down the existing blocks, or by adding 1/4" MDF pieces to the outside of the forms and taking away from those. The ability to remove whatever piece I was working on from the center spine was a HUGE help in shaping these.

The upper receiver was shaped mostly on a belt sander, but some detail work was done with a palm sander, and eventually a sanding block to refine the shape.

EVERY edge on this thing is beveled! this was all done by hand with a dremel tool. Because of the strange angles of a lot of the pieces, I couldn't use my table router.

For the lower barrel shroud, I used some scrap pieces of styrene and sintra formed around an MDF base. This is the interior - the repeating trapezoid shapes make sure the angles stay consistent.

I also used some more scrap styrene to vac-form the scope assembly that sits on top of the upper receiver. These were formed around MDF bucks, and the dome shape on the sides was made from vac-forming the end of an engraving tool handle cap.

I also busted out the lathe to take care of the scope and the small cylinders on the right side of the gun. The scope from laminated sheets of MDF, and the cylinder master was made an old banister support. Really.

For the "grip" on the scope, I found some leftover rubber material used to line the insides of toolbox drawers. I think this was part of another project, but my toolbox drawers are also without liner, so who knows?

The lower grip details needed to be slotted to receive the lower barrel shroud and lower barrel assembly. The latter was made from some PVC pipe bits I had in my "scrap plastic" tub.

A trigger was made out of a delrin bar, and a recoil spring salvaged from a dead RC car. This created the trigger assembly.

I decided I wanted to have the gun light up red in the sides and on the scope as it does in game. Additionally, to simulate "muzzle flash" I would add 3 LEDs to both barrels which would illuminate when the trigger is pulled. I added a small pushbutton switch at the front of the trigger to make the lights work, and for the battery compartment, I scrounged a double AAA cell holder from an old XM Radio remote control. This was countersunk into the handle.

THIS PIECE TOOK FOREVER! Oh man, the angles... It was very convenient to be able to shape pieces since I could remove them from the gun, but because nothing ever went back on exactly as it did before, a lot of times the alignment would change in test fitting, and I'd have to shave the edges down or move things around again. The result you see here - three pieces of styrene, took me almost an entire evening to get right.

After more beveling and shaping, this was the result!

Using a dremel tool, I started carving the panel lines.

The front "vents" were made by drilling holes at the top & bottom, then using a dremel tool and cutoff wheel to connect the dots. The material on the inside was cut away with an engraving bit.

The first coat of primer on MDF always looks ugly. This also marked my first expenditure - 2 cans of Krylon Ruddy Brown, nearly $5!

After one pass with sandpaper and a little more primer, you can see how much better the pieces look.

I used some spare LEDs I had left over from Big Daddy for the illumination in the center chamber. An old mobile from IKEA lent a few pieces of red translucent acrylic to tint the lights even further.

Additional details were added in styrene sheet.

For the details on the lower barrel shroud, I made a master piece out of ABS and styrene, then molded it and make 12 copies. The puck next to it is for the 4 cylinders on the right side of the gun.

Then the fun part. Primer, sanding, spot putty, repeat. About 4 passes and I had a pretty smooth piece.

I didn't want to go buy any perfboard, so I once again reached into the scrap plastic bin for more styrene. By drilling holes and routing the leads of the LEDs in a weird little maze, I was able to make some halfway decent little dead bug boards. I made 2 for the barrels, one for the center section, and another for the scope light.

A few more details needed to be added in styrene. The vents in the front grip aren't perfectly canon, but since this was a personal build I decided to add my own touch to it. Also, I cut the gap way too deep on that center section, and this was the best and fastest way to hide it! A great teacher of mine once said "Celebrate the Intersection. The more you try to hide something, the easier it is to see" Also... the small barrel there is an old ballpoint pen.

The battery cover was also made with some scrap styrene, by heating it and forming it to the shape of the handle. A styrene box on the inside keeps it locked in place.

Onto paint! I had scrounged some free Ace Hardware offbrand from an old job at my office, which served as the rather bright silver basecoat. To tone this down, I dusted it with Rustoleum hammered spraypaint, then Krylon clearcoat. The gunmetal color you see here is the result.

The upper front receiver, rear stock, grip, and front grip were all painted with Plasti-dip spray to give them texture and a rubbery feel. This was another expenditure... up to nearly $10 now. All parts not painted with silver or plasti-dip got satin or flat black, depending on their location.

The scope was finished off with a piece of PETG (left over from Big Daddy's viewports) pained black on the back to be as glossy as possible.

To control the electronics, I returned to the dead RC car and stole the switch from it. It even came with a nice plastic housing! This was placed in the scope mount. As you can see, i didn't have any shrink tubing handy... so the leads were isolated with hotglue. Horray cheap budget electronics!

