Volpin Props

Bird Splicer Mask, Bioshock

2013-04-15T13:50:00.000-04:00

I suppose it's no secret that I'm a pretty big Bioshock fan. Infinite is just around the corner and I'm really looking forward to all the props that game will open up to me, but before that there was one thing still in Rapture I wanted to have a crack at building.If you're like me and want to take a pass at making your own Splicer mask, I sell raw styrene copies of the finished mask in my store, ready for trimming and paint!

Splicers in Bioshock wear once-festive party masks that have been smattered with blood and cracked with abuse during their time in Rapture. My favorite design has always been the bird splicer masks, so when I got a commission for one earlier this year, I jumped on it.

Gathering reference was a bit tricky here. I don't have the PC version of the game and though someone unfolded a pepakura model of the mask some time ago, it has since disappeared after the demise of Megaupload. Nothing to do then but fire up the game! One of my save files happened to be very convenient as Jack was wearing the Big Daddy suit and the splicers would ignore him. Perfect for reference. I found a bird splicer, dispatched the poor fellow, then used the "Telekinesis" plasmid to get about a hundred different views of the mask.

I used these references to put together a set of blueprints, then commenced building.

The plan was to sculpt a base mask form that would be used as a vacuum forming buck. This would be split into two parts, with the beak being separate from the rest of the mask. I began by making a series of MDF sliced sections, then filling the cavities with foam and sanding them to a rough shape.

The eye area of the mask was actually pirated from a glass wig head in my shop. I took a scrap chunk of 0.1" styrene and heated it over the form, pressing it into shape as it cooled. The resulting piece was trimmed down and glued to the MDF and foam frame. Bondo was then used to blend the styrene into the foam panels and make the entire dome more uniform.

This looked very, very strange.

Several passes with Apoxie Sculpt followed this step. I began by roughly blocking out the feathers and filling in the eye areas to sit further out from the mask. The mounting lip for the beak and bridge of the nose was also extended and filled in here.

Primer and sanding followed, and then some filler putty.

The last detail needed were a couple of raised edges around the eyes. These were also done with Apoxie Sculpt, after a lot of measuring and cutting out a paper template to use in order to make both eye holes symmetrical.

The first pull was done in .040" styrene plastic, which proved to be too thin after stretching over the large form. There was also significant webbing when trying to do both pieces at once, so I had to separate the beak and the face sections.

The second pass, done in .060" plastic, was much more successful.

After the parts were trimmed, the beak was taped into place and secured in the corners with small spring clamps. Superglue was used to bond the two styrene segments together permanently.

A few passes of primer and a fine grit sanding sponge were used to prep the masks for paint. At this point my client requested a second mask, so I pulled another copy and assembled it as well.

The two finished masks will have very different paint jobs, so they each got a different base coat color. One is a light tan eggshell, and the other is (obviously) satin black.

I went through a LOT of test pieces before settling on this finish for the masks. My client wanted a look that emulated cracked porcelain on the white mask. I had about a dozen test scraps before landing on this. The base coat is the tan seen in the above shot, which was then brushed over with Elmer's white glue. This wasn't watered down, but it was brushed on pretty thin - enough to make the surface appear "wet" but not enough where you could see the white tint of the glue. While the glue cured, thinned acrylic paint was airbrushed over the entire part. I found that the cheaper the paint was the better it cracked - I imagine this has to do a lot with how flexible the cured acrylic is. The stuff I used was Blick brand white paint, the kind you'd find in an elementary school. Cheap!

By selectively applying the paint to certain areas on the mask, I was able to get cracks to show up in some places but not others. The finish on the white mask was perfect.

The second mask required a bit more prep. There are only 4 masks like this in Bioshock, worn by the four Splicers that Sander Cohen sends you kill and photograph in the "Fort Frolic" section of the game. These have red feathers, green feathered paint around the eyes, a yellow beak, and yellow eye accents. First, the feathers were airbrushed red and allowed to cure, then I used a drybrush technique to streak paint across these parts in a feather-like pattern.

The green areas were painted with a base of Elmers glue to get them to crack a bit, but I used a thin brush to get a small feather texture to the paint. Green was also used for the quills on the red feathers.

Lastly, the beak was airbrushed yellow and the areas around the eyes were accented with yellow rings. This was all done with acrylic paint.

In order to protect these base layers, the acrylic paint was sealed with clearcoat at this stage before weathering. I wanted to make sure that rubbing the grime coats into the cracks and crevices of the masks didn't disturb all the work I'd done already. The finishing touch for the Fort Frolic mask was a few passes of dirt and grime, once again done in acrylic paint. I used a damp paper towel to streak the paint across and remove dirt in raised areas while depositing it into recesses.

The white mask got a similar coat of grime before the really fun part...

...blood splatters! It's been a while since I got to do a really fun splat of blood, and this one turned out wonderfully. After the acrylic weathering cured, both masks got another pass of clearcoat and an elastic strap was added so they could be worn.

Here are some shots of the finished pieces - if you want to see more photos of them in higher resolution, check them out the gallery.

Thanks for reading!

Sophitia's Elk Shield, Soul Calibur IV

2013-04-15T12:00:00.000-04:00

I'm a bit behind on updates - there are still two full armor costumes from 2012 that I haven't written up yet! That said, here's a more recent project with a bit shorter (hah!) write-up that I hope will tide people over in the meantime while I chip away at my backlog.

Sophitia's Elk Shield. I built this, and the sword to go with it, for Jessica Nigri as part of an upcoming costume. While I've done something very similar to this before, I thought I could make several improvements to the project to make it both lighter as well as sturdier and more interesting dimensionally. Let's begin!

As always, blueprints! If you're interested I do have these available in vector based PDF available for download (as well as all my other blueprints) in my store. The shield worked out to be fairly small, but it is a buckler after all.

The biggest deviation between this and my earlier shield for Cassandra will be the rounded dome. Cassandra's shield is a foam block sanded to shape and resined over, but Sophitia's will be hollow styrene. To start off, an MDF platform and raised spines were cut and glued together.

These were filled with blocks of urethane tooling board, then cut and sanded down to a rough dome shape.

Bondo was used to fill in several of the gaps and smooth out the surface overall. Once it was sufficiently rounded and even, the buck was vacuum formed from .060" styrene to make a hollow shell.

The rings on the outside of the shield are stacked MDF circles. The initial shapes were trimmed on the outer edge with my bandsaw, and along the inner edge with my scroll saw. I made a homebrew circle cutting device for this task; essentially a board with a nail in it. By drilling a hole in the center point of the circle you want cut then pivoting the MDF around this nail, you get a perfect circle from a regular saw.

Here's all the rings trimmed out, and stacked on the base of the shield. These were all eventually also passed through my table router in order to round off the edges.

One very thin ring had to be cut to hide the seam of the styrene dome. This piece is 1/4" thick and only 3/16" wide, with a rounded outer edge and a concave inner edge. A little scary trimming this on my table router, but it worked out in the end!

The main baseplate of the shield had T-nuts inserted which will provide mounting points for the strap and handle later on.

The dome and all the boards were glued together with gap filling superglue and allowed to cure.

For the detail strip between the levels on the rings, I used round styrene bars in .040" and .060" diameter. These were glued on one small section at a time to make sure they were flush and even. The process was repeated for the inside as well.

On the backside, a sheet of styrene was scored with an engraving tool, drilled to match the mounting screw holes, then glued into place. It wasn't possible to get small spring clamps to hold the styrene bar in place here, so pieces were taped down while gluing. If the center puck looks familiar, I re-used the vacform buck from the Cassandra shield project as they're identical in-game.

The last ring detail was a flat strip that ran the circumference of the shield right on the styrene dome. This was sculpted from Apoxie Sculpt then sanded even after curing.

The "elk horns" on the front of the shield were transferred to a second vacuum formed dome by trimming out the pattern to lay flush over the curved surface, then traced. A thin strip of styrene was used to mark the center "spine" of these parts before sculpting.

I tried out a new material this time in favor of saving some weight on the finished piece. The stuff shown here is Smooth-On's "Free Form Air" epoxy. While it is extremely lightweight and dries fairly hard, it is nowhere near as nice to sculpt with as Apoxie Sculpt. The uncured clay sticks very badly to skin and sculpting tools, and its far too easy to damage the surface with even a light touch while sculpting. It also stinks to high hell.

After struggling with this stuff, I switched back to Apoxie Sculpt for the outer trim around the elk horns. After this cured, both pieces were cut out from the styrene dome and sanded to shape.

Last stages before paint!

I had such an elaborate plan for this… and it all kind of went to hell. Let's watch, shall we? First off, the whole shield was base coated with Testor's Metallic silver enamel. Actually, from here on out, all the paint unless noted is Testor's Enamel. The elk horn areas were masked off so there would only leave bare styrene in place after the paint was finished. This would give me a plastic surface to glue to later. You never want to glue onto paint because that's all the glue will stick to - the very weak adhesion between the paint and your project is what you're actually relying on. Always make sure to scrape away paint before gluing!

After masking off the shield rim, the center of the shield began quite a journey. Starting off with metallic teal green…

…then a few coats of translucent metallic blue…

This paint texture was really quite pretty in person - the hue and metallic pigments shift a lot in person and give the shield a lot of depth. The perimeter of the elk horns were airbrushed on with more Testor's Enamel and enamel airbrush medium. Keep that airbrush medium in mind, it's going to be important in a second. In the photo below the shield looks very very blue - this thing played hell with my cameras (I use a mixture of 4 different cameras when documenting my work) and it looked completely different from shot to shot.

The front of the shield is actually gold (and changes to silver along the outer edge without any sort of seam line at all) so the blue area and the back of the shield were masked off while the outer rim was painted gold.

While all this was happening, the elk horns were also painted silver, then masked off and painted gold in the center.

After allowing everything to cure for a full week (and each coat of paint was given 4 days cure time between layers) the shield was assembled! I gave the entire thing a beautiful coat of 2K Urethane clear…

…and 2 hours later it gave me a heart attack. This photo is slightly out of focus; I believe my hands were shaking as I took it.

