Bloop
Sr Member
I made this replica of Loki's belt buckle as seen in the Disney+ series. 3D modeled in Blender, printed in gold silk PLA filament, and finished with Vallejo paints. I made it for a Halloween costume, but I had a print error on the day of, and only had a few hours until I needed to wear it, so I had to reprint it at a low resolution just to get it done in time. So the final version has more visible print lines, but luckily it wasn't not too noticeable since the no one was going to be looking at it too closely. It looks a little bigger than the original, but I was using a regular belt with it's own buckle that I had to cover with the TVA buckle. You can still see a bit of the buckle underneath, but it wasn't too bad. I thought about removing the original buckle from the belt, but I was worried that the PLA printed buckle would fail if it were the only thing holding the belt together, so I opted for the safer approach. I figured at least if the buckle happened to break (it didn't), I'd still have a functional belt.
The finished result in the picture photographed a lighter and more yellow than it looks in real life, but it was still a bit lighter than I wanted, since I kind of rushed the paint job to get it done. So I touched up the paint job after, mostly just as another test. I may re-print it again, either at the highest resolution on my FDM printer or on my resin printer for even better fidelity.
The first pic shows the two other versions I printed. The bottom, larger one was before resizing and re-doing some of the details (the hammered metal texture,for instance). I used it for my initial paint tests. The center buckle was the one that failed in printing - the bottom came out misshapen. I had tried to fix it quickly by re-printing just the bottom, up to the letters, and I cut off the existing bits and glued and melted the two pieces together with a soldering iron. I painted it up while the one on top was printing, just in case I had another print fail. You can see the higer resolution of the print compared to the top/final buckle.
So I started the paint with a black wash, wiping away the excess, followed by lighter colored washes (but a little less diluted) of orange and black mixed together for a dark brown hue, then finished with dry brushed layers of gold mixed with the brown color, getting lighter as I went along to give it a bronze-ish finish.
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