Final assembly after paint

It looked good, but needed weathering. First though, I called up the shop that does all my vinyl - Signs Now Atlanta - and had them cut some stencils for me. I designed the decals for the M8 in illustrator, and the guys at Signs Now cut them in vinyl for me to use as templates. After sticking the vinyl to the piece and painting over with enamel paint, the mask was removed to show clean, crisp lettering! The nice part about this is what they're more permanent than vinyl decals, and I can control how "weathered" the paint will be.

After that, it was time to weather it. I spent some time recording the entire weathering process for those interested, and in the coming weeks I'll be editing that into a time-lapse video to show the overall technique I use. Don't expect magic though, mostly it just looks like this:

My initial pass was a bit heavy with the dirt - my favorite comment about it was "I don't think I'd trust the fate of the universe to someone who doesn't know how to clean their gun." This was a good point.

After pulling back the dirt and grime a bit though, I think the final result really shines. It looks well used, but also well cared for. The finished piece!

More pictures, and in higher resolution, are available on my flickr page!

As always, thanks for reading!

Daft Punk: FINAL!

2010-07-21T18:58:00.006-04:00

Its been a long road. Seventeen months, countless hours, multiple dead ends, hundreds of lessons learned, and one helmet made. In the past two installments I've discussed sculpting, resin casting, chroming and vacuum forming. This is where the magic happens though... Illumination.

Build Archive: Part 1 - Part 2 - Helmet Q&A

If you want to know the details, grab a drink and follow along. For those of you who prefer the "instant gratification" route however, indulge yourselves in the following. Want more without reading all the boring build notes? Scroll all the way to the bottom for more prettiness, or visit my Flickr page for higher-rez pics:

Want to learn how to make a daft punk helmet in 3 minutes? Don't blink.

Now, for the build. We last discussed the golden bucket nearly a year ago. It was a last-minute test piece with a webbed visor and so-so chrome. The wiring color on the rear dome was incorrect, and the visor was tinted much too dark to see out of comfortably.

I set about pulling another copy.

This time the chroming task was handled by yet another shop - Creations N Chrome in Valencia, California. After an initial teething process in which we learned NOT to bake the helmets in an oven for them to dry, I was treated to one of the glossiest painted chrome finishes I've seen yet on my hand-sculpted form.

I also took this time to create a color-accurate wire dome for the rear of the helmet. Despite the holiday feel to the color scheme, its canon-accurate to Guy Manuel's actual piece. In it went.

Yes, I promised you pretty lights. First, I had to teach myself to design circuit boards. After some research online, I found a program called Eagle from Cadsoft, and set about learning the interface. Many of my boards went through dozens of revisions as I found ways to make them smaller and more efficient. Here are a few shots of the final designs (top silkscreen and top copper only)

These were sent out to a company called batchPCB.com for printing. 5 weeks later, I had my boards! In the interim, I also lived on the Digi-Key website. All components except for LEDs were purchased through Digi-Key. LEDs came from Superbrightleds.com. I know it sounds like I'm hocking just about every single place I used here, but I'm bound to get emails about this eventually. Hopefully if I toss all the info out there, it'll help other builders when they give it a shot.

So, with boards and components finally together came the soldering.

...and more soldering...

...and then some more.

Once the boards were made, housings for the colorbars were built from styrene sheet.

These were mounted to a vacuum-formed black styrene dome to make sure their shape lined up with the helmet.

Having the housings built meant I could start building the wiring harness for all the lights. There is over a mile of wire wrapped around the inside of this dome.

To diffuse the light inside the housings, white foam pads were placed over the LEDs. These each had corresponding gel sheets that would eventually be glued over the LED boards and foam.

Here's the rainbow lighting rig being assembled.

All of the signal and power would come from this black box, which houses the Arduino and AA batteries. A DB9 serial connector bridges the harness and the Arduino. There are three controls on the box - one switch that turns the lighting on and off, and 2 potentiometers which change the speed and pattern of the lights.

I have to give a MAJOR shout-out here to James Moss, who programmed the Arduino for me. I discovered pretty early on into this project that I had no mind for coding whatsoever, and set about finding someone who did. Thanks to YouTube, I ran across James' own Guy helmet build and asked him if he could program my lighting array. The results you see in the videos below are examples of his stunning work.

The last of the lighting was the color bars at the "chin" of the helmet, and the EKG meters in the ears. I sourced a local printer to laser-cut vinyl decals for me, and adhered these over translucent white acrylic to make masks for the LEDs.

When mounting the lighting rig, I wanted to make sure no light escaped into the inside of the helmet. All of the light areas were blacked out with thin foam 3M weatherstrip adhesive to make sure they stayed put.