The 2K Urethane clear had been tested on all of the surfaces prior to this numerous times, but I had never tried it over the Testor's Enamel Airbrush medium before. All of the cracking only took place where that specific thinned paint was used. Knowing that now helps me in the future, but at the time I had to choose whether to chisel off the elk horns (thus destroying them in the process and probably damaging the dome as well) and sanding the whole thing back down to nothing, or attempt to salvage this debacle. I decided to salvage it. The clearcoat was a rock at this point and all reaction had stopped, so I loaded the entire shield up with clear. By the end of things, there was probably 1/32" of solid urethane clear on this thing. After a few days of curing, I started on the surface with 400 grit wet sandpaper and some soapy water.

After about 5 hours of sanding, I had gone through 400, 600, 1000, and 2000 grit paper.

The next day, when my fingers had feeling again, I started buffing the newly smoothed surface. Starting with rubbing compound in medium cut then fine cut, followed by swirl remover, then three coats of tech wax. The results were… well, better than I could have ever hoped for.

With the paint salvaged (WHEW) I turned back to the last remaining details. The grip was cut from a piece of bar stock aluminum, heated and bent to shape then sanded and rounded over with a dremel. The arm strap was done by my friend Cathy at God Save the Queen Fashions.

Check out that pro shipping crate! This is how all my replicas travel these days.

The last detail was some light grime and weathering in the seams of the shield and on the inside of the elk horns. This was mostly done with an airbrush, but pressed into the seams with a damp cloth as well.

Here's the finished shield, and a few shots of it next to the completed sword (write up coming soon!)

I'm very glad to have salvaged this paint job and lucky as hell it turned out as pretty as it did. I don't want this to ever happen again, but it's nice to know I can pull it out of the fire when it does. If you'd like to see higher resolution shots of the final piece, check them out in the gallery.

Thanks for reading!

Shield of Whiterun, Skyrim

2013-02-13T23:10:00.000-05:00

Since I made a set of Banded Iron Armor for my Dragon*Con 2012 costume, I decided I wanted to build a shield to go with the matched set. There are all sort of amazing and intricate shields in Skyrim, but unfortunately I only had about three days to make mine… so I chose something a bit simpler.

While a Whiterun Shield isn't really something you'd carry around in game unless you wanted to show off the fact that you randomly killed some town guards, I had an affinity for Whiterun due to spending so much time there. Also, the celtic knots on the horse and the yellow color seemed to work well with the rest of the warmer earth tones in the armor. I started out with some simple illustrator blueprints. There are a lot of good references for these shields on the Elder Scrolls wiki, though for some reason the shields all seem a bit oval shaped in a model viewer. For the sake of symmetry, I decided to make mine round, and 24" in diameter.

I wanted to use real wood that could take stain, but the piece also had to be as light as possible for costuming purposes. My plan was to sandwich a piece of polystyrene foam with a few sheets of luan board, then stain the wood the appropriate color. I started out by telling my ~~shop monkey~~ assistant to trace the blueprints I made onto wood panels. She did one and I did the second, and man was this mind numbing.

After the patterns were transferred, I cut out the wood "slats" on my scroll saw. The edges were then beveled with my dremel tool to better simulate the look of separate boards that were fitted together.

The natural woodgrain of the luan is very subtle, since it's just sheet plywood. The actual shield looks like a much deeper grain that has been accentuated with age and inclement weather. I needed a way to carve a lot of very exaggerated wood grain texture into some thin wood paneling for a shield I'm working on. After trying out a couple methods with a router, hand files, and an engraving tool, it was looking like this segment of the project was going to take forever.

I figured what I needed was something like my scrollsaw, except with a dremel wheel attached to it. I pulled the blade from the saw, rigged my rotary tool with a clamp and a zip tie, and set up a few pieces of scrap board to set the table to the right height for the paneling. The patterns in this shot only took about 5 minutes, and I had the whole thing carved in a little over an hour.

After a little while the cutting wheel built up some dust and started leaving a burned edge behind it as it cut the patterns, but with the heavy stain the wood was going to get, this wasn't too problematic.

For stain, I bought some dark Minwax and brushed on two thick coats, wiping off excess while it cured to let a little more of the natural wood texture through. This isn't high end furniture work, but I think it turned out alright.

In order to make the shield thicker than the combined .25" thickness of the luan panels, I cut out a 24" circular disc of polystyrene foam to mount the pieces to.

Each board was dampened with water, spread with gorilla glue and placed on top of the foam. I piled everything heavy from my shop on top of it to keep the boards in place while they cured overnight. I call this "Adequate Clamping Pressure"

Four T-nuts were embedded into the back of the shield to hold the arm strap and handle in place. These only anchor into the wooden boards, and in retrospect it may have been a bit more structurally sound to adhere these two boards to one another as well. No failures yet, but I tend to over-enginner things for peace of mind.

The inner lip on the the shield was made with Apoxie Sculpt. As an added feature I hadn't counted on, this actually made the shield far stronger. than just the boards glued to a foam disc.

The remainder of the lip was built with bondo. Mostly this was a cost cutting measure since skinning the the entire outer edge in Apoxie Sculpt would cost an arm and a leg. I left some of the pits and gouges in the bondo when it was sanded to give the perimeter of the shield a bit more of a rougher edges like quickly banded metal. These are supposed to be utilitarian pieces made en masse for city guards, not museum pieces.

After taping off the wooden parts, the shield rim got a cot of primer and a few passes of hammered silver.

Onto painting! All of the work on the front of the shield was done with acrylics. The first pass was way, way too bright but I managed to pull it back down a bit more neutral later with some weathering and light yellow washes.

I will freely admit to being a bit spoiled by my laser cutting machine, and this was no exception. Painting the horse freehand would have been a disaster for me, so I made a set of paint masks, laser cut onto some stencil paper. Each quarter was laid down separately, then sponged over lightly to give me an outline of where to paint later.

Here's the finished sponged pass. I didn't want to go too heavy here and risk later layers of paint looking uneven.

After a lot of filling in and close attention to staying inside the lines (thanks, kindergarden art class!) I had a finished horsey. I don't think the Whiterun guards call him that, but I was kind of tired and loopy at this point so his name became "Horsey".

The shield still needed some weathering since the paint and horse were too vibrant, so I did a few layers of a more bleached out yellow, applied in streaks to give the paint a more uneven and randomly worn effect. This photo is an iPhone shot and it blows the colors out a bit, but the contrast helps call out the lighter areas somewhat better.

The finished shield! It only weighs about 2.5lbs, not bad for something this large.

Admittedly, the strap and handle aren't the most impressive things in the world. My leather skills have a long way to go.

After the convention was finished, I needed somewhere to put this thing. Unfortunately, there isn't much space on my walls for a 2-foot-large disc… but there's plenty of room on the floor! I keep all my replicas in my game room, so I decided to make a little end table out of this guy. I already had an end table in my gaming room, but it was a thrift store find leftover from my college days - water ring stains on unfinished wood and a wobbly frame. Still, it had parts I could pirate for this project. I yanked off the legs and stripped the old finish with my orbital sander.

The legs turned out to be red oak, so I picked up a couple matching boards at Home Depot and built a simple box frame. The center running board holds the shield in place, anchoring to the two T-nuts used to secure the arm strap.

Each corner has a small nylon furniture foot on it that keeps the frame from scuffing up the under/backside of the shield.

After sourcing a 24" sheet of glass for the top (thanks, Mom!) I now had a much more impressive side table for my game room than my leftover college thrift store find.

Obviously, it's not always this clean. Here it is in a more natural scenario…

Thanks for reading!

Combat Shotgun, Fallout

2013-01-17T21:20:00.000-05:00

I was commissioned recently to make a replica of the Terrible Shotgun (aesthetically identical to the Combat Shotgun) from Fallout 3 and New Vegas. If you've seen my previous AER-9 builds you know I'm a pretty big fan of the Fallout universe, and the Terrible Shotgun was a piece I'd wanted a chance to build for quite a while.

The finished piece!

A special thanks goes out to Mike McDermott (BillyBob884 on DeviantArt) for his pepakura skills: he put together a pep file of the Combat Shotgun available in very handy PDF format, that I referenced more than a few times during the course of this project. Thanks dude!

I should mention, this is a MASSIVE write up. Grab a cup of coffee, you're gonna be here a while.

This project is, I suppose, a bit more technical than some of the others I've done in the past. I think one of the nice part about my write ups is that things are largely pretty approachable. Recently I've made a really large vacuum forming machine, gained access to a laser cutter, and for this specific project I channeled my old Furniture Design degree and picked up a miniature milling machine to work with aluminum. While many of my previous projects require something akin to a bandsaw as the most complex tool, this shotgun is definitely not a "beginner" project.

Game render of the Combat Shotgun

Even still, the roots are similar. I started off by making blueprints in Illustrator, based on as much in-game reference as I could pull together.

The combat Shotgun is based quite heavily on a Russian machine gun put into service during WWII, the PPSH-41. Barrel heat sink, sights, drum magazine - many parallels can be drawn between the two designs. I started off with a PPSH diagram lifted from a vintage WWII manual which gave accurate millimeter dimensions of all the associated parts. I scaled the stock on the Combat shotgun to that of the PPSH rifle, and the remainder of the blueprint was scaled accordingly.

I chose to make the stock on the gun from laminated sections of red oak. The areas for the trigger mechanism and barrel mount were cut from the center section before gluing the sheets together, as this made these recessed cavities much easier to construct as opposed to chiseling them from a solid chunk of wood.

Red oak is about as easy to sand as a block of concrete, so more drastic methods were used to get the stock into shape. I started out with a rather angry looking grinding drum and gradually worked my way through 50 grit sanding paper all the way up to 400. I attempted to chisel out some sections, but the oak splinters very badly and I found grinding to be the best method of getting the proper look and feel.

The forward grip was also shaped from a block of red oak. The grip channels were added on my mill with a (very long) bit. It's what I had! The lower grip sits on a long threaded rod which passes into the rear stock and the magazine catch.

At this point I switched over to the drum magazines. These parts are assembled from three pieces which are all vacuum formed from ABS plastic. The bucks were made from MDF with acrylic parts and furniture tacks used for added raised details.

After the ABS was pulled over the bucks and trimmed out, the center section was inserted into a PVC coupler and gently heated until it retained the proper curve to match up to the front and back plates.

This is one of the magazines loosely assembled to check for fit.

