Classic Predator Hand Sculpts - Pulling Has Begun

[Darth Pinhead]

Foremost, pictures have been added to A classic journey thread of my right hand sculpt. I am currently texturing the "leather" of the glove.

OK, I officially SUCK as an OP. Obviously, I have not completed Daman's request. I'm not blowing you off, brother, I just keep forgetting. I blame Darth Cheney. It's time to Sharpe the back of my hand. I actually have a drawing/blueprint that I drew up based upon the book I mention in my album. At some point I will redraw it and more than likely add it to the Tools album. In the meantime, I can tell you that the distance from the wrist to tip of middle finger is 9", which is pretty damn close, if not dead on, to the hands Scott uses on his statues. I could write a paragraph about why the hand had to be so big, but it basically came down to proportions. In order for one thing to fit, that made something else bigger, and then finger lengths and hand widths became all wonky. Should I bring both sculpts down in size? I have no idea. First sculpts. NO idea how they're going to turn out in latex. If they're way too big, I can try to resize them via remolding the latex pulls.

Now, onto the second question I completely missed:

May I ask how did you measure the sut off point for the nails?

Sorry, I somehow missed your question, Guan-thwei, the first time I read your post. Again, not intentional. With that, I don't quite follow what you are asking, lol. Are you asking how I determined how far down to bring the nail into the finger? If so, I spent weeks go back and forth over the Steve Wang Maquette pics, until I felt comfortable with a decision. Frankly, I HATE the nails on the screen-used hands. I look at them as "test mock-up" gloves and the maquette as more of final refined pieces. Here is the most helpful pic in regards to your question:


Thanks for all the positive feedback and questions, folks. Keep 'em coming. I SWEAR I'll do a better job at answering them...

 

[Usurper]

Brad.

Having started my own P1 left hand today i decided to look at the BR on a couple of things that were miffing me. I am not sure if you are interested in the points below, but i thought i would mention them, even though they do not detract from your sculpt on what are undoubtably THE best P1 hands we have ever seen here.

1st of all, the knuckle studs, not only do they have NOTCHES at the base of them, they also have nipples ( sorry no other word )

2nd, His MIDDLE finger on the left hand has a GAP at the side of the finger, i have checked the section over and over and it is only on that finger.

anyway i have attatched as good a pic as i could get ( had to use my iphone to take a photo of the screen. ) incase you wish to tweak.

 

[Darth Pinhead]

Brad.

Having started my own P1 left hand today i decided to look at the BR on a couple of things that were miffing me. I am not sure if you are interested in the points below, but i thought i would mention them, even though they do not detract from your sculpt on what are undoubtably THE best P1 hands we have ever seen here.

Foremost, thank you for the kind words regarding my sculpts. I am rather floored by the "The Best" title; I humbly bow and say, "Thank you."

1st of all, the knuckle studs, not only do they have NOTCHES at the base of them, they also have nipples ( sorry no other word )

Ah, yes, the nipple (Funny, that's how I've been describing it to others, as well) and notches. I went back and forth on those. Here's the thing. Because I made mine out of Sculpey to maintain the conical shape and baked them so that I could go back and sand them into such a shape, I worry about a mechanical lock created by the indentation that creates the edge of the nipple and the stone mold. Thus, I went with the look of the maquette on that.

As far as the notches go, ****! This whole time I thought they were holes and I have been chewing on whether to plastic wrap off the rest of the hand and just pulling out the Dremel. Upon further review (Apparently I did not look closely enough over the first TWO MONTHS, Grrrr) It appears I get to pull all of them out to actually notch the fuckers individually. DAMN YOU, LEE!

2nd, His MIDDLE finger on the left hand has a GAP at the side of the finger, i have checked the section over and over and it is only on that finger.

Hmmmm. I now see what you are talking about. Well, again, PISS! If I were a gambling man, I would say that the ring finger on the side you can't see in that shot, is a mirror of the middle. Take a look at my interpretation of the right hand. I think the left is probably similar in that the index/middle fingers are joined via leather and the pinky/ring fingers are joined. Did that make sense? At any rate, from a design standpoint, it would make sense that the gap is mirrored, down the centerline of the hand, unless, of course, you've looked and are positive it's not there, lol. Hmmmm. Also and for the record, though I like what they did, I am not convinced of NECA's of the hand webbing (Look at how they split the hand), upon a closer review of the maquette hand, I think the fingers of the glove are indeed joined between the pinky/ring and then again between the index/middle fingers. Further, it appears from the picture you posted that the glove webbing DOES come up the first knuckle of the pinky finger and ties into the ring finger. Of course, replicating this will not be that difficult, but it's going to cut down on the dexterity of the wearer. I think I will revise accordingly. Thanks!