Both the lighting rig and the rear wire dome were affixed to the helmet using T-nuts and allen screws. The bases were glued in place with plumbing epoxy.

After the lighting rig was secured, I started routing wires and mounting the boards.

Not wanting these to get damaged, I used a scrap piece of formed styrene sheet to make a protective cover which would keep the boards from getting knocked around or broken.

On top of this and on the sides of the helmet, I added layers of foam padding to grip the wearer's head.

And finally, the inside was fully lined in automotive headliner fabric for comfort and style! Despite how it looks, visibility is actually quite good! Hearing anything with all this padding around your ears? Thats another story.

The first test-fire of the final piece:

The final piece. Finished and it feels so good. If anyone is going to ComicCon 2010, you might see this thing in person!

Below are a few pictures taken by my friend Jennifer Barclay around Atlanta. I managed to cajole her into following me around in the ridiculous humidity, taking shots and answering all sorts of "what is that?!" questions. My last day with the helmet was a memorable one, and her shots are truly fantastic.

This has been one hell of a ride, and easily the most monumental replica project I've ever undertaken. Higher resolution pics are available in my Flickr stream (up to 2272x1704 for you big-screen people!)

As always, thanks for reading!

Jump Kick Punch (project update!)

2010-06-21T11:50:00.004-04:00

So after all the E3 craziness of last week, there was (obviously) a ton of media coverage on all the new motion control, older rehashed games, and interactive tigers.

A few of my friends run a very entertaining podcast/blog called Jump Kick Punch! and they asked me to do a little guest-spot with them in their E3 review and re-cap.

Head on over there if you've got some serious time to kill and would be entertained by four mid-20's guys yammering on about the current world of videogames in a beer-fueled frenzy of swearing and belching. If the previous sentence didn't illustrate this fully, the language is a bit PG13 (okay, R) so don't go blasting it at the nursery where you work or anything. Fun fact for people that don't know me personally: I apparently swear a LOT. I wasn't aware of this until I listened to a recording of myself.

Also, as I've been listening to this while writing this entry, I also seem to be the ONLY ONE TALKING. Apologies to Brandon, Tom and Josh for me sort of railroading their podcast...

Because I hate to do a post without pictures, here are some shots of a few of my upcoming projects:

Link's Hylian Shield (Zelda: Twilight Princess)

The project that soldiers on. I've only been working on this between other builds, so its been slow going, but the base paint work is done and now I can start mounting the filigree pieces on permanently.

Cassandra's armor, sword, and shield (Soul Calibur IV)

The full set! So far most of the progress has been on her pauldron shoulder armor - a clay sculpt which will be cold cast in resin to make 2 duplicates. Recently I've started on the shield and sword as well. While they're only just blocked shapes so far, they're coming along nicely.

Hand Plates (Daft Punk)

To complete the Daft Punk look, I'm making their hand plates as well as the helmet. The initial pieces are clay sculpted over castings of my hands. These will be sanded to a smoother finish then vacuumformed in styrene plastic and sent out for plating.

And, finally, everyone's favorite. Another video of the Daft Punk Helmet, with lights and tinted visor! Just need the interior padding and we're ready for the final photoshoot and write-up.

Thanks for reading, and if you choose to visit my friends at Jump Kick Punch! then thanks for listening!

Budget Build Mini Vacuum-Former

2010-06-13T11:58:00.004-04:00

I have long wanted a vacuum-forming machine of my own, and after scouring tons of resources online, I finally decided to try my hand at it.

My former is a little bit different from others I've run across. My wife and I recently received a new toaster oven for our wedding (Thanks Cindy, Susan and Terri!) so the old one that followed my wife through college was now up for harvesting. I decided to take out the heating elements - these being often the trickiest part of most people's vac-former builds - and make myself a vacuum-former around them. This limited me to the size of the heating elements, but since this is my first ever attempted vac machine, I figured it couldn't hurt to start small.

Here's a few helpful links I scoured when doing research for my build:

First thing was first: I had to dig the coils out of the old machine. The flash in the picture makes it look worse than it was, but we're talking about 5 years worth of corn dogs and mini pizzas here. This thing was nasty.

And the guts I excavated. In the end, I didn't end up using the temperature control switch or the timer. The "bake, broil, toast" is only a rotary switch that turns individual heating elements on and off, so that was scrapped as well. The wires had a nice heat resistant shielding on them, so I re-purposed those later. They even had their very own fancy ceramic posts!

The heating elements dictated the size of the oven box, which itself dictated the size of the frame and platen. In the end I would up with a 14" x 14" work area. This is the oven box going together - its a maple box lined with 2 sheets of 1/4" hardibacker concrete board.