These still needed a fair bit of additions to be functional. The finished gun was supposed to be able to exchange magazines easily, and I'd decided on a magnetic catch to hold them in place. Also, while the ABS held its shape fairly well, the large flat sections flexed very easily. The shot below shows the interior bracing of one of the ammo drums. The clear acrylic makes sure the outer panels don't flex inward, while the white styrene ring keeps the side panel in place during gluing, ensuring a proper tight fit.

The upper sections of the magazines were cut out in a semicircle, and an ABS pipe was glued in place (sanded down from the last shot below, that was just rough placement.) The inner diameter of this pipe matches the outer diameter of the heat shield on the gun, where matching magnets were mounted. A large ceramic magnet was epoxied to the inside of this piece before gluing the magazine shut.

The last pieces for the drum magazine were the alignment panel and wing nut. The white piece on the front here mates up with a channel in the magazine holder on the gun, which makes sure the magazine doesn't shift around The wing nut is a piece I molded in order to make multiple copies for multiple magazines.

Getting back to the meat of the build, I had sourced a few different diameters and thicknesses of aluminum pipe for the barrel and heat shield. Over the course of the project, I milled/drilled/tapped dozens of holes in these pieces for various elements.

This area of the gun is the inside of the magazine holder, and the four large holes mark where 4 neodymium magnets are mounted to hold the magazine in place. The slot cut out of the inner barrel makes sure this clears the magnets when all the parts are installed. The magnets themselves aren't actually glued into anything; they sit inside the drilled holes and pull towards a steel plate held in place on the inside of the heat shield. The pull on these is much stronger than the pull against the actual drum magazine, so they're not going anywhere.

The magazine holder itself was made out of several pieces of laser cut acrylic, laminated together. Might be hard to follow the progression from the first shot to the second here, but these are just a bunch of flat parts glued into a big brick!

A few additional elements were made out of lathed urethane resin for the mag holder. These make up the small round drums in the front and back. The front piece had to be sanded to shape to mate up with the heat shield, so I spray mounted some 120 grit paper to a section of scrap pipe and gradually removed material until I had the desired shape.

This U-shaped channel in the front mates up to the panel on the front of the magazines mentioned earlier. The rounded edge makes it easier to get the magazine into the slot even if your approach is a bit off.

There's a large block on the front, which probably has a name I can't identify, which was made with a similar "layered" process. The base parts were all trimmed in 1/8" acrylic, and the various sized holes correspond to screws and pipe that need to fit into the front and rear sections of the part.

This pic explains that last sentence a bit better. The rear of this block holds the grip piston in place, while the sling swivel is mounted to the front.

In the shot above you can see the finished forward sight and ghost ring. These both started life as boring chunks of aluminum. The ghost ring was gradually hammered over a round buck (for much longer than I'd expected) to get the proper shape. Holes were drilled in the mounting tabs that lined up to tapped holes on the heat shield.

The actual forward sight was a block of 1/4" thick aluminum milled down into something a little narrower and more detailed. I am very lucky to have inherited some of my grandfather's milling bits which have enabled me to do small detail work like this without having to sell a kidney in order to afford the necessary mill accessories.

Speaking of aluminum work, there was plenty to do on the trigger mechanism. Side plates were cut from 1/8" thick stock, while the trigger itself was milled out of 1/4" material. Threaded spacers and a return spring completed the main mechanical assembly.

This drops pretty neatly into the cavity in the stock, and I cut a thin aluminum plate to cover up the mechanism.

A trigger guard was hammered over a wooden buck, then threaded for some very small machine screws and mounted to the plate.

The last part of the trigger assembly is the safe/semi/auto switch in front of the actual trigger. On a real PPSH this is a slide switch, but in the Fallout game files it's a toggle. Weird, since the gun has no full auto feature, but I just makes it like I sees it.

Moving forward and a little bit up to the barrel heat shield again, I needed to make all the bits that sit at the back near the shell eject port. The shroud around the barrel was made from ABS pipe and laminated acrylic; I cut the port on the side with the mill.

The rear sight and safety switch (I guess thats what the block behind the sight is supposed to be?) were made from acrylic parts, then molded and cast with aluminum powder in urethane resin. The stock butt plate was molded along with these parts, after being sculpted from a block of urethane tooling board.

The rear shroud slips over the barrel heat shield, and is held in place by the screws securing the iron sight and rear safety switch.

One last part was made from resin for the rear of the rifle - the barrel end cap. This was initially lathed, then put in the mill to have one side leveled off in order to lay flat over the rear stock.

You might have noticed the glossy and pretty stock in the shot above. Both the stock and the grip received several coats of wood stain, buffed with steel wool between each coat. After allowing to dry for several days, these parts were buffed with paste wax. Shiny! I also added a rear sling swivel (off a 1914 Enfield) to the rear stock.

At this point, all the major components were finished! The gun is built in such a way that it can be taken apart down to its individual components if any maintenance needs to be done (it was originally intended for a film shoot.) All parts are screwed together and there are no glue joints. Below are all the parts laid out before assembly (screws not shown) then after assembly. I did many test fits to make sure everything worked together, and there is a very specific order you have to go through to put it all into one gun.

All of the painted parts were put on hangers, then painted with black primer followed by Testor's "buffable metalizer" paint in gunmetal gray. The color on this paint is beautiful, and it can be buffed with a soft cloth to a nice metallic sheen.

Weathering was done in a fairly subtle way. The aluminum pieces were scuffed along the edges with a 220 grit sanding sponge to bring out the natural metal color underneath. Plastic and resin parts were dry brushed with enamel paint to match this effect.

After all the parts were dry brushed then clear coated and given 24 hours to dry, the gun was laid out for assembly! I'm no pro when it comes to field stripping and rebuild, so the process of making this into one finished prop took me a little under 2 hours. The finishing touch on the gun was a vintage PPSH-41 strap, shipped direct from Russia!

It's a blast to hold and you feel like a total bad ass walking around with it. I wouldn't really suggest that last part outside of your living room though, because you could easily mistake this cannon for the real thing and get in a lot of trouble!

Pics of the final shotgun, taken by my good friend Dan Almasy. Extra props in the set up really complete the look!

The butt plate on the gun is engraved with the Dracogen logo, the official sponsor of MANY things "geek" culture and the commissioner of this fine piece here.

Total time from start to finish on this project was 4 weeks. Not bad for such a complex project!

If you'd like more pics about the gun's build (believe it or not, I left a LOT out of this build description!) the please take a look at my Flickr. Larger resolution images of the finished piece can be found in my portfolio gallery.

Thanks for reading!

Steel Axe, Skyrim

2012-11-05T09:57:00.001-05:00

(This post was published on my website, www.volpinprops.com, about 2 weeks ago. I will be continuing to update my blogspot, but if you want to keep up with more timely updates as projects finish, check out the new site!)

One of these axes will be for sale through Desert Bus 6 this year. It is one of only 3 made, and the only one being offered for public sale!

Continuing with the Skyrim trend, but not a helmet this time!

There are all sorts of intricate and complicated weapons in Skyrim, but the Steel weapons - low level though they may be - possessed a very cool concentric circle pattern to them that I thought looked particularly awesome. When a client asked me if I had any interest in making the one-handed axe, I jumped on the project.

The base shape of the axe was laid out in illustrator, and I used these blueprints extensively in making the mold master.

The axe head was where I started my efforts, and this began with several layered pieces of laser cut acrylic. Having the blueprints in vector format made transitioning to laser cut pieces very easy.

Angled risers in the center make up an internal frame structure that makes sure the layer on top has the proper curve to it. The facing edge was added in thin styrene sheet in order to make the curve from the center of the axe head out to the blade.

The whole project was really an exercise in layering. More styrene was cut on the laser to make up the outer perimeter edges of the axe, which surround the concentric circle patterns. Panels like this were added to the top and bottom as well as the sides of the axe.

Things don't come out of the laser cutter perfect though. There was a lot of sanding and cleanup in order to get the edges crisp and round.

With the base form done, the blade sections of the head were filled in with apoxie sculpt, then sanded down to a pointed edge. There was a also a bit of cleanup needed in the center area of the axe head where the styrene edges curved into the middle.

Behind the raised filigree patterns is a stippled texture. This was simulated with Rustoleum multicolored textured spraypaint. I've used this in the past to make a grip texture on pistols and rifles, and the effect it gave me here was pretty spot on to what I saw in the game renderings. The outer edges were masked off first before spraying.

The filigree parts were laser cut (man I love that thing!) from .020" styrene. The outer edges trimmed out before were .060", so this very thin stock provided a small raised section while still sitting lower than the surrounding parts.

The last piece needed for the axe head was the top nut, which was lathed from a resin block and glued to the top of the axe head master.

Next up was the neck and pommel. These followed a similar technique to the axe head. I started off both with blocks of sintra, then layered on styrene to build up the perimeter shapes. The neck part was more geometric, while the pommel was a bit more of an exercise in free-form dremel and belt sander sculpting.

The neck section at the beginning. The little tabs at the base serve the same purpose as the ones in the axe head, giving shape to the styrene layer which will go on top.

This technique needed a lot of putty on the seams to make everything flush and pretty, but the end result was great.

A bit of apoxie sculpt on the sides, then some furniture tacks for rivets and filigree parts cut from .020" styrene.

The pommel had essentially the same build process, but with a little bit of bondo filler tossed in to make everything smooth and even on the curved panels.

Handle was up next. It's wood, right? Let's make it out of wood.

What started life as a simple humble 2x4 wall stud has a much more glamorous existence now. Sometimes I feel bad for all the sheets of MDF at Home Depot that have to live as shelves instead of space guns and cool weapons. Anyhow, I added some chunky cuts into the upper area of the handle to better match the game art.

Last part! These little guys are the rivets that would hold the pommel onto the handle. They'll be decorative on my axes, in order to make the handle wrap easier to do later on.

Now toss everything in clay and throw some rubber on it. The pink rubber here is Mold Max 30, the greenish stuff is Mold Max 40. 40-weight is my new preferred material for block molds like this.

Wait 12 hours, then repeat.

Molds finished!

These parts were cast in Smooth Cast 320 urethane resin with black tint. There's a process called "cold casting" which I've done on my helmets in the past, but only for a subtle metallic texture underneath paint and weathering. For these parts, I first powdered the molds with aluminum, then poured in resin with aluminum powder mixed into the plastic.

