LoZ: Breath of the Wild (2?) - Sheikah Slate WIP

[PoopaPapaPalps]

After seeing the trailer, I found myself excited for this game more so than any other game of the series in recent memory; I thought I'd act on this enthusiasm and make something new.

I'm sure there are plenty of people out there already 3D printing their own but I neither have the resources or the interest to invest in those resources to 3D print one of my own, so this will be an old school build.

The plan so far is to just make it a prop, a light-up box essentially, but I may look into making it "function" later on down the line by putting in a working screen and bother to learn some programming.

Here's an early progress pic. I'm a real slow sculptor and, just to get this far, I'm too embarrassed to say how long. It's made just a bit more progress since I took this but there's still a ways to go. Once I've finalized the details, I'm going to make a throw-away mold of this and work on the back half to repeat the process again with that. The plan is to have casts of both the front and back for me to clean up and play around with before going on to make the final mold of the piece.



I've got LEDs and some other things coming in the mail to finish this off with and I'm toying with the idea of having a pull out battery case for it. It's still a long ways to go so we'll see.

 

[MadPhazeGames]

That is really cool so far! I'm almost finished with painting mine; although it's made out of cardboard and foam. When I get home I can post a picture of what it looks like so far. It's really crappy due to rushing around trying to get the other parts of the costume going at the same time.

 

[PoopaPapaPalps]

HEY, LISTEN!

Listen, I know it's been six years since I started this thread and it's become all but irrelevant, but that hasn't meant I've not been piece-mealing this thing together over time. Now that the second game looms over the horizon, I thought it would be nice to revisit this thread---that I had completely forgot about starting.

At the time I was making this, there wasn't much reference material until the game came out. Needless to say, a lot of what I initially sculpted needed reworking--and rework it, I did. A lot of it is based off of the model in-game model and influenced by the original concept art, but moreover, I wanted this to look and feel like how it is referenced to in the game (it's referenced to as some sort of "stone tablet") and source of its inspiration: Jomon-period Japanese pottery.

A lot of folks straight-up rip the game model from the game and have 3D printed it, and while that's fine for some, it's not for me. Doing that kept the low-poly limitations that the game is constricted by, and hampers the original intent of its aesthetic; namely, the angled corners and edges. Two of the discerning details among the Jomon-period pottery is, one) its softness of geometry, its rounded edges; there are very few sharp angles on the pieces; and, 2) its asymmetry. There's a tangible human fingerprint in the sculpting with details not matching faces or sides. A lot of people idealize this or miss one of these two details within their models and it loses that touch. It was something I was really wanting to preserve in my iteration and the reason why I initially chose hand-sculpting over other means.

Another thing it also had to be was 1:1 in size. Not to me, but Link within the game world. It's been worked out that Link is 5'2, and me being only ever so slightly taller by three inches, I worked out the proportions that this thing needed to be in. Especially if I was going to cast multiple pieces, the shrinkage would be negligible.

Unfortunately, as I kept re-working the piece, my ambitions grew and grew until ultimately, I think it's out-grown my skillset and I'm a bit stuck with what to do with the thing. I want this to "work." I want to incorporate a working screen and camera in their respective spots, and have the light in proper places (I originally had in mind to put in an old small tablet that someone gave me). A lot of this was made with the areas already prepped to put in LED bulbs and tube lights but, again, I've re-thought a lot of it and I'm unsure how I'm going to go about this. I don't want cast clear and tinted with colors so it can be painted and backlit; that's a lazy solution to me. I want this to be almost a "real" thing but I have no idea how to go about it now. I thought about having an inner form made to vac-form clear components to sleeve behind the slate and have that lit up. Again, that's too many steps.

My current idea is to get this 3D-scanned so I can tinker with the model in digital space to figure out how to part the thing into pieces. I want clear components and solid components incorporated together to keep the fidelity of the piece; I don't want to cheat and have it painted in areas. It seems more and more that scanning and printed pieces may be my only solution.

Damned aspirations...