See this people? This is AWESOME feedback (Not that the other positive feedback isn't awesome, as well, :down: )! Thanks, Lee, most appreciated!

 

[Usurper]

Brad, all points agreed on, i only mentioned incase you had not noticed. :down:

I will be taking quite a few liberties with my hand sculpt, but when i saw the above i knew i had to tell you.

 

[Darth Pinhead]

Again, thank you for pointing those details out. Once the "Malcontent Sculptor" (As I have come to refer to myself) is finished reworking the texture on the right hand (Up until 3 am, last night reworking the area), I plan on jumping back to the left to make it more accurate, based upon what you and have pointed out.

The problem I have with the hands is this: what is accurate? Screen used? Maquetter? Huge differences? Now, obviously, if you want screen-used accuracy, you don't even look at anything else. However, I, simply put, HATE the majority of the details on them, down to the claws, lol. Thus, mine are a bit of a fusion...

 

[Usurper]

Best way dude. the screen hands are really quite bland, which is why i intend to jazz mine up in a few places

im sure you will hit a point soon where you become happy, with the level of accuracy :down:

 

[Darth Pinhead]

Pictures have been added to A classic journey thread of my right hand sculpt. The right hand is pretty much finished. Just some minor clean-up to the glove texture from doing all of the skin texturing today. Unless, OF COURSE, Lee locates some other freakin' blatant error on my part, :down:

Seriously, Lee; please let me know. I will be so pissed if something appears wonky. Thanks!

 

[Usurper]

Let me wake up and drink some coffee then ill go looksy. :down:

 

[Darth Pinhead]

Well, I think NECA may be somewhat correct with the webbing on the fingers, though I don't think it should be quite as drastic as they made theirs:



Well, since I have a week, guess I'll start revising, lol...

 

[Darth Pinhead]

So, I spent ALL FREAKING DAY revising the webbing and working out the glove details based upon the above referenced pics. I reached the point shown above. Luckily, I caught Gene in chat and he brought up a great point: though accurate visually, keeping the webbing as shown is going to make these uncomfortable, cumbersome, and the latex is going to buckle and crease. If they were being cast in foam latex or if I had sculpted the fingers closer together (Good luck getting tools in there) with silicone being the final cast, I may have been able to get away with it, but that's not the case. Soooo, time to carve out all the revisions. Not happy, but glad Gene spoke up. At any rate, here's what is about to be destroyed:

 

[xdmray]

looks really nice. Brad you don't have to destroy it, just cut out the webbing....

 

[Darth Pinhead]

LOL. Sorry, meant destroy all the work I did today, as in, the webbing. Just frustrated. Thought for sure I was on the right path with making these the "Bee's Knees", but I'm glad Gene chimed in or I would have been even more upset. POOP!

Thanks, Daman. As Lee would say, "I'll get this sorted out tomorrow."

 

[Usurper]

As i said Brad, because they are your take on the gloves, dont get over critical, just have to learn to accept somethings we will not get perfect

and the hands look great either way.

 

[Darth Pinhead]

Thanks, Lee. Just kicking myself that the latex issue didn't occur to me since you had already warned me about creasing early on in this project. Alas, live and learn.

As it turns out, I have a bigger problem. It seems that even thought I THOUGHT I had checked the wrist circumference per an earlier warning from Gene, it turns out it is too small. I took a measurement of my hand in a "squeezed" position (You know how you try and get your hand in something tight? That position) to determine a minimum circumference at the widest point. Well, that turns out to be 9.5" and guess what, that's the same size as the current wrist on both sculpts. Sooo, not only taking into account that the glove is going to be around 1/8" thick and thus have a smaller internal diameter, but I have the shrinkage issue to contend with, as well. A 15% increase would put the wrist at 11" but even that scares me, so I'm chomping on bumping it up to 11.5" (21%). Is that overkill?

