Bard Blog

Part 1: Rapid Prototyping & 3D modelling
Part 2: Making the Silicone Mold
Part 3: Pouring the resin

Step 2: The Resin Pour
Material used:
Axson F32

Once the mold was done I measured the amount of resin needed by filling it with normal rice. This gave me a decent estimate as to how much I would need to pour to get a one figure. Mine ended up at 4 dl, however it would I soon realize I only needed 3 dl.

I then added rubber bands around the structure of the mold to keep it together and avoid spillage from resin. I first used a series of cardboard pieces around the edges, but this isn’t really necessary if you have a small and sturdy mold. I made a little cardboard box to put it on.

Axson F32’s second component is highly toxic and should only be used in a well ventilated area. If you breathe it in directly, you’ll have to spend a week in hospital. Doesn’t sound much fun. Unless you’re into nurses or second hand infections. Then it’s great!

So, you’ll probably want to get a big fan and do this next to a window. It might also be a very good idea to have a proper gas mask just to be sure.

After the mold was ready and my ventilation was in order, I poured together the two components of the Axson F32. I set a timer for 2 minutes, stirred it around for 1 minute and then poured it into the mold at a height and titled it slightly while pouring. Once it was filled up, I gave some light karate chops on each side to make the resin fill into every cavity. Doing this tends to help avoid bubbles.

Here it is, the first resin cast I did!
As you can see, it’s pretty much a perfect replica of the rapid prototype model, even the rougher texture has been replicated. At this point I realized my model was stuck inside of the silicone because I had put the model in the wrong way. Had I rotated it by 90 degrees, it would be much easier to extract from the mold. However, I managed to fix this by cutting a line in silicone from the chest down. The models after this had some additional resin around the chest, but this was easily removable.

After the I cast a few more models, I started to sand it down while spraying it with a primer, then sanding, then priming, sanding, etc. x4. At this point, they look pretty much perfect.

I then sprayed them with some normal Montana spray cans to see how they would look in color! The ideal thing to do now would be to perfect one casted model to make a master mold. This would give mea perfect casting every time and I would not have to spend ages on priming and sanding for each model.

I hope this little tutorial was useful to you! Check out my resources list underneath to learn from the places I learned…

Tips and Tricks:
-Pour the silicone from as high as you can to avoid air bubbles
-Flip the two-part molds to an 60-70 degree angle when pouring the resin
-Remember to make ventilation shafts. The more the merrier!
-Wear protective gear!

Resources:
My Flickr Set
http://www.flickr.com/photos/hellobard/sets/72157607454804214/

Resin is the New Vinyl Flickr Group
http://www.flickr.com/groups/resinisthenewvinyl/pool/

Rapid Prototyped Chocolate Monkey Faces
http://bebop.cns.ualberta.ca/~cwant/chocomonkey/

Yoshii’s ZBrush Toys
http://www.zbrushcentral.com/zbc/showthread.php?t=47708

Sci-Proto:
http://www.sci-proto.com/sla.html

Shapeways:
www.shapeways.com

Smooth-On Mold-Making Tutorial Video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSH19G_6Yeo&feature=related

Freeman Supplies Tutorial Videos:
http://www.freemansupply.com/video.htm

Part 1: Rapid Prototyping & 3D modelling
Part 2: Making the Silicone Mold
Part 3: Pouring the resin

Step 1: The Silicone Mold

Material used:
Elastosil M4503 by Wacker Silicones combined with Wacker Haerter T-35. Random clay for the first layer of silicone poured, use Klean Klay or something similar instead.

The first thing I did was to get a big bag of my LEGO collection as a kid. I estimated the measure I would need to fit my model without using too much silicone but still remaining within a safe limit to avoid a flimsy mold. I then proceeded to build a giant castle of LEGO! To my surprise, this was not as much fun as it was when I was a kid

After the Lego was built, I filled half of it with clay and inserted the toy inside. As you can see, I put the body into the clay top-down. This was actually a really bad idea! It could make it nearly impossible to extract the casts as the body is stuck inside the silicone. What I should have done is to have flipped it around 90 degrees to the side.

After this, I added small holes with a pencil in the clay all around the model, so that the silicone would fill inside and create a locking mechanism to combine the two pieces later. Someone on Flickr pointed out that I had made these too deep, but they served me well through the process as they are. I then created two vents using some pencils at the ears and a pouring tract at the top. That is where you will be later be pouring the resin into. This tract should be much larger than the pencil-sized ones I made. It should also be formed as an up-side down cone for ideal pouring. I had to cut this with a scalpel at a later point as once again some of the excellent people from the “Resin is the new Vinyl” Flickr group pointed out.

The left ventilation tract was a very bad idea, I filled this up with silicone as it makes no sense. The resin would just pour out to the side!

I then built up the LEGO so it would cover the entire husky. I mixed together the two-component silicone (Elastosil M4503 & T-35) and poured it down onto the husky from as high up as possible to avoid air bubbles. Remarkably, this technique and/or choice of silicone had no air bubbles at all. The silicone then needed 20 hours to cure.

After that was done, I turned it upside down, removed the clay and then poured another batch of silicone on the other side, filling up the LEGO castle.

After another 20 hours, my two pieces of silicone were done! This silicone didn’t even need the silicone mold release spray that the Smooth-On YouTube videos say you should use. It came out quite easily, but I’m sure it might be even easier if you did use some of that spray. I think it depends on the silicone and what your model is made of.