From the dimensions of the oven, I worked backwards to figure out the size of the platen and frames. Frames are also maple, held together with L-brackets and wood glue.

For the platen, I took two sheets of 1/2" MDF and sandwiched them around a sheet of 1/4" MDF. The 1/4 was trimmed to about 3/8" wide to form the inner hollow area. These were clamped and set to dry overnight.

On the underside, I glued in a threaded piece of PVC and sealed the seam with caulk. The threads allow me to use a different adapter if I ever step up to a larger vacuum pump in the future.

This is the cobbled-together adapter I'm using for now. All sealed with caulk as well, it pressure fits onto my shop vac hose.

After this came the drilling. And then more drilling. And some drilling after that. I don't know what I would have done without the laser guides on my drill press. The holes are 1/8" and spaced every 1cm. This was based on my "well, that seems like a good idea" research, and some hinted-at suggestions online that smaller holes over a larger area work better.

I got the rolling table when stopping by my parent's house to pick up some of their old furniture. This used to be their kitchen telephone table. Initially, I had planned to remove the leaves, but had to include them in the end because the table top was about 4" too narrow.

Here's the freshly drilled platen and the oven box ready for mounting.

The oven box itself was mounted to the table using 1" x 4" poplar boards. 3" long lag bolts were used to anchor the board to the sides, and it is held to the table with L-Brackets

The inside of the oven before mounting the coils. I used fireplace caulk to seal the edges and seams of the hardibacker board. I also used this later to seal the wiring going into the oven.

To articulate the plastic frame and move it from the oven to the platen, I tried something I've not seen used before: drawer rails. Similar to the idea of using toaster oven heating elements, this was something that seemed to make sense in my mind, despite never having seen it employed before on anyone else's build. I bought 4 of these at home depot - 24" long - and mounted them to the table and frames. They took some adjustment, but overall the result is great. Smooth action and dirt cheap!

I also stained and sealed certain pieces of the machine to protect them from wear and tear. The platen and frames were stained and sealed, while the oven and support arms got a coat of wood hardener.

For power, I ran a grounded line to a distribution box with its own outlet. The switch here controls the oven, and the outlet is used for the vacuum and heat gun. Don't laugh at my rigged-up switch plate - I had a few of these laying around and I was trying to get this thing together as cheaply as possible!

The oven wiring took a little trial and error to get right. Initially I had the entire thing running in parallel, but this tripped the breaker in my garage a few times, so I had to change the wiring configuration. I decided to do 2 coils paired in parallel, and then wire these two "banks" together in series. That worked out well, heating the elements nicely but not popping my breaker.

I had a few more things to do before firing it up. The frames needed a way to clamp to one another to hold the plastic in. I used some aluminum L-channel stock and cut 2" sections from it. These were screwed to the frames and secured around the plastic with binder clips. I have somewhere around 600 of these things in my house from a previous project, so I'm always trying to find new ways to use them.

I also added a strip of closed-cell foam around the platen to help seal the vacuum when I lowered the frames down. Additionally, I added non-skid tape to the insides of the frames to better hold the plastic in place.

With that done, it was tine to melt some plastic! I grabbed some random junk from my shop and lined it up. Shown (clockwise) is:

A filigree piece from my Hylian Shield build
An aluminum block
The mold master puck from Chell's Heel Springs
An old, damaged mold master from my Master Sword
1/2 of a golf-ball textured yo-yo

And the first pull! This was with .060" styrene - I'm betting I can get really good definition with some thinner stock, but its what I had available.

A close-up of one area. Not bad for a first pull!

The finished beast, complete with battered shop-vac.

All told, this project cost me around $100. Most of the components I already had laying around from other builds, so I guess if you had to go from scratch, it might end up running $150-$175 or so.

Toaster oven heating elements: free
Table: free
Shop vac: free
PVC Fittings: free
MDF: $18
Pine/Poplar/other wood: $20
L-Brackets: $15
Wiring/Switches: $12
Hardibacker Board: $8
Caulk/Sealant: $5
Wood stain/sealer: $10
Various hardware: $2
Drawer sliders: $4/ea

Best of luck fellow DIY-ers, hopefully we'll start to see some more toaster-oven formers popping up in the future. As always, thanks for reading!

Light Staff (Final Fantasy XI)

2010-05-09T16:30:00.005-04:00

I was commissioned to make the Light Staff (Apollo's Staff to those who only want the +1!) from Final Fantasy XI. FFXI came out in 2004, and the graphics aren't exactly up to par with more modern games. As such, some artistic liberties had to be taken with the design of the ornamentation.