Once the part is cured, you can buff it with 000 steel wool, then polish it to a bright metallic shine. I used Mother's aluminum mag wheel polish on my parts to get them this shiny.

Plugs and rods were inserted into the neck, head and pommel then epoxied into place. A 3/8" steel threaded rod runs the entire length of the handle on these pieces, making them extremely rigid.

My friend Cathy over at God Save The Queen Fashions did the wraps on the handles for these pieces. The axe that was sent to my client has the correct tan color to it, but I have a thing for the color red, and asked that my handle wrap look a little different.

After a light pass of weathering to darken the recessed areas around the filigree, the project was finished! The final piece weighs about 2.5lbs and measures 26" long.

The Shield of Whiterun is another project I wrapped up over the summer which still needs a writeup. It'll be a short one, but expect that to come soon!

More pictures of the build process in higher resolution are available on my Flickr page and in the Gallery if you're interested in learning a bit more detail about the project.

Thanks for reading!

New Website!

2012-10-19T15:50:00.001-04:00

Volpin Props has moved! Or, rather, expanded.

I've got a new website which will eventually be the new home of all my posts, updates, blog updates, and big fancy gallery images. There's also easier ways to submit commission requests and see if any cast parts or digital files are for sale.

There's still a few tweaks needed on the new site, but everything will be running smooth ASAP. The blog there will be RSS compatible if you'd like to subscribe for new updates.

If you're really attached to Blogger, have no fear! I will continue to be updating the blogspot, though the posts will come about a week after the blog postings go live on www.volpinprops.com.

Here's a taste of some of the project write-ups that will be upcoming on the new site:

Click this link for the new site, and thanks for reading!

Helm of Yngol, Skyrim

2012-09-11T14:53:00.000-04:00

So I've been on a bit of a Skyrim kick recently. I've completed several projects from the world of Tamriel which will be popping up on this blog in the next few weeks, but the first one I'd like to feature from my latest build bonanza is the Helm of Yngol.

Originally the client who commissioned this piece was interested in getting the more standard Iron Helmet, but stumbled on this piece in one of the many caves in Skyrim and immediately changed his order!

If you're interested in a more immediate recap, I ran a GoPro camera in my shop while this project was being built. 280 gigs of video and a full day of editing later, you can watch the entire process in less than 4 minutes!

The process here is very similar to my other helmet builds, most notably the Female Draugr/Ancient Nord Helmet I completed earlier this year. A basic frame was constructed from 1/4" MDF and filled with blocks of insulation foam, which were carved into a rough shape.

The basic form was then painted with acrylic paint. This is a barrier - the extruded polystyrene insulation foam is very solvent sensitive, and the bondo process in the next steps would dissolve it if not for this coating.

There were several coats of polyester filler used to build up the shape and make things symmetrical. The green stuff in these shots is "Rage Gold" by Evercoat. Sands very smoothly and spreads evenly too.

A little while into the sanding process, I noticed that the brow section was far too narrow. Using my blueprints, I traced out the brow section and transferred it onto some 3/16" masonite. The gap below this was then filled with some florist's foam. Florist's foam is less reactive to solvents, so you can spread polyester filler directly on top of it without the acrylic coating needed on the pink foam.

Couple sketched lines to get the feel of where things are going. Getting better!

The shape was refined and smoothed with coats of filler primer and thin passes of more filler until the shape was sufficiently smooth enough.

In the Female Draugr helmet, I took a dremel and carved out each "hammer dent" individually. Despite this being handmade, the end result still looks somewhat uniform and more than one person has likened the surface appearance to a golf ball.

For Yngol, I took a different approach. The finished surface of the helmet was covered in a very thin layer of apoxie sculpt (about 1/16" thick) which was then dented repeatedly with the backside of an engraving tool. This made the final surface much more random in pattern and depth and didn't take nearly as much time as the dremel method from before.

After completing the hammered texture, I attached the horn bases. These started out as vacuum formed styrene discs with acrylic rings glued to the helmet sides. After securing them in place, they got the same apoxie sculpt and hammered texture as the rest of the helmet.

The face plate section came next. Styrene eye markers were trimmed out and glued to the helmet base as markers for where the sculpted elements needed to be positioned.

I don't recommend the white apoxie sculpt to anyone looking to have clean, crisp details. I happened to purchase the wrong kind when shopping for sculpting supplies and my distributor is an hour from my house, so I was kind of stuck with it. The white apoxie has a more "fluffy" quality to it and won't take an edge or very sharp detail well. In my opinion, the "natural" color is much better. After a lot of shaping with clay tools and a bunch of water, the faceplate was textured and left to cure overnight.

The side filigree received a similar texture. I trimmed out the pattern from some construction paper in order to transfer it to the helmet shape. This also made sure the trace lines on the left and right sides were as identical as possible.

Starting out... Pretty rough.

And cleaned up, with hammered texture finished.

Next up (and again, I was just trying to burn through the white apoxie sculpt at this time, hence why I'm being sort of liberal in using it!) were the horns. These have a polystyrene foam base and are skinned in apoxie sculpt. Their base is an acrylic disc, which allows them to fit into the plug on the horn base. These needed very little sanding after a coat of filler primer.

The helmet was painted in primer to spot any small issues that still needed filling/sanding, then the rivets were added. These are 3/8" furniture tacks, and there's over 50 of them in this thing.

A coat of primer, then a coat of gloss enamel, and it's ready for mold making!

I don't have many extensive steps of the print coat/thickened coats here - if you're more curious about the finer points of molding a helmet, check out my Daft Punk Thomas helmet write up for more details there. The material used on this helmet is Rebound 40 - thicker than what I typically use, but I wasted to try something new.

The horn molds are one piece with a slit up the inside in order to demoed the finished casting. This slit in the silicone is situated on a thickened channel to help make sure the two sections register properly when the mold is assembled. The horns themselves are cast in a thin coat of Smooth Cast 320, then filled with expanding foam in order to keep the weight down.

The helmet itself is cold cast in aluminum powder with Smooth On's ONYX resin.

Cast parts trimmed and assembled!

Cold casting powders allow you to buff the surface of your casting with fine grit steel wool in order to get a metallic shine. The helmets (I made 2) were buffed with 000 steel wool, then I added gouge marks and other lighter damage with my dremel tool.

Weathering these pieces was a mix of acrylic airbrush washes in black and various browns, followed by some heavier brush painted acrylics in the seam lines.

The helmets were rusted with ferrous iron powder. This was sprayed with a mixture of vinegar, hydrogen peroxide and salt, then left to cure overnight.

The horns were painted in a gradient using an airbrush and three different mixtures of brown. The base color of the 320 resin - an off white - meant I did not need to base coat the horns after sanding the castings.

A few coats of clear later to protect the finish and weathering, and the project is complete!

My client got the better of the two helmets - mine was a test piece and is actually a fair bit thicker than the final production piece. A few segments of thin foam squares pad the inside of the helmet to the proper height.

A few detail shots:

More pictures of the process are available on my Flickr page. If you're interested in seeing daily updates of my projects as they happen, then please stop by my Facebook and subscribe!

Thanks for reading!

Mr. Destructoid Helmet V2

2012-08-16T10:44:00.000-04:00

About three years ago when I was first getting started in the whole propmaking thing, the guys from Destructoid.com asked me to make a big mascot head for them to wear at conventions and such. I had no idea what I was doing, but the finished piece looked pretty good despite weighing 10lbs and being made from masonite and polyester resin.

This thing has been all over the world and has had the crap kicked out of it. The eyes were knocked out, battery cable torn out, at some point someone installed a speaker system inside it attached to an iPod. Its on its last legs after three years of game conventions and parties, so they're after a replacement.

Re-imagined plans:

My plan is to make the new one out of all vacuum formed parts, and incorporate each element into the main buck so things won't snap off. Ears will be connected to the sides, and the mouth/eyebrows will be connected to the faceplate. This helmet will also have LED eyes with 20 sequenced patterns.

If you're a regular reader of this blog, you might recall the Proto-Form Vacuum forming machine I built a few months ago. That machine was constructed specifically for this project! The large scale of this helmet combined with the thickness of the materials I'd need to be working with meant a new higher-end vacformer was in order. It definitely lived up to expectations, and has been a very valuable addition to my shop.

I started off by making some of the simpler forms from sheets of MDF. The faceplate and side panels were layered 1/2" sheets with accent pieces cut to shape on a scroll saw. Since the side panels are symmetrical from left to right, I would only need to make one of these bucks in order to pull copies for both sides.

The large ear puck started out as a 2" thick chunk of MDF, rough cut into an octagon before being turned on a lathe. The final piece has a hole drilled through the center in order to allow air to be pulled into the large divot during vacuum forming.

The top of the helmet would be a bit too thick to make out of a solid brick of wood, so I started by making a set of MDF spines that would have 1/4" secured to it with brad nails.

After the outer "skin" was completed, I filled the interior cavity with expanding foam to make sure the vacuum of the machine wouldn't crush the thinner wood.

The backside of the old helmet had a riveted strip at the top, similar to the eyebrow section on the front. Mostly this was just to add some visual interest, but for the new one I thought adding the Destructoid name to the plastic would be a much more interesting look. The guys at Destructoid supplied me with their font, and I cut the logo out of 1/8" acrylic on my laser cutter.

Using the negative space as a frame for the new letters, the acrylic was glued to the back side buck. I had to drill small holes in the corners of some of the letters to make sure the air would be sucked through them to give me a nice detailed pull.

The last buck that needed to be made was for the large eye lenses. This, again, started as a couple laminated pieces of MDF. After a bunch of turning, sanding and filling, I had a smooth pretty dome.

Onto the forming… almost! Before this, I made a series of drafts for the forms out of 1/2" MDF. Pieces like these make it much easier to remove the finished part from the van formed plastic, and also make sure that you don't get a lot of nasty webbing along your corners. I made these parts in several different lengths so the same set could be used for all the parts. The upper section of the helmet needed two large custom blocks made for the sides, however.

Plastic time! All of these parts were pulled from .10" styrene. The detail I got on the letting was VERY impressive. I really love this new machine.

