Wedding cake topper!

I finished this the morning of the wedding! It all worked out perfectly! ... I just wish I gave myself a couple extra weeks.

ZBrush Project 04: Bird of Prey - Gun

The very center piece of the upper Disruptor canon is the original cylinder from the previous post. This is the almost completed inner wing gun for the Bird of Prey. How accurate is it to the studio model? I have no idea. The best I can do is use the model kit parts from AMT ERTL's set from 1995 and hope that's accurate enough. I don't need this thing to be perfect. Just as good as I can get it.

ZBrush Project 04: Bird of Prey

Behold! The humble beginnings of a fully detailed Klingon Bird of Prey!

Zuul Trophy Sculpt

One of the guys at work, Dave Sadler, is a very very dedicated Ghostbusters fan. He sculpted this screen accurate Zuul, made molds of it, and was kind enough to drop those molds off at our shop so we could make our own!!!! These photos are the most current progress shots I've taken for my particular Zuul dog.

At this moment, she's in her finished primer stage. Everything is attached, tied in and sculpted just the way I like it. I extended her throat back a bit and tied in the tongue (using alligator throats as reference). She unbolts from her base for painting, don't worry!

I also made the trophy base. I routed it, stained it and shellacked it. I went to a trophy store and had them make up a really clean looking trophy plate for it! Icing on the cake! The next two steps are to paint her, and install plexiglass eyes that light up! Then she'll be all done! 

Those steps are going to have to wait though. I must put her in storage for a month or so and start sculpting my wedding cake topper! Once that's done (and maybe when we're set up in the new house) I'll pull him back out and finish her!

Fun With Sounds 1: Circuit installed!

   Here's the finished installation of the circuit in the bottom of the base. I wired it so the speaker wires run up to the top along with the switch wires. Tomorrow I can paint the base black and start gluing all this together!

Fun with Sound 1

For the past ten years, every time I've received a card with a sound chip, I've ripped out the chip and the tiny little speaker and kept them. My plan had always been to make humorous sculpts based on these little bits of noise. The above image is a sneak peak at the first one. Can you guess the theme?

Starbase 1 (also known as Spacedock) FINISHED!!!!!

 And Viola! She is done! I apologize for the yellow tungsten lighting in my bedroom, but at least it gives all these photos a nice warm feel.

I printed out decals for the bay doors. They're movie accurate to color and numerical order.

Damn. This is exactly the look I was going for! I'm very happy with how this turned out.

The runway lights are white (hard to tell in this photo) but more importantly THEY BLINK! Yes, that's right! These little fiber optics blink. Wanna know what's even cooler? The Red side door lights blink too!

All the lights out. 

I'm not mailing this off. I made a custom box with foam so that I can hand this off to my brother in 4 months and be relatively sure the circuits will stay intact. 

 I've rigged it so that the adaptor cord will effortlessly plug into the bottom of the base.

I'm actually very excited that this project worked. I combined two different voltages with multiple LEDs and integrated them into a VERY small space with fiber optics and the whole thing actually works! So many doors have opened up for me with this!!!

Starbase 1. A Second Try.

All the way back in January, I posted about my 'great experiment', a custom build of Star Trek's Starbase 1. (apparently the cannon name is simply 'Spacedock'). I intended to make a mold of an existing space dock model, cast it in clear resin with a hollow inner tube for light and an integrated brass tube. All of this worked perfectly. I found blue neon strip lights from Wal-Mart for $19 and a stupid Hulk wand toy with the perfect LED slow blinking light circuit for $5. I spray painted my star base, drilled out hundreds of windows and hooked up all the lighting inside.

Everything was going according to plan. There were a few bumps in the road, but that was to be expected. I was dealing with two different voltages inside this one piece. A 9v wall adaptor supplied power to the blue neon light strip just fine, but the Hulk circuit was only a 3 volt, so I needed to find the right resistor. This first design also had an additional white LED light, that I believe was 6 volts, so that complicated things. I was unable to learn about resistors online. There aren't any really clear tutorials, just color code deciphering. I had no choice but to buy a bunch of random small resistors from Skycraft. 

I originally bought two Hulk circuits. The first one I instantly blew out when I hooked it up to the wrong resistor, the second was installed successfully in Spacedock. I tested everything multiple times between steps, just to be safe. I wanted everything to be JB welded into place   inside the model to make sure nothing would break. My great oversight was overestimating how much room I had inside the upper dome. When everything was finished and I only had ONE step left, to close up the dome and glue it all together, that's when everything went wrong. 