I traced the basic shape of the staff in Illustrator and set about designing the filigree ornaments on the staff head. I used a screenshot of a character wearing one of these staves to get the scaled size appropriate.

I decided to try a clay sculpt this time around, since the staff head has a fairly organic shape. First off, I printed out my blueprints and adhered them to a sheet of 1/4" MDF. This way, my sculpt would remain symmetrical so long as I stuck to the edges.

The sculpt was done with Chavant brand medium weight non-sulfur clay (there's a mouthful.) All in all, it was fairly easy to work with, and a lot faster to work with than if I'd tried to make the entire piece from carved MDF or foam.

Basic shapes started rough, and I mostly just used my fingers to get the clay to the approximate shape.

As the edges got more definition, I switched to clay tools and sponges to smooth out the shape.

This is skipping a LOT of smoothing, adding clay, tooling, and frustration - but the final result can be seen below. I ended up lathing a puck out of MDF to take the place of the orb while I was sculpting. This was cut into three sections and the outside edges were sealed with wax to make removing the piece much easier without damaging the thin and fragile clay pieces surrounding it when I went to pour the mold.

Here you can see the definition on the edge of the clay after the MDF puck was removed.

After the sculpt was finished, the clay piece was put under some Rebound 25 silicone rubber.

Once the mold was set, I pulled a resin copy. Details transferred very well, and this piece needed no cleanup at all.

Using my original blueprints as reference, I transcribed the filigree patterns onto the cast in pencil.

These lines were then (painstakingly!) carved out with a lino block carving tool.

The carved channels made it easier to line up the round styrene bars for adding the accents on top of the resin cast. Thicker parts - such as the curls at the center area - were added with apoxie sculpt.

This piece was primed and painted, then molded in the same manner as the clay sculpt. I used a glass gazing orb for the central large bead at the top of the staff, and decided to create a mold of it as well so that I could make multiples later if I felt like it.

Two halves were cast in resin from the final mold and epoxied around the glass orb. The seams in the edges were then filled with apoxie sculpt.

After that, it was time for the most tedious part of the build... primer, bondo, and sanding. Repeat, repeat, repeat.

For the "neck" part of the headpiece, I lathed a pine block to shape, then added accents to the bottom area in half-round styrene.

These two halves were joined together with blind nuts and threaded rod. After the glue on the blind nuts was set, both pieces were joined with epoxy.

The first coat of paint going on the staff head after all the sanding and prep work had been completed. For the brown, I used the same Krylon Fusion brown paint that was used on the Force-a-Nature build.

For the longer rod of the staff, I needed a tapered dowel that was about 40" in length. Problem was, my lathe only has a 12" working area. Solution?

Pool Cue!

The divots in the handle of the cue had to be filled in, since the length of the staff rod is smooth. I filled these with bondo several times in order to get the edge as smooth as possible. This shot is from the first pass.

After the first coat dried, the brown area was masked off and the rest of the staff painted with Montana Gold spraypaint. This stuff is VERY shiny, and will remain that way unless you topcoat it with something else. I was going for more of an aged brass look for the final piece, so this got toned back a lot.

As with the halves of the staff head, blind nuts were used to join the upper and lower portions of the piece. These were left un-glued though, to help with shipping. The client can epoxy them later if so desired, or leave them loose if they ever decide to travel with the staff.

Finally, the piece was weathered with a wash of acrylic paints, airbrushed into the crevices and then wiped clean on the raised sections to give it an aged look.

The lower portion of the staff was weathered in a similar manner. After that, the two pieces were joined and the piece was finished!

The piece is over 45" tall and weighs about 5lbs. Added after the fact was a small rubber nub at the bottom to protect the wood and finish.

More pics, and higher res shots are available on my flickr page if you'd like a closer look. As always, thanks for reading!

The shape of things to come (Daft Punk)

2010-05-03T13:24:00.004-04:00

A little teaser on an upcoming update. Enjoy!

(This was shot with my phone, sorry for the crappy quality...)

TF2: Force-a-Nature

2010-04-02T17:30:00.005-04:00

Any outdoorsman will tell you the most frustrating part of hunting is when a deer simply falls down when shot, and doesn't fly backward into the forest. Those days are over. Anything this baby hits better pack a lunch, 'cause it is going for a ride!

This is a very cool and ridiculously proportioned weapon. 7" long barrels firing 4ga rounds and proportionally twice the size of regular rifle stocks, its comedy in overpowered shotgun form. How the Scout can fire this thing - from the hip - is anyone's guess.

First step first, I made up some blueprints in Illustrator. The scale was determined by sizing up the scout to 68" tall and measuring out the gun accordingly. The Scout, much like the rest of the guys in TF2, has HUGE hands which make the trigger and front grip assemblies respectively giant.