After trimming, I taped all the pieces together to see how things were shaping up. Pretty much exactly as I'd imagined, thankfully.

The eye pucks were pulled out of 1/16" PETG plastic, on my old smaller vacuum forming machine. The wire grid there ensures you still get vacuum even if all the holes are blocked with plastic.

These clear parts were then dyed red with a material called "iDye Poly" I had one test piece, shown here, that I used to check fitment of the eye areas. I'd like to claim that that fine edged lip in the faceplate was entirely intentional, but it was just a very fortunate accident that happened to look cool!

The large bolt heads were trimmed from 1/8" acrylic, and had a screw embedded in between their two halves to secure them to the helmet faceplate. The longer threads of the screws came in handy later when I was routing wiring around inside there; they allowed me to use some wire C-clamps and additional nuts to make sure all the wiring was clean and tidy.

At the base of the helmet, I added a reinforcing plate made out of 3/8" sintra. This plate would eventually be the mounting plate for all of the electronics and wiring for the eyes.

Speaking of wiring, it was at about this time that my circuit boards showed up. The boards for this project seem overly complicated, and they kind of are. I would have much rather made the entire "eye" board out of one PCB, but unfortunately the software I work with (Cadsoft's EAGLE layout editor) has a small working area on the free version, so I had to come up with a different solution. Each segment of the eyes would be its own separate board, and these would all need to be wired together for power, ground and signal. More complicated, yes, but it works!

The soldered boards. Using SMD components helped me keep these fairly small, and the frosted red LEDs have a very nice full 180º viewing angle. Boards were printed at BatchPCB.com

Wiring was… messy for the first few passes.

Here's the LED holder being cut on my laser (I'm a bit spoiled with this thing, I know…)

And the assembled eye lighting rigs. There are holes cut in these to help the wearer have a bit more vision out of the helmet than in previous models. In the old helmet, you could only look out of the mouth section. While the LEDs reflecting against the lenses does make looking out of the eyes a tad difficult, it's better than having a big solid wall in front of your face!

First test fire!

This is the little brain chip that makes all the animations possible. This was created by a very talented electronics guru, Donnie James. There are tons of animation sequences this little chip can do, and this helmet has about 20 patterns programmed into it. If you'd like to order your own, you can find a link to his products here.

More wire mess.

The eyes installed!

After a lot of wire wrap, zip ties, and conduit mounts, things start to look cleaner inside the helmet. I guess it's a hold over from my days doing car audio installation, but I have a sort of mania about wires being clean and routed properly.

The baseplate section with the brain box installed (lower left) and battery tray (lower right.) The helmet runs off 4 AA batteries and should get about 20 hours of life out of one set.

Onto paint! The assembled helmet was stripped of all the electronics and internals, leaving me with a blank shell that got a couple coats of primer. The helmet right now is just held together with superglue around the seams, but this will be strengthened later after paint with some rivets along the various holes you can see here. I really recommend anyone doing projects like these to install all your mounting points and drill all your holes before you put the final paint coat on the project you're building. The likelihood of scratching a nice finish when you're trying to figure out how to mount a component is too high - I know I've done it!

Silver accents being masked off on the faceplate.

The green paint was sprayed quite thick, then allowed to cure for 7 days. After this, the entire helmet was wet sanded down to 2000 grit sandpaper.

After the wet sanding, the entire piece was buffed with swirl remover, then given 5 coats of Meguiar's Tech Wax. The results are very shiny!

In this shot you can see the "little red button" on the lower front side of the helmet near the ear recess. All of the programming and control of the illumination board is done through this button. You can change animations, speed up or slow down, turn on power saver mode, etc.

The last step after re-mounting all of the components was to add the rivets to the seams to strengthen the structure a bit.

To make shipping and transporting this bucket easier and safer, I also built a custom shipping crate for it. My friend Cathy over at God Save the Queen Fashions even had some scrap green terrycloth around to make a protective shipping sack to further protect the paint and finish. The crate weighs about 10x what the helmet does, but it's really secure in there!

The final result! Thanks (again!) to my friend Dan Almasy for doing the great photography here.

The finished piece weighs just over 3lbs and is quite comfortable to wear. There's a foam pad at the top of the helmet and it is secured to the wearer's head with an adjustable chin strap.

I really recommend you check out the high res version of the pic below - this shows off the finished result really well!

Thanks for reading, and if you'd like to see more higher resolution shots of the process, check out my Flickr page.

Dovahfett for Make-a-Wish

2012-06-09T13:25:00.002-04:00

Several months ago I got an email from a my friend Art Andrews asking if I would be interested in taking part in a very, very cool project. At Star Wars Celebration, a convention held in Orlando, there have been past exhibitions where artists were given Vader and Stormtrooper helmets, then allowed to modify them to whatever they wished. Afterwards, the helmets were auctioned off for charity to benefit the Make-a-Wish foundation. The organization heading this up for Star Wars Celebration is the As You Wish Helmet Project.

This year, at Celebration VI, 40 artists were asked to portray their interpretations of helmets belonging to Clonetroopers and Boba Fett. I was asked to modify one of the Fett helmets.

My Finished Product!

I should note that I am in some terrifyingly professional company here. This project will eventually feature helmet redesigns from artists like Sandy Dhuyvetter (who painted three of the original screen used Boba Fett helmets) to full scale production giants like Legendary Effects (who's work you may have seen in The Avengers, Thor, Ironman, etc) and WETA Workshop (Avatar, The Lord of the Rings, etc.) Intimidating, but also quite an honor to showcase my stuff next to theirs.

I received the helmet blank casting in the mail - this is a reproduction from a screen used piece, and many of the iconic marks can be traced back to original paint and weathering. Some people may balk at hacking something so accurate to shreds, but it was actually pretty fun!

I started out by marking off where I would cut, trim, sand down and add panels. If you couldn't tell from the image above or the title of this entry, I would be making my helmet follow an aesthetic similar to the helms in Skyrim. I've been playing a lot of that game over the past few months, and I guess it has made me want to bolt horns to everything.

Because I'm a bit of a jerk, I decided to make a bit of a jab at the Fett helmet following by migrating the iconic "dent" to the wrong side of the helmet. Personally, I've always thought someone would take the time to hammer this thing out, but I guess Boba is a busy man. (As a side note, I briefly considered molding the dented area and constructing a helmet made up of nothing but hundreds of dents grafted together.) Cut out areas were taped back in place with tin tape, then resined back into position with some chopped strand fiberglass mat. Other ancillary bits were shaved flat or filled in to fit the final design idea.

A bit of bondo and filler, and the modifications started to blend back into the helmet shape.

Lines were scribed for the raised helmet frame sections, then styrene plates were heated to shape and glued to the helmet base.

I wanted the visor area to look like a band of metal that went around the base of the helmet and riveted to the dome. I had to extend the back line with another piece of styrene to make this look the part, then fill in the resulting gap with filler to blend it into one shape.

Apoxie sculpt was used to blend the styrene into and over joint sections to give the raised areas the illusion of sheet metal bent over underlying shapes.

With the base shape starting to come together, I needed to shift focus and start work on the horns. My idea was to show one of these cracked in half, and to have the rest of the helmet display similar amounts of damage and neglect. I wanted a piece that looked like it has just been unearthed and put on display.

The horns started out as pink insulation foam, trimmed with a bandsaw then shaped on my belt sander. After grabbing one and snapping it in half, these were coated with brushed-on urethane resin and rough sanded.

The horn texture was made with more apoxie sculpt, first layered over the entire horn then scribed with varying depths of lines to give them a more organic feel.I don't get to work on a whole lot of organic stuff, and while I admit I'm still learning how to get these sorts of textures to be convincing, this was a really fun step in the process.

To affix these to the helmet, I drilled a depression into the foam in the horn, then inserted a threaded rod. This chamber was then filled with casting resin to secure the rod in place.

Drill a couple of holes in the sides of the helmet, and we've got horns!

For the horn base, I started by cutting a disc of sintra and heating it until it conformed to the contour of the horn itself. A dremel was used to shave down the perimeter so that the plate matched the horn exactly. These plates were glued to the helmet, then blended into the base with more apoxie sculpt. I also added a small pin to the base of the horn to act as a registration key so the horn will always be mounted in the same position.

With the base form complete, I set about weathering. I wanted this thing to look old. Old, and very beat up. Using a dremel tool with a couple different ball engraving bits, I started hacking into several spots and building up a "corroded" texture where it looked like the metal had been eaten away. For the spots where the texture breaks through the surface, I sanded away from the back side to create an uneven organic opening.

This method was repeated in several areas around the helmet.

Carpet tacks were used to simulate rivets on the bands of the helmet. I used two different sizes to vary the appearance a bit. Pre-drilling these is a necessity. I also trimmed off the pointy bits on the inside.

The ball engraving bits were used again around the perimeter base of the helmet, along the edges of the bands, and next to the heavy gouges to give more texture.

At some point a while ago, it was decided by some friends and me that a skull mounted inside the helmet would be a perfect finishing touch. Since I'm still getting my footing with organic sculpting, I opted to purchase one to modify. Mine came from eBay, and its original purpose was to assist in educating future dentists. Not today, buddy.

I started by cutting out several of the teeth and removing the lower jaw and mounting points. The teeth were molded as one part, so I had to cut them into sections then grind down the remaining plastic.

After a bit of thought, I eventually decided that Mr. Skull needed to have a gaping cavity in his temple that would line up with the large crater missing out of the visor. That was a bad day for him. To make up for it, I decided to glue his head back together - the yellow line in the shot below is a bead of epoxy where the skull has originally been sectioned into two parts.

Two holes were drilled in the crown of the skull to act as mounting points. These line up with a sintra "spine" that has two bolts embedded into it, epoxied on the top inside of the helmet.

Weathering the skull was a blast. Lots of brown and yellow washes, the older the better. I would constantly forget I had done this and spook the hell out of myself when I walked into my shop to see this creepy thing staring at me.

With the skull weathering complete, I started on the helmet. Admittedly, this was a new attempt and everything from this step on was pretty experimental to me. I had done some tests on scrap plastic though, and felt at least halfway confident I wouldn't ruin all my previous work.

I started by taking black acrylic paint and mixing it with cabosil to make it thicker. This was sponged over the helmet using an organic sea sponge to build up texture. I taped off the bands for the first pass and textured them later so they would have a differing pattern than the surrounding surface.

