kubo and the two strings monkey head fix

[Flyscriber]

HI everyone.
Heres something of a departure from the "normal" studio scale fodder.
A year or so ago I received a call from a collector who had some of the original 3d prints used for the animation of kubo and the two strings. His Monkey head had suffered some kind of damage and he wondered if it could be fixed.
I asked him to send the part to me and I would evaluate to see if I could help.
These model parts are 3d printed using a full colour printer, and the quality is fabulous and the colour is trapped internally in the off white translucent print material. The broken parts were the monkeys hair (unsurprisingly) which had sheared off on the left side of his face and become lost (the broken original parts didn't exist any more).
First impressions were, how the hell do I replicate this look for a decent match to the other hair.
here's a shot from the movie and another shot of the part overlaid so you can see what is missing.

You can see the area just in front of the ear has a lot of fronds missing from it and when displayed looks completely one sided and out of balance.

 

[Flyscriber]

So I tried matching clear resin with airbrushed purple/pink under some off white on the rear side to allow the light through. But it didn't match at all.
Then it was onto other resin variants, 5min epoxy with a white mix of paint to make it semi translucent, no dice, two pack varnish with a white mix and a long cure time !!, no dice.
In the end I went for FIMO in a translucent white airbrushed on the rear to let the colours bleed through.
Now I had something which matched ok enough to be seen side by side with the original, I need to sculpt the 1mm wide!!! and 5mm long !! hair!!!!.
Being a half blind old dude I wasn't looking forward to this, but with modern technology (a magnifying glass) I was able to see.
Here is a shot of the parts next to the damaged head. They are super tiny.

Next was installation of the parts. The ones above were test parts to check the colour match against the original. They all needed to be redone as a single plate for fitting to the rear of the affected side, as well as a few parts to extend some broken individual hairs So many more hours sculpting the smallest bits ever, came up with this assembly.

You can see in this image where the fix is being held (red line), as well as the tell tale crack from my bad positioning for the picture.

Once I was happy with this, the assembly was added back to the head using super small amounts of CA glue, with NO KICKER.

The face is now nicely balanced left to right, whereas before the left side of the face (right in this image) looked really small in comparison.

You can still see a couple of tell tale marks here I had to butt join sculpted parts to the ends of broken hair over the top of the main appliance which was glued to the underside. These small "hairs" are only .5 to 1m in width. This is definitely the smallest repair I have ever done. The airbrushed blues and purples on the rear side matched up perfectly and you really need to look super hard to see the joins. Overall I was very happy with the result, as was the client who sent me these images of the repaired head in its display box.

Thanks again to you all for checking this out, and if you have a KUBO head display and need a repair, you know how to do it now.
Happy modelling folks.

 

[Fett_Ish]

Great work, thanks for sharing!

 

[Vacformedhero]

great film, and phenomenal stop frame miniature, you did a great job fixing the print.

 

[animator]

Beautiful repair work!

 

[DaddyfromNaboo]

Awesome! I do not know if you have been in contact with our member Tim aka D48thRonin but he worked on the movie and might be able to give insight into the actual creation process of specific pieces.

 

[Flyscriber]

Cheers for the kind words folks.
I saw a documentary on the creation of this film, very inspiring to see the 3d method used in this way.
Does D48thRonin appear on this ? Thanks for the info. This is not my main interest, but its definitely worth a watch for those who haven't seen it.

 

[3DImpact]

Late to the party commenting on this, but you did a great job matching that - one of those 'if you didn't tell me I'd never have noticed' repairs. Well done!

And what a neat collectable!

Dan