Starting off, I rough cut the stock and front grip out of 3/4" MDF. Thinner sections were added in 1/4" MDF to make sure I had the depth built out accurately.

These individual pieces were glued and clamped together to make large blocks. Eventually, I'd shave these down into their final shapes, but for the time, everything remained pretty chunky.

This is the front grip after some sanding. I added an MDF plate to the rear section to even this out and save myself a lot of bondo work. The piece sticking off the back will eventually act as the barrel hinge.

The barrels were an interesting challenge. Initially I thought of lathing them out of a solid block, then coring that block out for the inner barrel later. The more I thought about that, the less I thought I could pull it off well... so I tried something completely different and fairly strange.

I cut the front and back barrel profiles out of sintra. These are the upper and lower "8" shapes in the shot below. I then cut 1.5" PVC pipe to 7" long and glued the "8"s to the top and bottoms.

Strips of thinner sintra were trimmed in long thin triangles that matched the taper of the outer barrel, then glued to the PVC pipe. I also glued in wedge-shaped pieces of insulation foam to fill up the cavities in between these strips.

This was then skimmed in apoxie sculpt. The dented lines in the clay in the pic below are guide marks. I pressed a straight edge into the clay, making sure that the sides hit the two figure 8 shapes on the front and back. This indentation told me how much I needed to sand off once the clay was dry.

After a few hours of sanding I had this! Nice, smooth barrels, and as light as I could make two giant blocks of clay, too.

The center chamber was originally going to be MDF, but the gun needed to have a moving trigger and breech release lever, so I decided to go with something hollow instead. This box is made out of 1/4" sintra. I used a similar process to the barrels to make the curved domes on the sides of the chambers.

The chamber section after clay and sanding, mocked up next to the barrels to check alignment.

Magnets were added to the barrels and center chamber to hold the breech closed. I went with 2 neodymium 16lb pull magnets situated in the center of the assembly. You can hold the gun by the rear stock and these will keep the barrel closed well until you pull them apart. The best part is there's no maintenance needed for moving parts!

The front grip is held onto the barrels with 2 wooden dowel pins in countersunk holes. These were filled with gorilla glue and clamped for final assembly. The orange areas in the shot below are from an earlier set of magnets that ended up being too weak to hold the chamber closed.

The rear stock was shaped with a dremel and an orbital sander. After poking around online and watching what people have done with DIY CNC milling machines, I can definitely say I'm saving up for one of those next. Shaping this by hand and getting the symmetry right is a pain in the ass.

The front grip was also shaped to better match the in-game shotgun. The sides were beveled slightly and the corners rounded as well.

For the butt plate on the stock, I shaped a spare piece of nylon stock I had lying around from another project. The two countersunk screw holes will be filled in later so the piece is flush.

After the stock and grips were shaped, I rounded the corners on the center chamber to match the contours of those shapes as well. I also carved out the area in the stock for the breech release lever. Toward the back of the center chamber in the shot below are 2 stainless steel pins which hold the grip and chamber halves together. This is a friction fit that was glued in place later.

A fellow Portal junkie propmaker friend of mine offered to CNC some parts for me a while back, so I took him up on his offer for this build. He carved the trigger and trigger guard out of a block of aluminum for me based on a few drawings I sent him. He doesnt have much of an online portfolio, but you can see a kickass piece he made here.

The other moving part was the breech release lever. This was made out of layered styrene. The lever itself is spring-loaded and connected to a bolt on a copper tube that the assembly rotates on. The "guts" of the mechanism can be seen here:

All of the parts were given a coat of primer close to the final shade, and test assembled one last time before final paint. The trigger mechanism fit perfectly, which is amazing considering it was machined in a different state. Often, even the parts I make for myself in my own garage don't fit without at least some modification.

I also made a set of equally cartoony-sized shells to load into the gun. The first master was made out of lathed basswood and styrene.

I made a quick mold of the one shell and cast 2 more copies in resin, which were painted to match.

mmmm... chocolate gun parts. Krylon Fusion paint is niiiiice

The gunmetal parts of the FaN were painted with Montana brand paint, which I don't think I'll go with again. The color is excellent, but its far too difficult to get a nice, even coat. For $10 a can, its really not worth the hassle.

Lastly, the dowel pin holes were covered on the side of the gun with nylon screw heads painted to match. These were eventually topcoated with lighter gray testors paint to make them stand out.

And the final product in all its backwards-blasting glory!

Higher-resolution pictures are available on my flickr page. As always, thanks for reading!

Caster Gun for BlindSquirrel Props

2010-03-29T23:19:00.006-04:00

NOTE: If you're interested in purchasing a finished piece, send a note to Mike over at BlindSquirrel Props and let him know. This entry details my creation of a set of molds of his work. The gun itself is his creation and the molds are also his property. I am not taking orders for replicas of this prop!

