Moses's Replicas and other stuff (56K WARNING!!!!)

Moses

New Member
Let me start off by first saying that this is my first post here on these forums so hello to all :)

Also, as of right now these are the only props/replicas I've ever made. My knowledge in prop making is limited to what I've learned in working with these materials. I also have about 6 years of self taught ability in making 3d models in 3ds Max which was originally because I was a video game modder. I applied those skills to make 3d blueprints for what you're about to see and will for anything else I decide to make.

Down to the pictures since I'm sure that's what you all want to see.




Here's my first prop which I gave to my friend as a Christmas present. It's a Glass Throwing Knife from Morrowind. It was also my FIRST prop attempt.


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Here are the construction phases

http://fc03.deviantart.net/fs71/f/2...ng_knife_construction_by_chief_01-d4jlbz0.jpg

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It's made from 1/4in thick polycarbonate for the green glass pieces brushed with green solvent dye, magic sculpt for the rest of it, painted with a acrylic based powdered silver paint, and darkened with a universal non-acid based patina.

Here's my photobucket with the rest of the pictures

Throwing Knife Photobucket



Next is my second attempt at prop making, the 6th House Goblet from Morrowind's main quest.

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It's made from 6 solid pounds of magic sculpt with steel "re-bar" for supporting the top half's walls, the spikes, and the handles.


Sorry I don't have ANY pictures of it while I was actually molding the magic sculpt, nor have I worked on it enough since these were taken to justify new pictures. Almost all of my time spent making anything in the past few months has gone to Keening, my third prop. I've started lining and carving the details with my dremel tool.

Here are the rest of the pictures during it's construction process

6th House Goblet Photobucket


And last but not least, Keening.


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This is the first one I really got into making real "blueprints" for it. I finalized the 3d blueprints over the weekend sometime last November. They were changed slightly when I actually started building for one reason or another, but mainly minor changes(ex: instead of rod through the blade's bottommost area I used a piece of 1/16in thick tool steel cut into a rectangle.)

Here's how all the parts would be arranged on a 12in x 12in x 0.5in sheet of polycarbonate along with some other 3d blueprint renderings.
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Here's an assembly/disassembly video

http://s1151.photobucket.com/albums... Blueprints/?action=view&current=1a73cb0a.mp4


Here are the rest of the blueprints and references.

Keening's references and blueprints on Photobucket


I don't have any pictures of the earliest steps but here's what I've got.

SORRY ABOUT THE CRAPPY CELL PHONE PHOTOS. I really need to get a camera >_>


Keening's "Progress" on Photobucket


You'll need to follow along through the pictures on the photobucket link above. Right at the end of carving the handle the crescent at the end broke in half from a multitude of reasons.

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I ended up shearing off the disconnected central area on the two pieces, carving out a new center, and acrylic solvent welding the crescent back together. I even came up with a newer, stronger design for it in the process to make sure it won't break again.


After the carving was finished I tried my hand at working with leather to make a sheath. My sewing skills carried over for the leather-working.

The sheath was mostly finished and just needed the button snaps to come in the mail so I could attach them and finish sewing. In the mean time I made a stamp with my symbol on it to imprint it on the sheath.

The stamp itself is made from magic sculpt with 3 steel rings around it to strengthen it while it gets pounded with a hammer on an anvil. I've used the stamp on quite a few other leather items and it's held up extremely well for essentially being epoxy.


I was finishing up putting a coat of paint on it when all of a sudden the yardstick I was hanging it from fell and most of the pieces fell down the wooden stairs of the deck, down a floor, and onto the grass. Thinking of it still gets me pissed off. I had to sand all the paint off with sand paper which felt like it took forever. I finally got around to painting it a second time and did not like the results I came up with. I decided to strip it and try again. Didn't want to sand it off so I tried solvent paint remover. It ended up doing the job but, like I expected, put crazing all over Keening since it's made from polycarbonate.


Third times the charm right?


The gold is only this shiny in the sun and the darkened areas are much darker. I achieved a pitted texture like I was aiming for by making a nice even and full coat of gold over everything and then jittering the spray nozzle up and down to have it "spit" spots of paint about 2mm wide. waited till that had dried and repeated a few times. The pits were perfect for the patina to nestle into.