This texture got a coat of gray primer, then a quick scuff with a sanding sponge to knock down any pointed high spots.

After allowing to dry for a couple days (acrylic this thick says spongy for a while) the helmet got a basecoat of copper/brass paint. This is actually a mix of 5 different cans of spraypaint – from a nearly black-brown to a reddish copper – that gives the finish a mottled mix of colors.

Weathering began once this was dry. I started by sponging on a pale green wash of acrylic over the whole helmet, concentrating on the deepest areas of weathering.

This was followed up with a coat of satin clear to seal in the acrylic.

Afterwards, the helmet got a wash of dark browns in the seam areas, followed by a very bright teal/green along the seams and heavy pockmarks. The green was again done with the sea sponge.

For the horns, I started with a coat of textured off-white. I also made a mounting plate that secured to a lazy susan I use for painting in order to make the weatheirng easier.

These got several washes of brown and black, deeper in color at the base and fading out as they went up. After they were finished, the horns were sealed with matte clear. For matte clear, I prefer Krylon #1311.

After mounting the skull inside the finished helmet, it seemed like the darkness of the helmet was obscuring all the weathering work I'd done. The solution, of course, was LEDs!

Three warm white LEDs were mounted to the inside of the upper brim of the visor to illuminate the skull when mounted in position. They are powered by 3 AAA batteries and controlled by a toggle switch in the back of the helmet. As much of the wiring as possible was painted flat black.

My very good friend Dan Almasy volunteered to do the final photography on this piece, and the photo session wrapped up just a few short hours before the helmet went in a shipping crate off to the auction handlers.

I am extremely happy with the weathering on this, and it was an excellent opportunity to be able to test out some techniques I haven't had the ability to try before.

If you're at Star Wars Celebration, stop by the display and say hi to Dovahfett!

More pictures of the build process and final result (in huge resolution!) are available on my Flickr page.

Be sure to visit the As You Wish Helmet Project on Facebook to stay up to date with these helmets. The final build will be available for purchase on eBay in the late summer! I'll have an update at that time here as well as on my own Facebook page.

Thanks for reading!

Nord Helmet photoshoot with Manzi DeYoung

2012-05-30T10:28:00.002-04:00

About a month ago I was wrapping up my Skyrim Female Ancient Nord/Draugr Helmet project, and posted some of the progress over at my facebook page. One of the people commenting on the progress had a profile picture of them wearing a fantastic Dovahkiin costume, which got the gears turning...

While finished props sitting on a white background are always nice for a simple portfolio piece, I had to see what my helmet looked like with a complete set of armor!

Manzi DeYoung is the model and builder of the Iron Armor/weapons and Dragonborn costume shown here (armor and cloth work? This lady is going to take all my clients!) After following her comment to her own facebook fanpage, I dropped her an email asking if she wouldn't mind doing a shoot with her armor and my freshly finished helmet. I got a very enthusiastic "yes" and we were off! All photography work is credit to Max Song.

A few medical issues prevented the final shoot from lining up with my blog post about the helmet build process, but the results were worth the wait and I think its better to showcase cool pics like this on their own post instead of after along build log anyways.

I think its worth clarifying a second time just in case anyone missed it: The only thing I made here is the helmet. Manzi is a fellow prop maker out on the west coast, and the armor she's modeling is a result of her efforts, not mine!

If you'd like to see some more of Manzi's work, you can check out her website here. I've only posted a handful of my personal favorite shots from this photoset, but more can be found (and, as always, in higher resolution!) on my Flickr page.

Thanks for reading!

Protoform Vacuum Forming Machine

2012-05-23T18:52:00.001-04:00

Quite a bit ago I was able to get my first vacuum forming machine up and running, using not much more than an old toaster oven, a shop vac, and my parents' old telephone table from their kitchen (with, I should add, their permission to do so!) Anyone interested in that project can take a look at the build log here. Its been a great tool to have and has been very useful for the past few years its been in service.

This budget-miniformer has worked wonderfully considering the cost and time it took to produce, but as I've been getting more and more complex projects recently, I've been needing a machine capable of pulling larger pieces of plastic as well as thicker and more detailed pulls. I had done a lot of research in the past when planning my mini-former project, and had run across the Protoformer Vacuum Forming machine plans over at www.build-stuff.com more than a couple of times.

The plans are $65, and worth every penny. I highly suggest anyone interested in making a large professional level machine look into purchasing either these, or some of the other smaller format machine plans available on the Build-Stuff website. The end result (after a lot of effort and a fair bit of cost, its worth mentioning) is a hugely capable and very professional looking tool.

My personal build did not follow these directions exactly; I made modifications to the plans in certain key areas which other people who have built these instructions will recognize right off. These were not improvements, but rather implemented as a result of budget concerns, personal limitations (I don't have access to welding equipment) and the types of jobs the machine will see. I'll explain these when they pop up in the project log.

First off, I started by building the frame table. This is a bit smaller than the ones laid out in the instructions as my shop is pretty cramped these days and I needed something with a smaller footprint. Also, I had plans to change the lift rails and oven supports, and I needed a narrower chassis to do so. These are just 2x4 framing studs, glued and screwed together.

The vacuum itself would be provided by a 3cfm air pump I purchased at Harbor Freight. The 11 gallon surge tank that holds the vacuum was also from HB. To pull thicker materials like Acrylic, I may have to add another tank in the future, but for the styrene and PET plastic I'm working with now, these two will work fine.

A shelf was added to the bottom of the cart, made from 3/4" plywood. The upper table area was cut from 1/2" MDF. Both were sealed with shellac before mounting onto the machine. After mounting points were drilled, the frame was painted with flat gray house paint left over from my laser cutter cabinet project.

The original plans call for the oven support arms to be a set of 4 uprights welded to a steel box that will sit on the chassis. I chose to drill holes through the side of the uprights and bolt them directly to the chassis sides. This saved me some money in box steel as well as saved the complexity and time of cutting parts to length and welding them together. I also substituted 1" steel box stock for the 1.5" outlined in the instructions. My machine will see occasional use every few weeks and I didn't think the added beefy steel was necessary.

The oven frame box was built next. This is a proprietary design and made to specifically hold the heating elements sold by Build-Stuff.com. I chose to leave all the parts of the machine related to the heating and electrical system as close to the instructions as possible.

The outside of the box is made from poplar, and the inside metal grid secures to the outside box with a series of screws.

I used 2 pieces of 1" angle steel to hold the oven box in place. These are bolted to the uprights and pull double duty; they keep the uprights a set width apart and keep the oven box level and above the platen.

The platen was also modified, though again for budget reasons. I chose to repeat the design from my first vacformer, but incorporate cues from the Protoform design as well. 2 pieces of 1/2" MDF sandwich a 1/4" piece to create the inner cavity. A steel mesh frame is mounted in between the open sections to make sure the cavity doesn't crush inward under the pressure of the vacuum.

A 1" threaded PVC insert was cut from the bottom center section and sealed with RTV silicone. The hose from the dump valve to the air tank will mount here later.

The upper section was routed to have a round corner, then the assembly was glued, clamped, and sealed with shellac.

Unfortunately, a test pull once the machine was finished showed that the plastic got hot enough to pull the shellac back out of the wood. I added a thin aluminum plate with matching drill holes, and the problem was solved!

The air system I showed earlier came next. The pump evacuates an air tank, and the amount of vacuum in the tank is shown on the gauge at the front of the machine. When the plastic is lowered to the platen, the valve is opened, allowing vacuum to be pulled though the platen and into the forming area.

The pump and tank were screwed to the base shelf, then I assembled a menagerie of plumbing fittings and adapters to connect all the parts.

On the front of the machine, there are two switches that control the air pump and heating coils, as well as the vacuum indicator gauge and the vacuum release valve. Mounting points for these were trimmed out of an aluminum plate.

With these parts assembled, I now had the vacuum half of the forming machine finished!

The oven support rails came next, and were bolted to the side of the machine. The oven box was then lifted up and mounted to the angle steel bars.

As my dimensions were changed somewhat from the original Protoform plans, the lift arm mechanisms in the instructions would no longer work for my machine. I employed a very similar system as shown in the diagrams, though the lift arms I built are made from red oak.

This, again, was a budget and capabilities issue since I don't own a welder and buying another 8 or so feet of box steel would seriously anger my bank account. The lift arms work quite well, though the wood does flex more than steel would. You need to lift the arms by the sides of the center handle using two hands, whereas I imagine a steel assembly could be lifted using only one.

These lift arms attach to two 10" long sections of box steel which ride between them. These center rails are then bolted to the plastic carrying frame, which moves the material up to the oven and back down to the platen.

I couldn't get away from welding forever, so after cutting all of the parts for the plastic carrying frame, I asked my uncle James for a few evenings worth of his free time to weld up the frames for me. James has plenty of fancy welding projects under his belt (race car roll cages being chief among them!) and the results were perfect.

I stained the wood on the lift arms, painted the frames and bolted everything together for a test run. The lift bar clears the oven by the tiniest margin and I have to stand on my toes to reach it, but it works wonderfully!

I'd like to explain the heating elements and electrical wiring in detail, because I try to share as much experience and knowledge as I have for other people to learn from and try out themselves. Unfortunately, this time I'll need to be a bit more reserved about distributing this information. This machine runs 220V power, is built with its own sub breaker box, and is tied into a 50A breaker in my house.

This is easily one of the most dangerous projects I've ever constructed, and the simple fact is that if you want to build your own, you should go to www.build-stuff.com and buy the Protoform plans. I should note I have no stake in that company, but the instructions are comprehensive, and detailed and far better than what I can summarize here. $65 is a bargain for the amount of information contained in the PDF you get!

My garage used to run off a single 15A 110V breaker, but this has increased exponentially in order to run this one tool. I had an electrician install a new 220V 50A breaker for this machine alone, and also install a new 20A 110V breaker just for the rest of my shop. I can finally turn on the bandsaw without killing my stereo or having to turn off my space heater!

The heating elements are another kit offered by Build-Stuff, and the kits scale depending on what kind of machine you're building. I ordered these, as there's no need to reinvent the wheel, and the kits came quickly with clear and precise instructions. Assembling everything took about half a day.