Some people familiar with my builds may recall that I had worked with a fellow prop builder named Mike Iverson to pull the visors for my Daft Punk helmets several months ago. Mike (better known as BlindSquirrel) made a kick ass Caster Gun replica back in 2008.

After getting a ton of requests for multiples, he decided to make another, only this time with the intent to mold it. I had offered to make the molds a while ago as a favor, and got to work after the masters showed up in the mail.

Most of these are fairly typical box molds, a few more intricate than others. For each mold, I used Smooth-On's Mold Max 30.

Rear breech arms and barrel ring were unsupported pour molds. The silicone is thick enough on these to make sure the form stays rigid even without a form on the outside. First pass on the breech arms didn't go so well, so I ended up using a thinned layer of silicone brushed into the details first to minimize the air trapped by the rubber. Second mold went much better.

The barrel was molded in two halves to help with slush casting and to save weight. Also, this will help in placing wiring/battery packs if someone wants the gun to illuminate (I know mine will!) The box molds on these halves were done with a channel routed into the interior of the wood which locks the silicone into shape. This way, there's no need for a wooden backer on the box, making demolding much easier later since less of the support structure has to be taken apart.

I realize there's a ton of molding tutorials out there, but for my part, here's how I made my molds. This isn't really a step-by-step so much as some neat tricks I've learned that might help people in their builds. Each of the 2-part molds were made in very similar fashion. I'll show the grips as an example.

To start with, the piece(s) were embedded in soft non-sulfur oil-based modeling clay. This was smoothed out prior to placing the items in them to make the mold surface as even as possible. I followed certain edges in the master to hide the seam line as much as possible. Pour spouts were made in clay, as well as narrower vent spouts to release air bubbles during pouring. Registration keys were created by indenting the clay with the blunt end of a marker, but any rounded object will work. For some of my smaller molds, I used the back of a paintbrush handle.

On this particular mold, the mold box was keyed vertically to make sure the silicone stayed aligned curing the casting process. To ease in demolding the first pull, the wood received a wax release agent. This keeps the silicone from seeping into the pores of the wood and possibly tearing later.

After the clay and box are sorted out, I started by brushing a thinned layer of silicone over the piece. For brushes, I usually go to wal-mart and buy a pack of 50 kid's craft brushes. They'll get destroyed after one silicone use anyways, so no point in using nice brushes. These are also synthetic fibers, so there's less chance of a bristle falling out into your rubber.

After the brush coat has settled and all the bubbles have worked their way out, I fill the rest of the box up with more non-thinned silicone... then wait 8-10 hours.

Once thats dry, flip it over and remove the clay. You can see how the indentions made little raised keys in the facing edge of the silicone. The pour and vent spouts are also visible here. Make sure to leave that clay in place, as you'll need these areas empty later.

Repeat the process for the other side. REMEMBER TO USE MOLD RELEASE! Silicone doesn't stick to much, but it DOES stick to other silicone. If you don't put mold wax or some other substance between the two halves, they will form one solid block. Way back when I tried my first mold, I didn't have any mold release wax, so I used automotive wax instead. I still use it to this day and it hasn't let me down yet. No idea if its cheaper or not, but its what I had on hand and it worked wonderfully.

Finished mold!

This is how the pour is set up. The larger holes on the top are the pour spouts; smaller ones are the vents. There are 2 pieces of MDF lightly clamped to the mold frame to keep the silicone aligned during casting.

And the first pull! (yes, in pink casting resin... I had a bunch of dye laying around...)

Some more of the 2-part molds in various stages of process:

Trigger and sights

Caster Shells

Grip support arms and breech cap lever bar (seriously, I'm just making names up here...) This one is a strange mold - the resin from the arms fills the bar as its poured.

Both of the above after the first coat had dried

Breech cap

All the molds finished and ready for a run. In a test, I was able to pull an entire caster gun "kit" in a little under 90 minutes, using only 3 cups of resin. MUCH faster than scratchbuilding one after another!

Here's some detail shots of the pulls from the molds:

And finally, one complete Caster Gun kit.

If you're interested in purchasing a finished piece, send a note to Mike over at BlindSquirrel Props and let him know.

Thanks for reading!

AER9: Once more, with feeling

2010-03-04T15:27:00.003-05:00

If you're familiar with my last AER9, you'll recall that the project was completed in only 4 days. I recently had a chance to take another whack at it with a much more lenient deadline, and I'm very, very happy with the results.

The basic steps at the beginning were the same as my last build. Make a blueprint, transcribe it to wood, and start cutting, gluing and clamping.