Finished Pictures

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http://i1151.photobucket.com/albums/o630/MosesofEgypt/Keening/Keening Finished/8e9966bd.jpg

So here's the photobucket link to the finished pictures of Keening

Keening's "Finished" Photobucket pictures
 
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I forgot to add this. I made it for my friend. I don't really know if this qualifies as a replica, but I thought I'd add it anyway.

It's a Hylian Shield guitar pick made from polycarbonate. This is the second one I made(my friend lost the first) for my guitarist friend. He says it works better than the rest of his picks and it's the only one he uses. It's much more durable than any other picks and he will never break it or wear it out from even the most intensive guitar playing.

I carved my emblem into the back of it, put a hole at the top for him to put it on his lanyard clip, and the black was simply permanent marker I coated and smeared off until only the edges remained for outlines. All carving was done with a dremel tool, my weapon of choice for almost all my carving.

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Awesome and I mean AWESOME work.

Some really beautiful designs brought into reality there!
 
Thanks guys. I was starting to get a bit discouraged that this would get lost in the pages of threads since no one had commented on it all day. I'm kinda a pessimist so it's only natural lol.

So does anyone else here work with polycarbonate? You guys might know it better under the brand names of Lexan, Markalon, and Tuffak. It's a very picky material to work with. Pieces nearing the thickness of and thicker than 1/4in become extremely annoying and difficult to thermoform. Also to be considered is that I've looked all over and the thickest you can get it in sheet form is 0.5in since any thicker apparently causes issues with the sheet's strength. You can also get rods and tubes, but no blocks. In other words anything that can't fit in a 0.5in thick sheet and will need to be drape or vacuum formed with heat.


by the way, can anyone recommend a good food grade (preferably aerosol can based) lacquer, clear coat, varnish, polyurethane, or resin that I can spray the goblet with to seal it? It's gotta be hard since teeth will obviously end up touching it.
 
Damn those look awesome!!!!!!

Any chance of you sharing the templates for keening?

Probably your best bet on the food safe sealant would be to check with a local potter or glass place. They have glazes they use, but they can probably point you in the right direction for the best stuff to make sure you don't poison yourself.

Just curious, but any particular reason you didn't use neon green or emerald acrylic for the throwing knife? They look amazing, but at least with the already green stuff you wouldn't have to worry about the dye.

Amazing work!
Chris
 
First off those "templates" you're asking for are 3d models I made myself in 3ds max. If you can open 3d model files and be able to pull measurements from them then I'll think about it. I say "I'll think about it" because this is my pride and joy right now and I'm not sure how I'd feel about having copies out there somewhere. I zoomed in on keening in 3ds max until it was 1:1 with my screen size and kept that viewport for carrying measurements over to the sheets of polycarbonate with a tape measurer.


About the sealant, if by glaze I hope you don't mean heat activated glaze meant for pottery. This isn't made from clay or sculpey. This goblet is made from magic sculpt; a 2 part epoxy resin with clay consistency. I used some to make a mold at one point and it started to get slightly bendy with a browned surface around 375 f. I very highly doubt it will be able to stand over 1000f according to this.


Reason I chose polycarbonate over acrylic is because of how tough it is. I also couldn't find anywhere that had colored polycarbonate so I had to color it myself. Here's an example of it's impact resistance.

I took a scrap piece of polycarbonate at 4in x 1in x 1/4in and laid it down on the sidewalk. I slammed it with a hammer roughly 30 times. it was dented all over from the cement digging into the soft plastic, but no cracks or anything else. I laid it over a crack in the cement and struck the center about 30 times with a hammer again and about 20 times with an aluminum bat. same result. I picked it up and because of how hot it had become i was able to bend it in half, but otherwise polycarbonate has incredible impact resistance many many many times higher than acrylic. It will also never shatter. It's more of a soft plastic and will bend and snap cleanly without debris. I had a friend shoot a 0.5in x 4in x 6in sheet with a .45. He didn't have it clamped properly because it was sticking out of a vice so all the force was on the clamp line. the .45 dented it about 1/5in deep and bent the sheet over the clamp line until it broke into about 10 large chunks. If he had it supported on all sides though(like setting it up against something) I'm sure it wouldn't have gone through.


I have learned a few things in my time working on these pieces and if I were to soak the polycarbonate in a dye after it's all carved and polished it will absorb the color, eliminating the need for colored plastic. That's what I'm going to do with Keening's blade. I would have done it with the throwing knife If I had known about it at the time. I also never put a clear coat on the knife. Remember, it was my first prop lol. I treated it entirely as a learning experience.
 