These things get HOT, and in a hurry too. Full working temp is reached in about 2 minutes. The nichrome wire is a bit intimidating to work with at first, but it becomes easier the more you install.

The last thing I needed was a vent cover to protect the heating element wiring from any overhead junk. This was made out of leftover bits of poplar and a large air conditioning vent.

With the oven complete, I just needed to do some test pulls. I'm in the middle of remaking the Mr. Destructoid helmet (another old project from back in 2009) for the guys over at Destructoid.com, and all of the parts will be vacformed plastic. A few of the bucks were finished enough to pull a test piece, shown in the video below.

This new vacformer ran easily 10 times the cost of my first vacformer project, but the results are worth it. I'm actually considering updating the little one with its own pump and vacuum tank in the future to improve its performance as well.

Thanks for reading! More pics of this project (and a bit more explanation of some of the components) are available on my Flickr account.

Skyrim Female Ancient Nord Helmet

2012-04-29T16:36:00.002-04:00

Like everyone else who had a passing fancy with gaming, I recently fell very deeply into Bethesda's most recent Elder Scrolls offering: Skyrim.

For anyone who hasn't played the game, there's a wealth of beautiful armor and weaponry. Its the sort of thing where a builder like me wanders around the map saying "I want to make that. And that. And three of those." The item I found most striking, and the one I chose to build first, was the Ancient Nord Helmet (also called the Draugr helmet.) The write-up below is a pretty brief recount of my build process. If you're interested in seeing a more complete "step-by-step" account, you can check out the Instructable I wrote here.

If you played a male character in Skyrim, this helmet may seem odd to you; the female variant got these awesome antlers, the men had the ram horns.

I started out with some very nice 3D files ripped from the game, courtesy of a gent who follows my Facebook page and was kind enough to lend a hand with the source imagery.

From these, I made a set of 2D blueprints in Illustrator to pattern the build.

Recently I've found a great method scaling blueprints like this to their final dimensions: Print off a 1" grid onto a sheet of plotter paper, then trim out a space for your subject to stand. Photograph this as close to perpendicular as possible, then import the photograph into an image editor such as Adobe Illustrator. By scaling the image so that the 1" squares are indeed 1" in size, you can then import your blueprints over the image and find all the dimensions of your finished part.

The final dimensioned "slices" were cut from 1/4" MDF and glued together to make a sculpting frame.

Cavities in this frame were filled with polystyrene foam. I used some old water-contaminated casting resin to glue the foam into place, since it can't be used to make decent casts any longer.

After everything dried, I began shaping the foam with a coping saw, then varying grits of rough sandpaper (50, 100, and 120 mostly) The rough form was then coated in black acrylic paint to seal the foam against the bondo I'll be using in the next stages.

If this all seems very familiar, that's because this process is essentially identical to the way my Daft Punk Thomas helmet was sculpted. I've not tried this method that often, and I was curious to see if it could be transferred to a helmet like this. It worked great, and I have a few more Skyrim helmets coming up in the coming months which will employ this as well.

After two coats of acrylic, I started building up the shape with some polyester filler. The green goo in these shots is a filler by Evercoat called "RAGE Gold" - It sands much easier than bondo but is also significantly more expensive as a result. A tip for sculpting like this with polyester filler: at a certain point it will no longer be spreadable, but you will still be able to dent it with your fingernail. When it is at this stage, break out your 50 grit sandpaper and start shaping. The lumps disappear easily and you've got nice, even shapes.

There was a lot of this shaping, until the final base form was satisfactory.

The end helmet was going to be molded and resin cast, but in parts. The antlers would be molded separately, but I needed a place for them to anchor in the helmet. After carving out a couple of sections in the temples of the helmet, I vacuumformed some acrylic plugs and used these to make smooth even recesses in the helmet for the antlers to mount to.

These were then blended into the helmet with Apoxie Sculpt.

Around the neck of the helmet, there's a beveled edge that also had a slight gradual curve along the profile. For this, I glued some 1/2" sintra to the base and shaped it with a dremel. Height measurements were taken every inch along one finished side, then transferred to the uncut side to keep things identical.

After a coat of filler primer and some 220 grit sanding, it was time to start hammering!

Well, okay, not really hammering. The in-game helmet has a pretty drastic hammered finish, but since this piece is thin filler over a foam base, whacking it with a hammer would just result in a lot of cracks and chipped resin. I put a large rounded sanding bit on my dremel and gradually carved out each hammer blow.

Admittedly, I got better at this as I went along. Initially, the upper section of the helmet is a bit too uniform, but I still like the texture. The full process for this took me a little over two days to complete.

After this was done, the entire piece was then sanded with a 100 grit sanding sponge to blend these dents into one another, then the helmet was given another coat of primer.

Raised areas of the helmet around the eye pieces and the large curled filigree on the side were added with thin layers of Apoxie Sculpt. I used the back side of an engraving tool to replicate hammer marks in the surface while the clay was still uncured.

Battle scars were carved into the helmet with a dremel and a rotary wheel, then the large rivets (furniture tacks) were added to the faceplate. The whole part was painted glossy silver and allowed to cure in prep for moldmaking.

The antlers were a real challenge. After doing some research on modeling maquettes and armatures, I started by making a wire base, which was then wrapped in foil and thin sculpting wire. This makes sculpting the final form easier, cheaper, and lighter as well. Getting the initial shapes symmetrical was an exercise in frustration.

With the base form satisfactory, I skimmed the surface in Apoxie Sculpt. The surface was smoothed somewhat, but the nice thing about working with Apoxie is how well you can sand it once its dry. After curing, I smoothed out the entire antler form.

A few more details were added after this smoothing process. I used a dremel with a small ball engraver to carve thin lines along the base and crooks of the antlers, and more Apoxie was added to the antler bases to give them a rough, bony texture.

The molds for this project follow a similar technique to my Daft Punk helmet build, with the only exception being the type of silicone used. The white material in these shots is Mold Max Stroke, and the pink silicone is Mold Max 30. If you're interested in more detail regarding the moldmaking process, check out this Daft Punk post.

Helmet mold with registration keys

Finished helmet mold

Antler mold with seam line

Antler mold with one half of the mold jacket in place

With the molds finished, the parts were cast. The helmet is cold cast in Smooth Cast's ONYX resin. Cold casting is a process where you use metal powders mixed with the resin to make the final casting have a metallic effect. With this helmet, aluminum powder was first dusted into the mold, then sifted around to coat all the inside surfaces evenly with a thin layer of powder. I used fine steel wool (000 gauge) to buff the surface to a metallic shine.

The antlers were cast in Smooth Cast 320, because the off-white color of the resin makes for a perfect base color.

After some dremel work and buffing, the assembled helmet took shape!

Neat, but it needed a lot more weathering to look truly "ancient". I started with dark washes of browns and blacks into the battle scars and crevices on the helmet. Around the rusted areas I used some iron powder, dabbed on with dark purple acrylic paint.

This powder was sprayed with a mixture of hydrogen peroxide and vinegar, then allowed to sit overnight. The results were beautiful rust marks!

Painting the antlers was a bit trickier. I started by shading in the recessed areas with dark brown, then gradually layered thin coats of airbrushed brown on top of this, which were "scratched" away using a stiff bristle brush and warm water over the acrylic paint. The final version, next to an un-weathered helmet, is below.

After sealing the helmet in semi-gloss and the antlers with matte clearcoat, the final piece was assembled and finished!

I'll have more Skyrim stuff in the coming months, so if you're a fan of the game keep an eye out. There are many more higher-resolution pictures of the process available on my Flickr page, so take a look there if you're interested.

Thanks for reading!

Mass Effect 3 Live Action Commercial

2012-03-03T10:56:00.001-05:00

If you're a fan of the series (like me) and you've been drooling over every trailer that's been coming out recently (like me) you may have seen the latest live action commercial for Mass Effect 3 which aired last weekend. Look closely, and people who follow this blog miiiiight see something familiar:

Yep! That's one of my N7 Valkyrie rifles, making the first on-screen debut of my props! (okay, technically one of my Portal Guns was in the background of the Sony "Michael" advertisement, but given how long its there for, it hardly counts...)

There's even been some mumbling over at the Mass Effect facebook page that some of the guns from the shoot may even be given away as special prizes.

I was asked to ship out 4 raw cast rifles to Prague last November for this spot, and I'm just blown away by the results. Muzzle flash! Exploding Geth! Bad Ass N7 Armor! (no idea who made that, but damn its beautiful)

Thanks to the internet and the attention this little blog receives, I get to be part of amazing projects like this. I have no idea how I managed to make crazy stuff like this my fulltime job!

Speaking of Mass Effect 3, I recently re-visited the N7 Valkyrie project for the people over at Bioware. Over the month of February, 4 more Valkyries were produced and are currently awaiting shipping. The red one - that is to say, the canonically incorrect one - is my personal Valk.

Thanks for reading, following, and sharing my work - it's stuff like that that makes jobs like this possible for me!

Clare's Armor, Claymore

2012-02-19T23:50:00.000-05:00

As part of another joint costume adventure between myself and my friend Cathy over at God Save the Queen Fashions (some readers may recall her work on the Daft Punk leather ensemble) I was drafted to create the sword and armor for Clare, the protagonist in the series Claymore. My experience with armormaking are pretty minimal at best, so this was all one big learning lesson for me!

While not fully encased in a suit of armor, the Claymores do have many parts that make up their outfit. All told, there are 2 sets of shoulder pauldrons, a chest clasp, a sword carrier/backpack piece, a plate skirt, wrist cuffs, handplates and greaves.

After collecting a lot of reference images from the series, I set about putting together a few sets of blueprints.

This print shows some of the test patterns I used to make the skirt. These were printed out on a plotter and trimmed at full scale to check which size would be best for the final parts. Mockups like these were essential in order to get the scale of the armor parts just right.

The middle blueprint above shows some dome-shaped parts. These were profile and front views used to pattern out the shapes of the shoulder armor and the backpack dome. Much in the same way my Daft Punk Thomas helmet took shape, the mold masters for these parts started out as MDF spines outlining the outer edges of the shapes.

The cavities in these blocks were filled with pink foam, sanded to shape, then skimmed over with bondo to smooth out the entire buck.