I did discover a random and somewhat neat trick for scribing the lines on this though. By printing to vellum on an injket printer, I was able to directly transfer the pattern of the print from the paper to the wood. Using laquer thinner brushed over the ink, I burnished the paper against the MDF and the lines transferred perfectly! Made transcribing my blueprints MUCH easier.

The main difference between this build and my last is the materials used. Outside of the stock base, barrel, grip and MF cell, all other parts were made from sintra, styrene, or aluminum. These materials can take detail much better than MDF which afforded me a lot of control in making the shape more accurate.

I also decided to use LEDs for a glowing barrel effect. This was a preliminary test-fire to see how the idea would work. In the end, I used the lens out of a laser pointer behind the center hole in the barrel to focus the light and make it brighter in that spot.

After the barrel and stock were shaped to the correct dimensions, I started adding details in sintra & styrene. The rounded edges on the back and front parts were made by gluing the sintra into a box and rounding the edges on my table router.

Another huge difference in this build was my new lathe. The AER9 has a TON of little rounded bits all over it. These were cut out of MDF or sintra. The microfusion cell is 4 pieces of MDF glued together and shaped on the lathe as well.

This rear knob is also lathed MDF. The tube which sits on top of the barrel is an ABS rod. This was a lot easier to shape than the 5/16" steel tube I used on the last build.

Here's most of the parts going on for a test fit.

The grip is an MDF block with sintra strips shaped over it. To keep a uniform shape, I heat-formed one sheet over the entire grip, then cut it into strips on my bandsaw.

The rear of the barrel is a sintra box with styrene accents. The curved part behind the MF cell was sculpted out of apoxie sculpt and sanded to shape.

Various other smaller bits were shaped out of sintra/styrene before going to primer. Below is the trigger & trigger arm, MF cell area, barrel, cell eject lever, and other bits. I also scribed the panel lines on the parts with a lino block carving tool I had left over from my art school days.

Another test assembly after all the parts had been primed. I had some really tight tolerances when putting it together, as the layers of paint actually made it quite hard to get the front and rear casings over the barrel. Yay precision!

To power the LEDs, I used 2 AA batteries housed in an in-line battery holder. The knob on the back of the gun unscrews to reveal the battery door to replace the cells. I was very very happy with how this turned out. The LEDs are switched on and off by a hidden pushbutton switch on the bottom of the rifle barrel.

The last lathed part was the bottom support bar. This was carved from a pine dowel and cored out to receive a hollow aluminum bar. Styrene accents finished it off. I also found some knurled nuts to use for the two circular parts on the support bar and JB welded them in place.

On to paint!

The basecoat silver was done with Krylon chrome paint. After this, I dusted the surface with a darker silver by holding the can about 2 feet away from the part and spraying lightly over the entire surface. This gave the paint a stippled texture like cast aluminum would have (this is shown a little better on the front barrel casing in the shot below with the barrel painted green.)

Color was done with Testors spray paint for the barrel (which is annoyingly thin and loves to run) and Testors brush paint for the silver on the MF cell and upper pipe.

After this, each individual part got a coat of clear to protect the finish.

I know I'm going to get a ton of decal questions, so I hope this answers them preemptively. It seems like custom decals are the bane of every replica maker, and it took me a bit to figure out the best way to do it as well. As with my Portal Gun, the AER9 got water-slide decals on the MF cell for the warning messages, arrows, and stripe. These were designed in Adobe Photoshop and printed onto water-slide decal paper on a laserjet printer.

The barrel decals were done differently. The barrel was scanned on a computer scanner to pick up the color & texture of the paint. Then, I designed the side decals in Illustrator, taking them into Photoshop to layer them over the green background and weather them a bit before printing. These were output on adhesive-backed vinyl using a plotter, then applied to the gun. There is a slight seam line around the sides of these, but its only evident under close inspection.

Here's the gun all assembled and shiny brand-new! So pretty, so clean...

So needs a few coats of grime.

This was the first pass. Another new tool I had for this build was an airbrush. I'd never used one before, so this was as much a practice run as it was a weathering effort. It took some getting used to, but I was very satisfied with the results.

NOTE: If you don't seal inkjet decals before acrylic paint weathering, they will run & bleed! This is why I clearcoated the gun before this process.

I also made a display board for the gun to sit on, in maple. This was stained satin black.

Here's the final shots of the gun after all the weathering was completed and given another coat of clear to protect the finish. I am very glad I got to revisit this piece, but I don't think I'll be making another one. 2 was plenty for me, and its time to try another project with my newfound techniques and materials.

These pics and more build images are all available on my flickr page, in much higher resolutions. Thanks for reading!