Horned King – Texas Applied Arts | The University of Texas at Austin

December 3, 2018, Filed Under: Horned King, SFX 2018

A New Nightmare: Application Day

Cloak. Check!

Prosthetics. Check!

Gloves. Check!

Horns. Check!

Everything was ready for shooting day. We finalized our storyboard, all of our prosthetics had the first layer of makeup on them, and we attached the horns to the hood of the cloak. We had done everything we possibly could to prepare for application day the next morning and we were extremely confident in our abilities to put everything together in time for shooting.

We were ready and our actress was ready so everything should go smoothly, right?

Wrong!

Horned King team preparing for shooting!

Disaster #1: the cloak

Prior to shooting day, Maddie had created a beautiful red velvet cloak for our Horned King. It draped beautifully over our actress’ body and effortlessly added to our king’s regal demeanor. We had not foreseen anything going wrong with the cloak… nonetheless… it happened.

We arrive to the RTF building at 7am to begin our application process. The first thing we do is put the cloak and horns on our actress. We are pleased to discover that it fits perfectly over her head and for the time being, everything was great.

However, as time passed, the temperature in the building seemed to increase tremendously. Unfortunately for Becca (our actress), she forgot to take off her heavy sweatshirt before we put the cloak on. Maddie, Oz, and I were too busy preparing the prosthetics for application and attaching the horns to Becca’s swim cap to realize that our actress was sweating profusely underneath her cloak. After suffering in silence for a while, Becca finally spoke up and we were forced to stop the application process and attempt to take her sweatshirt off underneath the cloak.

Sadly we couldn’t take the sweatshirt all the way off because her horns were already attached to her head and couldn’t be removed. So Becca had to keep her sweatshirt around her neck and tuck the arms and body of the sweatshirt behind her shoulders.

She looked like the Hunchback of Notre Dame but at least she wasn’t miserably hot anymore.

We covered up the sweatshirt bump with fur

Disaster #2: The Prosthetics

Like the Cloak, prosthetic application went very smoothly… at first.

We apply the majority of the pieces with skin tight and many of them stuck to Becca effortlessly. However, we soon realized that the jaw pieces were too big for Becca and we ultimately had to discard the entire bottom piece (rip).

At last all of the pieces were on. We proceeded to add another layer of skin tight to make sure the prosthetic pieces stay in place and to add texture.

We were finally ready for makeup… and all of a sudden… Becca turns to us and says…

We had to act fast. We ripped the upper jaw prosthetic off of Becca and she runs to the trash can and proceeds to throw up continuously.

We were at a loss. We knew Becca couldn’t remain in the Horned King makeup and costume for very long in her condition. We had to adapt.

After a few more minutes of Becca over the trash can, we decided that we had to cut our storyboard down to the bare minimum: three shots showcasing the important aspects of our project.

We waited until the last possible second to reapply the upper jaw piece and were miraculously able to shoot in under 10 minutes.

Maddie smiling through the disasters on shooting day

Lucky for us, we were ultimately able to get what we needed out of shooting day. I am very happy with what my team has accomplished this semester and I look forward to seeing the VFX work. A special thanks to Becca for being a trooper and pushing through a very rough application day.

November 12, 2018, Filed Under: Horned King, SFX 2018

Bringing the Horns to Life

The next step after designing the Horned King’s Horns were to bring them into reality. I decided that the right tool for the job was the Longhorn Inventionworks Craftbot XL 3D printer. Using a 3d printer allowed me to easily iterate through several different scale models of the horns very quickly. The amount of effort that it took to re-edit a horn in Fusion 360 was low vs the effort of having to resculpt something in a different material such as foam. My only real concern with printing them was the weight.

The Craftbot XL allowed me to print at a maximum height of about one foot. I was actually limited by their width, not by their height. It took about 12 hours each to fully print each horn, and an additional half hour to sand off all of the supports and rafts.

Here are some of the smaller horns which were used to test the designs and painting techniques.

Unfortunately the second horn ended up printing with some layering errors, most likely due to errors in the slicing software. It ended up breaking into pieces when I carried it around. I considered just reprinting it and hoping that I didn’t get another error, but then I realized that I could just fix it using clay and superglue.

My next goal was to paint and texturize the horns. My teammate Sarah Harvey came up with a great method for this involving mixing paint into air dry modeling clay, liberally applying it to the sides of the horns and then slicing it with a palette knife to create a texture.

After putting on a gold sheen and allowing the horns to dry we had to find a way to securely mount them to our performers head. We decided to lash the horns to a headband using twine, and then tape the headband to a skullcap. This ended up being pretty secure, with our performer being able to move around and shake their head without it falling off.

All we have to do at this point is make sure and conceal the bottom of the horns using the horned king cloak, and our horns are finished!

November 12, 2018, Filed Under: Horned King, SFX 2018

You Can’t be a Horned King Without Horns

It’s probably safe to say that the most distinctive feature of the Horned King are the massive horns sprouting out of the top of his head. Without them he’s really just another ghoul. We knew that in order for our version of this iconic character to be unique and eye catching we would have to really create something distinctive. Maddie drew up some concept art for me to work from which I really loved the look of.

I was already working on several projects involving manipulating 3d scans of animal skulls, so I decided that it would be best to transfer that experience to this project and try and make a pair of 3d printed horns. I wanted the horns to draw inspiration from nature but be distinctly unnatural and demonic. To achieve this effect I decided to take a 3d scan of a pair of mountain goat horns and then transform them into a pair of demon horns. Here is the original goat horn I used, and here is the final product.

I made a video of my process of creating the horns.

https://youtu.be/Oq7-YoZq2GM

First I imported the base horn by entering mesh mode. Then I copied it twice, creating 2 more identical horns. I scaled two of them down to 75% and 60%. After moving them into position I merged all three of them together into a single horn structure. In the actual design process I took much more time to make sure that my placement was exactly how I wanted it, but for this short demo I just moved them into roughly the correct position. Next I wanted to cut off the base to get a flat surface for 3d printing so I used a plane cut to slice off a chunk of the structure. Unfortunately since I was cutting a mesh this left a hollow shell, so I went ahead and used the Make Closed Mesh function to create a flat base for the structure. I wanted to make the demonic horns less perfect and smooth so I went ahead and designed a couple smaller horns from scratch. In this video I imported one of them and then merged into into the structure the same way I fused the larger horns together. For the Left horn I repeated the process, just with a left goat horn to begin with.

I also posted my results to the 3D file sharing site Thingiverse. Now anyone in the world can download and print these horns.

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3209917

The next step will be to print and paint these horns!