I closed the upper and lower dome pieces with all the lights plugged in and glowing, and everything turned off. I froze with the pieces in my hand. I pulled them apart just slightly and jiggled the wires. Nothing ever came back on. I still don't know what happened. The blue neon light strip came back to life when I put power to it individually, but the hulk circuit, and the 6v LED never worked again. In hindsight I had an overly complicated design. The blue light strip was inches longer than it needed to be and the metal ring I installed to stop the light to the top was choking off space when it closed up.

Until recently the failed model had just sat behind my desk space. I was too angry to start on it again. It was looking like a completely failed project...... until recently....

Three days ago, I worked up the courage to start this project again. I stripped out and cleaned everything from the inside of space dock. I had a plan this time: simplify and reduce space consumption. The bottom lights would have to go. The upper city uplighting would have to go. I still wanted to get the effect of blinking runway lights and blinking red door lights achieved through fiber optics. The blue light was proven and easy. Simply glue it in and apply power to it. The above photo is the improved light sealed room I built for the runway floor. It allowed more stability and clearly defined the height I had for the rest of the inner dome. 

I went out and bought a new Hulk circuit. This time I only changed two of the lights, not all six.

As you can see, the inner metal circle has been cut, the layout simplified. Everything is glued to the ceiling, allowing as much room as possible between both halves. 

I had a secret weapon this time. Something that would allow me to finish this project in only three days. Reynolds 'insta-cure' gap filling glue. It's industrial strength super glue that cures in 15 seconds and is as strong and durable as epoxy glue. We use it at the Universal Prop Shop all the time! 

This was the final layout before I closed everything up for good. Notice the white rectangles on the top piece. These allowed for even more room and made sure nothing would be crushed when everything was sealed up. 

Mother's Day vase

So, as you can see, I cut off the top of the bottle, sanded the whole thing for a frosted effect, sculpted the outside in three separate sections (letting each section cure before starting the next one) and finally, painting it! I wish I had more time. I'm meh about how the whole thing came out. It's good enough, but I felt rushed and my sculpt Apoxie is so old, some of it didn't cure and had to be removed and resculpted. 

Queen of Death! Armature

Tonight I set an hour aside to start the armature for the queen of death! Tomorrow, I can start laying in clay! 

Mother's day vase

One project I just started tonight is a custom sculpted vase for my mom for this mother's day! I'm going to sculpt a twisty wood design on the outside, and a stone base on the bottom. I went to wal-mart and got a nice clear plastic soap bottle. Tomorrow, I'm going to cut off the top and lightly frost sand the entire surface.

Baby Gorilla Sculpt Commission

  Here's the first one I actually started and completed. The Baby Gorilla sculpt. This one was a bit more dynamic and took a little bit longer. I believe from start to finish it was 11 hours, while the Elephant was only 7.

These photos were the final approval photos for the client. My one regret is that in the rush to get these boxed up and shipped off to Washington, I forgot to do a better photo shoot for my portfolio website. So these, will sadly not be featured on my website. 

Elephant Commission

Last month has been crazy! We did 10 hour days at work for the entire month and I got two sculpt commissions from out of NOWHERE!

I was given the task of sculpting a baby gorilla and this elephant. I'm going to just cut to the chase this time and show you the end result. It's my typical wire armature with tin foil for filler, white cheap sculpey clay for the underneath layer, and much nicer terra cotta colored sculpey on top for detail. I then primered, sanded, primered sanded, primered. It was your basic sculpt process, very similar to Pascal. In fact, exactly like Pascal!

The client wanted the arms a little higher and the belly a bit fatter. Beyond that, he had no corrections! This is the first sculpting commission I've gotten in 5 years! It was so nice to have a paid project again!

Comicon promises....

Time to start the long awaited 'Queen of Death' sculpture I promised I'd do during last comicon. Here's the first set of sketches.

Zbrush Project 03: Lego Pirates Island Scene

This took 3 weeks to make from scratch in ZBrush. I tried to make it as perfectly accurate as possible. Each stud even says Lego on it! I've always been a huge fan of the classic Pirate System. My favorite set as a kid was the 'Black Seas Barracudda' pirate ship. 

The second I finished the Lego Minifigure last month, I thought to myself: "I HAVE to do a pirate scene"! All these pieces are accurate right down to the paint scheme. I had all these pieces when I was a kid, so I'm very familiar with how they're supposed to look and feel like. 

My master plan is to create 12 ZBrush portfolio pieces, then add a new column to my portfolio website featuring all 12. I think I might add a new stipulation to this: half should be organic and half should be mechanical.