Genestealer Update 21: New and Improved Sculpting Armatures

So we're back to work on the Genestealer project.  

A while back (update 17) we ran into a bit of a snag because the sculpting armature I was using for one of the lower hands wasn't quite ideal.  It was made from a lifecast of my own hand and there were a few technical details that made it tricky to work with.

So we decided to go a slightly more high-tech route and start by scanning my hands.  Now with our somewhat low-end scanners, this is made a lot easier if the scanner is stationary and the object being scanned is placed on a turntable that will move at a slow, steady pace so the computer can keep track of where everything is easier.

So we sat me on a turntable and scanned my hand:


Tiki was no help at all in this process:


We scanned my right hand with the fingers splayed out flat and wide and then again in the "live long and prosper" pose.  We also scanned my right knee:


We didn't scan my left hand or left knee because it's pretty simple to just mirror them over digitally and my left and right sides happen to be the ideal example of symmetrical human perfection.  I am Adonis.

Or close enough for what we're doing.

After a bit of digital cleanup, the knee was truncated to just the part we'd need to sculpt on top of and the hands were cut into sections like so:


Since we'll be sculpting gloves and the armatures will be used later as mold cores, we have to make sure that the hands can be pulled out through the wrist of the glove.  Since the armatures are rigid, the only way to pull them out is to make them break down into separate parts that have registration keys to slot them together like so:


So once we were happy with the separation points, I started by printing a pair of knees:


Then the hands:

Reassembled, the hands looked like so:


The outer fingers were just pressed into place and will still be able to slide off later.  To use them as sculpting armatures for the Genestealer, they needed a big xeno manicure before we mounted them to bits of wood:


The knees were also mounted to boards as well as an elbow cut from an old lifecast of my arm:


To smooth the surface and reinforce the 3D prints a bit, they were given a coat of Epsilon PRO epoxy from Smooth-On because I'd run out of XTC-3D.  My friend Kate got to do the honors:


The removable fingers were hardcoated separately to keep them from being glued onto the rest of the hand:


Once the epoxy had cured, the fingers were placed back in place and the gaps were taped over:


If you're a keen observer, you'll notice the tail sculpt in the background of that last pic.  My goal has been to graduate to ever increasingly complex parts to mold.  The tail is bigger, but it's going to be a simple two-part mold not much different than the knees or elbows. 

So after layering it up with medium firmness Chavant NSP clay, the whole thing was textured to add the larger wrinkles and creases:


Jeff did the initial texture pass and he did a pretty good job:


Kate also spent a bit of time on it, smoothing out a few of the creases and brushing away some of the tool marks.  Then I got to do the final pass on the texture:


I added a few random lumps here and there to make the silhouette a little less smooth and manufactured-looking.  Then did the final pass with a tiny wire brush and a chip brush to give the whole thing the same final texture as the other fleshy bits we already cast:


The smooth part at the base is where it will mate up with the back of the waist/hip section when we get to making that piece:

So now the tail is pretty much ready to mold and the armatures for the hands and knees are ready for us to start sculpting on top of.

Next I'll have to figure out how to attach the carapace to a human wearer:

Stay tuned...

January 2025 UFO Sightings in the Workshop

I've been posting somewhat regularly about the Genestealer build.  It helps to have the head hanging on the wall above one of my printers to serve as a reminder that it needs more work:

But that's not all I'm working on.  We also have a handful of things on the bench that I'm not allowed to talk about (yet).  But I still feel compelled to post an update about something other than the genestealer build.  The good news is that with my industrial strength case of undiagnosed ADHD, I always have at least fifteen other projects going on at any given time.  Some are getting a lot of my attention.  Others less so.  All of them are in the shop, in the way, and in progress.

So here's the current roundup of UnFinished Objects orbiting around the shop...

First up, a while back I made a handful of Mobile Infantry costumes from Starship Troopers:

While it's okay if you have a fire team running around all armed with the same model of assault rifle, if I'm going to outfit a whole squad (or maybe a platoon) I need to make a wider range of armaments.  So for starters, I hacked up a cast of the Morita assault rifle to make the Morita carbine.  It weighed a ton though and I'm probably going to want to make more than one, so we pulled a mold.  Here's the first casting when we were demolding it:


Since I'm on a roll with Starship Troopers builds, I decided I also needed to make a replica of Lieutenant Rasczak's prosthetic hand:

The hard parts are all printed and painted.  I just need to mount them onto a glove and call it done.

I'm also in the process of making the masters for the M55 Tactical Nuke Launcher:


Somewhere in the shop I have a stack of the grenades piling up too, so I'm almost done making Starship Troopers props.

On another front, while we're making the Genestealer happen, we're also working on a host of other Warhammer projects.  First off, there's this stack of scenery parts:


To go along with them, I have the beginnings of some servo skulls:

These were made from a mold we just pulled off of a human skull I've had kicking around the shop for years now waiting for me to do something with it.

I also took advantage of some down time on the 3D printers to turn out this amazing Chaplain helmet from Space Marine 2:


A while back I also printed and assembled the Saviour of the Free helmet from Helldivers 2:


Soon I'll finish masking it and painting the gold details on the way to making the rest of the costume to go with it.