Initially I was going to simply add 3/16" all the way around the wrist, but that won't work because it will look all wonky on the back side. That actually makes me rather happy because I won't have to redo all those details. What that DOES mean is that it has to go on the sides and on the palm side.

At any rate, thanks for all the positive input and support, fellas!

 

[TehEl1te]

I think they are completely lame and should be thrown into the street.

Seriously tho... Your sculpts are certainly AMAZING. I love the amount of attention and care you are putting into the research... For the wrist size tho... I may be wrong but 11.5in to me seems a bit large. Its going to be tucked away under the arm skin or gauntlet... however the persons suit works...you really wont be seeing the wrist. I will take some pictures of my hands for you. I've got some big hands too. Be right back!

EDIT for pictures

Here are a couple shots of my hand next to my pred hand

Here are a couple shots of me wearing it. The circumference of the wrist part is about 9in. maybe a bit bigger. I have big hands (im tall and lanky) and I can get my hands in the gloves fairly easy. I have to do some wiggling one I get down to thumb area but thats it. They come off much easier because im usually sweaty as hell... gross but its the truth.

Here is a shot to show how the wrist gets tucked into a gauntlet. Now I would probably like to have an extra inch on my gloves... I have no problem with it but for the sake of super ensuring the hands dont pop out of the gaunt it wouldn't hurt... But I haven't had an issues so they are fine the way they are.

Now a few things to consider are.... 1.) my hands are wolf hands... 2.) My wrists are probably a bit smaller than most. I'm tall and **** but im a bit thin too. You can see in the one photo the extra room in the gloves wrist compared to mine. The gloves wrist is about 9in in circumference.

I figured I'd share some shots of my gloves, alltho not the same in design it could help a tiny bit with something along the road. I know, they need paint touch up... Hope this can help at least a little.

 

[Darth Pinhead]

Thanks, B. Most useful and appreciated!

OK, so the following are the knowns:

A. I'm going with a 15% shrinkage rate, just to be uber safe.
B. The measurement of my hand, at the biggest point around my thumb with my hand in the tightest position possible, is 9.5"
C. The glove thickness will be 1/8"

With that, here is my train of thought:

1. So, if 9.5" is the minimum internal circumference. then 15% bigger of 9.5 is 10.9 minimum inside on the sculpt.
2. But, I have to get this in terms of radius to determine the external radius of the glove and thus sculpt. So, we'll assume the circumference is a perfect circle and use 2(pi)R=C and determine that the radius is 1.75".
3. Now, to add in the thickness of the latex (1/8"), so the external radius is 1 7/8".
4. Plug that back into 2(pi)R=C, and we find that the external circumference (Sculpt radius) needs to be 11.78" (Yeah, gonna round down for SOME sanity to all this).
5. So, if current radius is 9.5", that means I need to add 2 1/4" to the current sculpt, on the sides and palm side of wrist (Not screwing up the look of the back).
6. Using a 12% shrink rate brings the sculpt dimension down to 11 7/16", so a 3/16" difference, which OF COURSE begs the question, "Will the latex stretch that much if needed?"

Grrrr. I over-think...

Yeah, see, this is how my mind works. My poor wife has to deal with this sort of mentality on an hourly basis...

 

[Darth Pinhead]

Well, the Malcontent Sculptor has been working to get the fingers and thumb correct on the hands. Currently, working on the left hand. After the failed webbing attempt I sat back and realized they just didn't look "real" enough to me. I also decided to keep the additional finger length, which is making the greeble placement look better. You'll also notice that I made new master Greebles and have begun placing the casts on the portion of remaining glove. Hope to get this damn thumb issue resolved today, so that I can flip to the right hand and get the fingers and thumb to match, then detailing, and finally molding in silicone. I have also decided that the nails on the final will be latex for fear of suits being ripped by resin nails when people go to make adjustments throughout a hunt.

 

[IronWulv]

WOW! What a Hand-Job!

 

[PredatrHuntr]

Looking good Brad. I really like the round greeblies you did - they look fantastic. Now git er done and mold dat bitch up!

 

[Darth Pinhead]

LMAO! Thanks, guys!

Well, I am finally content with the form and ready to texture this bad boy up: