Archives for October 2018

October 29, 2018, Filed Under: Reactor Assault, SFX 2018

Building a Model Set

The largest obstacle to overcome when creating a model set is the scale. We tackled this issue after much deliberation and discussion on how proportional our robot and humans should be in size compared to the reactor room itself.

Next was the design and look of the room itself. We decided to go for a robotic less natural more repetitive room that’s use would only benefit robots. So we went for a dome with a honeycomb pattern on the walls of the room. Seen here in my crude concept art.

The thing is not everything went as structured as this. We played around with the scale and design several times. All the while prototyping along the way differnt ways we could accomplish this design as functionally and good looking as possible.

The final part is to this construction process is the building phase where tears meet tired eyes and failed attempts lead to greatness. We chose to use chipboard board its flexibility helped us create the curve and is an easy material to laser cut. We have run into several issues with laser cutting but it has been all software for the time being that has impeded our progress, with that said we are near finished construction. All that we are lacking is cutting out the walkway and the facets for the reactor tube.

We started with the the quarter of a dome seen above and then decided to make the bottom half as well to help with continuity.

October 29, 2018, Filed Under: SFX 2018, Warbringer

Oh Ship!

Howdy!

The past week has been filled with tons of awesome progress for team WARBRINGERS. Darshan has been hard at work creating the final lift system for our ship’s hull, Kyle has been making great strides with the masts and I’ve been devoting most of my time for this project to the texturing and painting of the hull, which I’ll be focusing on down below.

After experimenting with Jaxsan on 3D printed PLA (see last week’s blog post), we decided that it would be best to dye the Jaxsan before applying it to the hull of the ship. A dark raw umber paint was used to tint the product so that in the event that the paint becomes scratched, the resulting surface color wouldn’t stand out against the rest of the hull.

A tool was developed to draw wood plank lines across the surface of the Jaxsan. These lines were then further detailed by hand to create individual planks and nails. Plank scale was determined from a Royal Navy standard. We drew the approximate size of the planks onto a sheet of paper and placed it on the hull to get an idea of how the scale would look once finished.

After drying, a six-layer wood finish was painted onto the hull of the ship.

Admittedly, the painting process was new to me and a bit difficult to adjust to but having gone through the process a couple of times now, I’m glad I stepped outside my comfort zone. Huge shout out to Karen and Ashton for all their advice and help with this!

Once the painting of the hull was done, details such as cannons, the ship’s crest, and additional boards needed to be created. The team decided that an easy way to create detail quickly would be to treat a thin piece of material, in our case cardstock, with the same Jaxsan and paint process used on the 3D printed hull. During the Jaxsan phase of the process, I sculpted several different textures to accommodate the different types of texture we might require.

I cut several beams that spanned the length of the hull. These beams divide the ship into rough quadrants and were used, along with photoshop, to determine placement of cannons on the ship’s hull. I modeled and 3D printed portholes with cannons protruding that will be painted and textured in the coming days. The intention of 3D printing the cannons is to add a sense of increased depth to the scene.

Going forward, Kyle and I will be switching roles slightly. I’ll be moving away from detailing the hull and towards the troubleshooting of the mast raising system. As a result, Kyle will take over with the finishing of the hull. As of the writing of this blog post, we have a rough prototype of the raising system that looks promising going forward. Hopefully we’ll have more to share next week!

That’s all for now, thanks for reading!

Till next time,

-Kaan

October 29, 2018, Filed Under: Horned King, SFX 2018

SKULLpting and Painting

Capturing fear can be difficult because you must consider all aspects of the fear– both physical and emotional. My job as one of the artistic leads is to analyze, create, and implement the many elements of fear in order to produce a strong reaction from the audience.

The fear we hope to capture is one of the most classic and revisited classifications: the childhood nightmare.

When thinking about the nightmares we had as kids, many are able to distinctly recall the monsters who we imagined lived under our beds or in our closets, patiently waiting until sundown to haunt us in our sleep. When you visualize the emergence of this monster, what is the first thing you notice? Is it its menacing red eyes that glare at you from across the room and stare blankly and threateningly into your soul? Or perhaps its his sharp, rotting teeth that it exposes only to present a hideously evil smile?

In my opinion, it is the hands.

To most, hands are a very mundane aspect to the human body. However, hands produce a kind of emotion that is unable to be captured through other parts of the body. They tell a story. Hands are usually associated with touch and comfort. Not in this case.

The hands of the Horned King need to tell the story of a monster desperate for power. They need to be rotting from intense desire. His bones need to be protruding from his discolored skin that surround his claws infested with dirt and grime. We want the audience to squirm from the thought of having his hands brush over their face.

So how did we create these terrifying hands?

We started with concept art.

This is just a rough sketch of how we wanted the end product to look. As you can see, it exaggerates the protruding bones and sharp claws. During later prototypes, we revised this concept to include rotting colors such as greens, blacks, and browns.

Then we moved to prototype 1.

This is the first prototype of the hands. They were very small scale and were made out of just wire, crumpled up paper, and masking tape. Surprisingly, the masking tape gave us a very nice rotting texture that we would eventually use in later prototypes. We went over the masking tape with acrylic paint to perform a color test. We were happy with the green and brown tones and decided to continue this color scheme throughout the course of the project.

Prototype 2

Like the first prototype, the second prototype also just used paper and tape. This one, however, followed anatomy more closely. We were also more strategic about the placement and direction of our tape in order to make “cracks” in certain areas and emphasize bone structure in others. In addition, I improved the paint strategy by being more meticulous with the employment of shadows and highlights. At this point in the process, we were so happy with realization of Prototype 2 that we decided to recreate it for the final product.

The Final Product

Unfortunately we ran into a major problem during while creating our final gloves: The tape wouldn’t stick to the gloves (oops). We had to adapt and come up with a different solution. Eventually we decided modeling paste would be the most effective solution. We layered the paste on the glove to resemble the bone protrusions and added additional layers to serve as our rotting texture. After drying, we added our many layers of acrylic paint and used the cracks in the dry modeling paste created by bending our hands in the glove to our advantage. We accentuated every crack and crevasse with shadows and highlights to construct some truly disgusting Horned King hands.

We are excited to eventually add claws and use these hands to reintroduce a childhood fear to our audience!