On an unrelated note, a couple of years ago I picked up a Captain Cardinal helmet: LINK

If you're not familiar with the character, I wouldn't be at all surprised.  He first appeared in the novel Phasma where he turns out to be a rival of Captain Phasma within the First Order.  While she wears a custom suit of chrome armor, his is bright red:

So, while I was in the middle of laying up a new set of Phasma parts, I decided to also mix up some red gelcoat and make a batch of First Order stormtrooper armor in red:


I've got the boots already and the cape is on the way, so once I trim, prep, and paint these parts, I'll have that full suit ready to wear.  For the past couple or three years, it's been a running joke whenever we're about a week away from an event and I'm in the middle of crunch time I'll say to the crew, "you know, we can probably get Cardinal done in time for this thing..."

They scoff.  We laugh.  It's a good bit.

But now, the next time I say it out loud, it won't be a joke.

On the subject of insanely niche Star Wars costumes, I've also decided to build a cosplay of the First Order AT-AT driver. I'm almost done with that build, so there will be a more detailed blog article forthcoming, but for now, here's a picture of the shiny white helmets: 

I'm also making me a new set of Halo armor.  I started making Locus from Red vs. Blue a few years back and every time the printers have nothing to do I add another part to the stack.  At this point, the printing is done, the helmet is painted, and with a bit more prep work, the armor will be ready for paint as well:

Then all I need is to sew up the very involved undersuit and it's done.  Finally.

On a completely unrelated note, I decided to add a sexy one-sixth scale statue of Disney's Evil Queen from Snow White to my collection of things I don't need.  Here's a shot of the statue parts shortly after printing them:


So that's going to be a thing.

There's a lot of things in the shop seeing genuine progress every single day.

Then there's the "someday" stack of projects.  These are the ones that have gathered a bit more dust than most.  Chief among them is the War Machine from Ironman 2 which I really need to knock out and get together:

It's close, but it'll need a couple or four weeks worth of work I haven't managed to set aside yet.

Also on the someday list are these Massiff Taxidermy mounts:


And tucked away a little deeper in storage is the Super Battle Droid that I started making molds for:

I still need to mold the thighs and the arms, but it's only a matter of time.  Then I can create my own army...

For now, I'm just glad to be maintaining a steady flow of things getting finished.

Stay tuned.  Much to come.

Genestealer Update 20: Getting into the Meat of It

 In my last update, we'd just started painting the hard shell parts blue:

But you may have noticed there were a lot of holes in them.  Like these little windows in the forearms:


In the reference artwork, those parts are gaps in the hard shells where the soft, meaty parts can be seen.  So we need to start making soft, meaty parts that will be the same color and texture as the head, waist, and hands.

To do this, I had Jeff lay out some flat clay sheets cut to sizes and shapes that would fill each of the windows in the upper arms, forearms, and thighs:


Then we started texturing them to look like a strip steak or a piece of crab meat.  Initially they were just raked with a scrap of corrugated hose from a shop vac:


That gave us an initial set of mostly parallel lines of even-ish size.  Then he went back over them with finer tools to make the pattern a bit more random:


The final touch was a quick pass with a tiny wire brush to give the pieces a fibrous look:


While Jeff was putting the finishing touches on the last of the smaller pieces, I sculpted and textured the biggest piece to fit into the windows on the back of the carapace:


Then the small pieces were mounted to a scrap of plastic and a wall was built around them:


The big back piece was set up the same way:


Since we would be casting these pieces in silicone rubber, we would make a cheap but rigid mold out of urethane resin.  So after spraying on a copious amount of mold release, we poured a batch of Smooth Cast 300 resin into each of the mold boxes:


After a few minutes, the resin started to turn white as it cured:


I always enjoy seeing this transition happen:


Once the resin was cured, it was time to clean out all of the clay.  We had put down a lot of release agent, but since the mold was still warm and I was too impatient to wait, the heat-softened clay had to be picked and scrubbed out of the mold instead of coming out as one solid, clean piece:


Once the molds were cleaned out, they were ready to pour:


I was ready to pour too:


The pieces were poured in Dragon Skin 10 silicone rubber from Smooth-On:


To get the clear-ish, translucent silicone to the proper plurple color, I mixed in tiny bits of Silc Pig Silicone Pigments.  I used what seemed like the tiniest little bits of red, blue, and white, but still managed to make the rubber completely opaque:


Once the rubber was poured, I laid a piece of powermesh fabric over the top of each one for reinforcement:


The silcone rubber is a little easy to tear and very difficult to glue back together if something does rip.  Given how thin these pieces are in some places, it was vital to add fabric to make them less prone to coming apart later.

These were poured at the end of the day and this particular version of Dragon Skin has a 7-hour cure time.  So I left them undisturbed until the following morning before peeling them out of the molds:


The long pot life and cure time means there's plenty of time for any bubbles to work their way out of the part.  So the texture came out perfectly:


The only surface flaws I found were smaller than the head of a pin:


Since I have to mix the color each time we make a batch of these, we made molds for the full set of parts for one side of arms and legs so they'd all come out the same color:


Either way, I'm absolutely thrilled with the resulting texture:


Here's one of the pieces fitted into the upper arm:


And the bit of thigh meat in the thigh window:

So that's the first successful pieces of rubber for this build.  These are the simplest pieces to sculpt, mold, and cast.  So in the interest of graduating through levels of complexity, the next parts we'll tackle will be the knees and elbows and the tail.  Then we can get into the complex shapes like the hands, the feet, the waist/hip section, and then finally the head.  

In the meantime, the head sculpt continues to collect dust hanging on the wall in my office: 

Exciting new things are happening soon.  Stay tuned!