All ready for casting…

Resources:
My Flickr Set
http://www.flickr.com/photos/hellobard/sets/72157607454804214/

Resin is the New Vinyl Flickr Group
http://www.flickr.com/groups/resinisthenewvinyl/pool/

Rapid Prototyped Chocolate Monkey Faces
http://bebop.cns.ualberta.ca/~cwant/chocomonkey/

Yoshii’s ZBrush Toys
http://www.zbrushcentral.com/zbc/showthread.php?t=47708

Sci-Proto:
http://www.sci-proto.com/sla.html

Shapeways:
www.shapeways.com

Smooth-On Mold-Making Tutorial Video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSH19G_6Yeo&feature=related

Freeman Supplies Tutorial Videos:
http://www.freemansupply.com/video.htm

Part 1: Rapid Prototyping & 3D modelling
Part 2: Making the Silicone Mold
Part 3: Pouring the resin

With the advent of affordable 3d printing, I finally found a cheap and efficient way to make my own toys at home using high resolution rapid prototyping technology, silicone molds and resin plastic. I will be documenting this process on my blog to show the progress and to help others do the same. It was quite difficult to find out about this process online, so this is my way of giving something back to the online community.

Rapid Prototyping:
I’ve been looking into rapid prototyping for a few months, and finally started getting some quotes from different RP companies. While doing that, I uploaded an STL file to Shapeways.com and got a quote for 400 USD. At a price like that, I wasn’t quite prepared to go straight to ordering. However, they happened to have a competition to get a free model made and shown off at Siggraph 2008 which I was lucky enough to be one of the winners of.

Blender Nation SIGGRAPH 2008 Shapeways YouTube.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbT3T6CW05Q
(Jump to 2:01 to see the husky toy)

The model looks like this.

This is quite impressive print quality. From what I can tell this is their “White Detail” level. The details come out very nicely, however its texture is a bit rough and not at the sort of smoothness a normal plastic sculpt would be. I tried sanding it down with limited results, the texture was still visible; though smoother to the touch than before.
At the size of 10×10x10 cm’s the shapeway print costs $471.19 including shipping. This is quite a high price compared to some of the other quotes I eventually received.

Other quotes at 9×9x9cm:
Scimitar Prototyping Inc (www.sci-proto.com): $536 (plus shipping)
Steven Guevara (a3dcreator@gmail.com): $195 (plus shipping)
Carsten Rosenbohm (cr@neue-freunde.org): 360 Euros (plus shipping)
3D Art To Part (www.3darttopart.com): $164 (including shipping)

3D Model:

I am by no means a master 3d modeler, I just started learning this last year so I am sure many would find my polygons horrifying! However, I did manage to get the husky to a level that I was quite happy with. Despite some strange edge loops… ^-^
Regardless, with enough smoothing in Maya, it worked out. Shapeways (and most of the others) required I provide them with an STL file. I had to convert an OBJ file into STL via a PC app, which proved to be quite the task as the size ratio needed quite a bit of tweaking. Luckily, Shapeways now has this handy new tutorial that will make the process easier:
http://www.shapeways.com/tutorials/exporting-from-maya-with-collada-3dprinting

Resources:
My Flickr Set
http://www.flickr.com/photos/hellobard/sets/72157607454804214/

Resin is the New Vinyl Flickr Group
http://www.flickr.com/groups/resinisthenewvinyl/pool/

Rapid Prototyped Chocolate Monkey Faces
http://bebop.cns.ualberta.ca/~cwant/chocomonkey/

Yoshii’s ZBrush Toys
http://www.zbrushcentral.com/zbc/showthread.php?t=47708

Sci-Proto:
http://www.sci-proto.com/sla.html

Shapeways:
www.shapeways.com

Smooth-On Mold-Making Tutorial Video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSH19G_6Yeo&feature=related

Freeman Supplies Tutorial Videos:
http://www.freemansupply.com/video.htm

Check out the quick review of the Cintiq 20WSX drawing tablet I wrote for Ultrasquid!

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Laser cut skateboard courtesy the talents and laser eyes of Kurt at 5280 Lasers! It’s been quite the while in the making, but finally it’s done and ready for sale. I’ve got 4 of these coming up in my shop in about a week, so if you need some nice wall art or just a new deck to grind to hell, be quick to get one!

I got to direct and design four idents for the Norwegian Opera House’s new website which was a very exciting project to be on. We greenscreened an opera singer, two ballet dancers and a violinist and added motion graphics to the mix. The full-screen video on the site makes it look just perfect… Have a look for yourself!

The job I did for Adobe in November has finally hit the Adobe Premiere Express application over at Photobucket.com, so head on over there to make your own remixes of photos and videos using around 15 graphical icons made by me. The ones I did have a somewhat particular style, so I suspect you’ll be able to see which ones I did. And you coooould for example, make a cute little valentine card for that special love-squid in your life! ^_^Go try it for yourself here:www.photobucket.com

Woho! I received my complimentary shirt from Woot.com!And i took terrible self-portraits in horrible lighting! Yay! Regardless, the shirt came out really cool and I’m very happy with the size and shape of the design. I’ll have to draw more of these…

Seriously, techmogology is getting so very very good… I did this quick render of a lamp for a product I’m working on, should hopefully come something cool out of this after a little more work… Right now it’s just a strange-looking lamp, but soon. oh soon. just you wait, me and Techmogology are going places! 

Exciting day! We were at the greenscreen studio in Oslo shooting for 4.5 hours for the idents we’re doing for the new Norwegian Opera House. I designed the new website and got the lucky break of getting to art direct and design the three idents we’re doing for the flash site. Directing dancers, violinists and opera singers was pretty surreal of an experience, but I think we ended up with a really great result. Now a few days and nights of After Effects magic await me…