These parts were placed on my vacuumformer and pulled out of .10" styrene

The upper and lower pauldrons were pulled twice per side - each shape has an inner and an outer layer of .10" styrene to add thickness and rigidity to the shape.

Small machine screws were embedded along the inside of the larger pauldron, and the smaller ones affix to the inside with nuts. This allows them to pivot slightly and helps to increase movement.

After a guide coat of primer, it was decided to add some damage to the armor. Clare is the "lowest ranked" Claymore in terms of her abilities, and in the anime series, she gets her ass kicked a lot. It only made sense her armor would take some pretty severe hits during her trials.

The dome part of the "backpack" thing was pulled in the same .10" styrene as the pauldrons. This was placed over a sheet of 1/4" sintra trimmed to the shape of the backpack perimeter. Since the weight of the cape would be hanging off the spiky wing sections on the backpack, it made sense to have the backing plate be one solid piece in order to be as rigid as possible.

The wing sections were also cut from sintra, and started out as 1" thick parts. These were cut first on my bandsaw to give them a rough shape, then bisected along their center line.

After cutting the center line out, I added a thin styrene sheet between the halves to act as a guide for cutting the profile shape of the wings. After this was added, the two halves were glued back together around this part.

The sintra was rough sculpted into shape with a dremel tool using the center spine as a guide.

More sintra was used to make the sword carrier sections. While the actual Claymore blade I made won't fit in these recesses (damn you anime designers!) I do have plans to make a sword "blank" to fill this cavity in the future.

Lots and lots of filler and sanding later, we have a smooth pretty backpack. This got the same scars and scrapes as the pauldrons, don't worry! I don't have any pics of it handy, butt here are also 4 blind nuts embedded into the back plate in order to mount this to the costume later on.

The "battle skirt" (as I came to call it) was made out of 1/4" sintra sheets. These were first trimmed to shape, then the edges were beveled by hand with a dremel tool.

Sintra is a foamed sheet of PVC plastic, and it doesn't really like to take compound curves very well. A lot of work went into heating specific parts of the material, bending them to shape, re-heating, and repeating. There were several test fits to make sure the curve of each piece worked well with the parts next to it. The shot below shows the parts about halfway done with this process

After the curves were finalized, each piece was sanded to remove the texture of the sintra, then given a coat of primer and light filler where needed. These parts got a lot of damage and weathering, done mostly with a dremel tool and engraving chisel. The small holes at the top of the plates are for stitching into the Claymore top shirt part later.

Here's where we get into somewhat unfamiliar territory where I've just decided to wing it. If you've never seen a process like this before, its probably because I had no clue what I was doing and just felt like making it up as I went along. There are better ways to do things like the below, I'm sure, but since the project budget couldn't include pricier materials to do proper lifecasting, this seemed like a pretty good budget minded alternative.

Claymores have 2-part greaves which cover their calf, shin, ankle and the upper part of their foot. I started off by making a set of packing tape molds of Cathy's legs. These started out as trashbags wrapped around the area to be molded, then wrapped tightly with tape and cut along a seam when finished.

After taping the seam back together, these were filled with 2-part expanding foam to make a rigid copy of the leg forms.

After removing the tape, I skimmed the outer sections of the foam with bondo to make a smooth surface the same shape as the greaves.

There's a large cuff at the top of each of the greaves, which has a long spike leading up to it. In order to make sure I had a uniform shape and thickness around the entire perimeter of the leg, I cut strips of sintra out and glued them to the bondo around a mark on the upper part of the calf. The gaps between the strips were blended in with bondo.

The upper bevel of the cuff was added with apoxie sculpt, and the long pointed accent on the shin and calf was put in with apoxie as well.

These parts were cut in half on a bandsaw, then glued to 1/2" MDF risers in order to make vacuumforming bucks. In the shot below, you can see a proof-of-theory pull from some thin sheet I had laying around.

The completed master, next to a part pulled from .10" styrene!

The last task for my vacformer was to make the wrist cuff. This was lathed out of some laminated sheets of MDF then pulled in .10" styrene and glued into one part. Shockingly, Cathy's hand fits through this tiny part with room to spare!

At some point I started to get behind on deadlines, and my documentation suffered a bit as a consequence. These clasp parts over the chest are an assemblage of styrene sheet and half round styrene bar stock. Aside from this, I don't have any shots of their creation. Sorry!

After everything was primed and prepped (my preferred method is going over the primer with a 320 grit sanding sponge and diluted surface cleaner like windex) each part got a topcoat of silver before weathering.

Weathering these parts made a huge difference in their realism! I used airbrushed acrylics, then topcoated each part with gloss clear in order to seal in the "grit and grime."

The two shots below show the difference between a fresh coat of paint and a weathered surface. The differences in parts like the greaves are subtle, but it really helps the overall look, in my opinion.

The greave and boot parts on one of the shoes for a mockup. After I gave these parts to Cathy, they got a velcro strip along the inside edge to keep them together and hide the side seam a little better than in this pic.

The final bit of weathering was the spattering of Yoma blood on a few various parts of armor. The blood itself is done in acrylics, and like the rest of the weathering, sealed under a coat of gloss clear.

The final pieces all assembled with Cathy's lovely costume work (see more of her stuff at God Save The Queen Fashions!) and shot by our friend and awesome photographer, Dan Almasy:

Details!

Really wish I'd gotten a shot of this part being made. Another vacformed part - the hand armor!

Along with the weathering on the armor, I also helped out Cathy by adding some blood spattering and weathered grime to her cape. Remember: dirt adds realism.

My favorite shot from the whole shoot, Cathy looks like a badass here.

More pics of the process available (and in higher resolution!) on my Flickr. As always, thanks for reading!

Clare's Sword, Claymore

2012-02-19T23:20:00.000-05:00

As part of another joint costume adventure between myself and my friend Cathy over at God Save the Queen Fashions (some readers may recall her work on the Daft Punk leather ensemble) I was drafted to create the sword and armor for Clare, the protagonist in the series Claymore. Aptly named, the Claymores carry giant swords almost as tall as their wielders which they're able to fling around one-handed with ease. I needed to make something as lightweight as possible, but still able to handle the rigors of convention use.

There are a lot of variations of these blades around. Specifically, the difference between the swords the collectable figures hold (lower two) and those more accurate to scenes from the series (top) I didn't check the manga; chances are there's a myriad of other variants there as well. Cathy and I decided to go with the top option.

The first part of this build started with the hilt "wings." These started as a piece of styrene patterned to the same dimension as the profile of one wing.

I added styrene "dams" to this, and used these sections to mark off where the upper ridges should be. By filling the areas in with apoxie sculpt and sanding to shape, I knew exactly where the lines on the part should peak.

A little bit of sanding later, and this part was put under silicone rubber to mold and make an identical copy. The silicone used here is Smooth-On's Oomoo rubber. I only needed a couple pulls, so mold longevity wasn't an issue.

While this was setting up, I started work on the giant blade portion. I needed things to be light, but still rigid enough to be handled for several hours. The central spine and handle of the entire piece is a PVC pipe with an oak dowel embedded down its entire length.

This spine was extended to the width of the blade by cutting a set of 1/4" thick oak boards to act as lateral reinforcement. These were first zip tied to the blade to glue them into place...

...and after the glue dried, the board was fiberglassed onto the center wooden dowel using 2 layers of glass fiber cloth and polyester resin. I also beveled the edge in order to get this center spine to fit better around the blade "sleeve" which I created in the next step.

For the exterior of the blade, I trimmed two long sheets of foamcore into wedges and shaved a V-shaped notch into their center, as well as tapering the outer edges. This will make more sense shortly, I promise.

After taping up the seams and slipping the foamcoare blade sleeve over the wooden spine, the basic form starts to take shape!

This was affixed to the wooden spine by slush casting Smooth Cast 300 into the cavity at the back of the sword. At this point, the whole assembly weighs about 2.5lbs.

To strengthen this outer skin, I brushed polyester resin over the foamcore shell. In retrospect, epoxy resin would have been a better idea, since the polyester soaked through the paper outer section on the foamcore and dissolved the foam underneath, necessitating cleanup later on in the project. Live and learn...

The tip of the blade was an exercise in weird technique. I knew this had to be very robust part of the sword, since the most likely pose with a 5-foot-tall blade will be holding it upright with the tip set on the ground. I made a small box out of cardboard, set it around the blade end, and filled it with Smooth Cast 300 resin.

It took a long time to get from there to here, spent mostly on my belt sander, but the end result was a solid resin tip. Rigid and definitely the strongest part of the blade.

The open edges at the back were covered with styrene plates

To make the pointed tip that leads up to the cross guard, I lathed a bullet shape out of a poplar dowel, then vacuumformed a couple of copies in styrene.

Getting these in place required a bit of hackery to the shaped outer blade section in order to get them to fit....

But after adding a bit of epoxy resin as filler (learned my lesson from the polyester from before!) The shape was blended back into place.

The cross guard and pommel sections were lathed from blocks of urethane casting resin. Blanks were created by filling cardboard tubes and allowing them to cure.

After some time with the lathe, the following parts emerged: Pommel...

...and cross guard sleeve.

Quick mock-up before primer

Clare's insignia was carved into the blade with a dremel tool. Since this cut into the foam a bit, the cavity was carved deeper then filled in with urethane resin to make an even and level recess.

After a coat of primer, the shape is nearly ready for paint.

The wing sections on the crossguard are affixed to the blade handle with an ABS dowel that passes through the entire center spine. I wanted to make sure these were as stable as possible, as they might take a random hit now and again since they sit so far outside the width of the blade.

Finally, paint! The blade was coated with Krylon silver, and the hilt/crossguard was done with testor's enamel. Lots of gloss clearcoat went over the weathering in order to keep the layer of grime and dirt intact.

The final detail was a smattering of Yoma blood on the first 1/3 of the sword. If you've seen the anime, there's a TON of blood flying around.

A few shots of the final piece, out in the elements, taken by my friend Dan Almasy. The leather handle wrap was done by Cathy after the sword was finished.

If you're interested in the rest of the process behind the build on Clare's armor, check out my write up on that project here.

More shots of the process are available on my Flickr stream for those interested in a little more background behind the build.

Thanks for reading!

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)

Image 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!