by Fabricatordjinn | Nov 18, 2015 | Uncategorized
I recently debuted an Imperius costume from Diablo 3 at Blizzcon 2015. I have received an enormous amount of feedback on this costume, and the most common question I’ve received is “What did you make that out of, how did you get it so smooth!” Well, here is your answer. I used a type of thermoplastic called Closed Cell PVC Foam, more commonly known as Sintra (brand) or XPVC. XPVC is sort of a hybrid between PVC (like the pipes) and Polyurethane. This mix gives it some truly amazing properties, and makes it surprisingly friendly to use for a thermoplastic. I starts out almost totally smooth, and sands to a near perfect finish. It takes all types of paint, and is by far my favorite material to work with. It is heat shapable, sandable, cuttable by hand or with a saw, drillable, comes in various colors and thicknesses and is in general a wonderfully versatile material to work with. I have even successfully turned it on a lathe. It is commonly used in the FX industry and for vinyl coated signs you see on the street. Instead of going into the technical minutia of XPVCs properties, I have included a link to the Wikipedia article on it HERE. That’s nice you say, what do I need to start? Things you need: XPVC: Sintra/Komatex/Celtec (USA) – Forex (UK/AUS) – Link to good price on Amazon First you need to find it. I get all of my XPVC from a local vendor called San Diego Plastics. It is only really sold by industrial plastic suppliers. If you live near a city,...
by Fabricatordjinn | Mar 13, 2015 | Personal Projects, Uncategorized
This helmet in my mind is one of the most challenging pieces of the outfit, and thats saying something! Heres what I had to deal with. I started by pulling the helmet shape from the in game model to get the basic shape. After ripping it apart I made a 2 piece template that would fold together into the shape of the whole helmet all at once. There was a lot of trial and error involved in this, but having a model helped immeasurably. In the end, I transferred my base pattern to 3mm PVC and cut each half out. They might be the craziest looking patterns ive ever used! Using a heat gun, I slowly heated up and bent the plastic to the shape of the helmet, using the pattern to meet edges and generally fightin with it for awhile. After a very long time tweaking and gluing, this is what I had. Complicated helmet base in a day! Obviously the tape couldnt stay forever, I glued it all together, then to make it a solid peice I mixed fiberglass resin, PVC dust (from my orbital) and bondo together to make a thick sludge, then slushed it around on the inside of the helmet. There is about a 2mm coat of the stuff holding it all together in there. After it dried, the helmet was rock solid and I could sand and fill it to kingdom come to get rid of those peaks and fold marks. This was a lot of boring sanding, but in the end I got a much cleaner helmet base that was quite strong....
by Fabricatordjinn | Dec 8, 2014 | Personal Projects, Uncategorized
Next up, the gauntlets! Or at least the upper section. I started as usual, with the base model from the game. After unfolding it and making some templates for the pieces that worked, BS’ing the pieces that didn’t, I transferred it all to plastic and cut out the base. For some reason I didn’t start taking pictures until the lowest level shell was done and everything was cut out, so here it is. After this, I cut out some trim (pictured), mounted it all in place, and heat shaped the lower sections to the open ended shape they are in the cinematic. These are very strange gauntlets. With that section mostly complete, it was time to start on the detailed top section. Using a template made from the pep file I created, I forced together the awkward shape of the top sections using a heat gun and lots of superglue/sanding. After that, I designed the detail that would go on the outside, planning to cut it out and build it up layer by layer. This was a tedious process, but ended up with some pretty good results! The first layer went down, and a bit of apoxie scult was used to fill the gap. Then, sanding. Then, another layer (designed from the previous template), went down ontop of the first, to add those cool looking levels. A coat of primer and some more sanding, because why not. Now it is time for the inner detailing! I couldn’t bring myself to use pre bought stuff on this, and sat down and drew out the inner detailing on one of...
by Fabricatordjinn | Dec 6, 2014 | Personal Projects
Ahhh Imperius, you wide bastard. These bad boys were fun to make, and where my first foray into making an actual silicone mold. Without further ado! Using the models I ripped from D3, I made a properly sized template out of pep for the base, and after transferring it to plastic and a lot of heat shaping (of which there are no pictures), I made these! God these were ugly and unwieldy, and cleaning them up was a nightmare because of the low res of the model and the thickness of the PVC (3mm). I decided to focus all my energy on making one shoulder to mold instead of all 4 big chunks. I started by patterning out the detailing on each side, and cutting it out of 2mm PVC. This was a mostly trial and error process involving a lot of cursing and measuring. After this, I added the outer trim detailing, and built up the top using Apoxie Sculpt. Lots of sanding here, as usual. LEARN TO LOVE THE SANDING. To finish it off, I used another piece of 3mm PVC and sanded it into the curvy beveled shape in the cross bit. For some reason I do not have pictures of this hand sanding process, but it was all done with the random orbit sander. After this, it was finish sanding and.. mold making! Sloppy first run, this whole thing ended up being garbage and I had to redo it. Valuable lessoned learned, namely take your time, and FILL ALL YOUR SEAMS. After another try, my one peice mold was complete.. and it was time...
by Fabricatordjinn | Dec 4, 2014 | Personal Projects
Hey all, I’m not dead, just lazy! I haven’t been keeping this page current with my progress, shame on me! Time to start the long process of fixing that. Here is part 2 of the breastplate boogaloo. Imperius has a thing for the Sun, it seems. . I wasn’t sure how exactly to build this, so I just started from the lowest level and went to work! I roughed out the shape below after a bit of trial and error, and cut the first layer out of 2mm PVC. And two more layers, designed by bullshit and guesswork. from this point, I glued these pieces together, then filled every gap with Apoxie sculpt to create the bevels and sanded it for ages. After much pondering on how to get this thing I have created to curve so splendidly, I made my choice and cut this thing I had just completed right in half. After more filling, sanding, and cursing, the finished cleaned up master was ready for my dumb idea! I made Vacuform pulls of both halves of the chest piece, and cut out the Vac formed halves. Perfecto! Oh wait, nevermind, you cant bend a hollow object without horrifying warping. I scrapped that idea for another one, and filled both halves of the vac pull with that same cheap fiberglass resin I used for the Spears sun. I didnt get any photos of this process as I pulled the resin out of the “molds” before it had fully cured, and quickly bent the 90% cured resin to shape with a heat gun and my hands, then screwed it...