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Thanks for all the compliments everyone. I still pale in comparison to the majority of the rest of you guys. I've only made a handful on things and using unorthodox methods. There's still a lot I can learn and that's part of why I'm here. This is mainly just a hobby for me though so I don't have any intentions of building for sale.


IDK HOW I forgot to mention this, but I also made this for a friend of mine.

350px-YunaStaff.jpg


I did everything except for paint it and make the tassel on the end. It also needed to have shallow pits filled in on the head since I didn't have a way to make my dremel tool perfectly level throughout the whole carving process and ended up carving more than I should have. I don't have any pictures of it right now but I will ask my friend for some after she finishes painting it.

It's made from a 1in diameter polycarbonate rod for the bottom section including the gold area between the red and blue. A polycarbonate tube was used for the blue section with steel bolts with washers sanded to fit perfectly inside it with jb weld to secure them. I carved plugs to fit into the ends of the tube and jb welded nuts inside the plugs(the staff disassembles into 3 main sections). The plugs were permenately affixed to the ends by drilling 3 symmetrical holes around the perimeter of the rod and through the plugs. I put screws through these holes, cut them off level with the staff, and sanded them flush with it's surface.


The head was made from a 24in x 12in x 0.5in sheet of polycarbonate(I got to keep the extra :) ) and was carved at first with a band saw to get the outline, then holes were drilled to fit a blade runner's blade into and cut out the general shape of the cutouts. I then finished it all up with my dremel tool and made the grey connector section from magic sculpt. There's a bolt going through the head and into the connector which secures it to the blue section. I wrapped the bolt in a few layers of duct tape before I applied the magic sculpt so that once it hardened any stress from the bolt bending wouldn't cause fractures in the magic sculpt molded around it.


I told my friend she can use epoxy to fill in the dips and then sand it over smooth and paint.

I modelled it in 3d first like usual.

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Though the bolt appears to be separate from the connector and the head they're actually permanently affixed to each other. I also scaled it to her height in comparision to it's height next to Yuna ingame so it's just about as close to a 1:1 ratio as you'll see.
 
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ugh, got a headache. I've got all the cracks carved and darkened with patina and honestly, I'm quite surprised at how good they look. They look natural to everyone I showed. I've just got one area at the bottom to carve which I'm saving for tomorrow and then it's on to the solvent dye. Gonna mix some blue and green and thin it out with some rubbing alcohol until I get what I'm looking for. Need to get my hands on some blue solvent dye first though >_>. Wish me luck.
 
I've built 2 LED's into the base of the blade so it lights up now.

I removed about 3/4cm from the middle of the steel bar that goes through the base of the blade, drilled a little hole through the blades very bottom, wired the LED's in parallel, took about an inch of wire, and essentially turned one half of the now separate steel bar into positive and the other half into negative. I then made an attachment clip from a thin sheet of polycarbonate that attaches to Keening with wires that nicely contact the steel bars, creating a circuit. Took a spare phone charger, a 180ohm resistor(to drop the current from 5v to 3.4), and a toggle button from a flash light, and finished the cord.

I can toggle it on or off with the button built into the cord and I can very easily detach the power supply if I want to carry Keening around. It's impossible to tell Keening has LED's in it without taking it apart. It's outside appearance was not modified in even the slightest. The LED's are covered up by the center golden piece with the large screw in it.

Keening now hangs from my wall next to my computer with the power supply clipped in as a light up wall decoration.
 
Here's some pics

Adjusted the colors to how it looks in person.
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Low light conditions with Keening's light off.
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Low light conditions with Keening's light on.
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Pitch black with Keening's light on.
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Well I've been busy with stuff, but I managed to get some work done on the goblet.

This is what it looked like before I carved any of the details. I had them outlined and ready for carving.

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This is after I carved the center, the handles, and cleaned up the spikes. I still need to copy the design on the wall of the goblet over to the other 3 sides and carve it out. Still mulling over ways in my head to do that easily. I think I've got one, but I'm still looking.

Also, on the left handle in the picture, those dark spots were areas i had dug out un-mixed part-b magic sculpt putty. It was soft cause it wasn't mixed thoroughly. I've filled them in already and smoothed them over. Don't want soft spots on the surface now do we?

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I'll be carving the braided cup rim next after I finish up the handles. Then it'll just be copy the design over to the other 3 spots and carve, spot check and make small adjustments, then paint and seal.
 
hey so, my computer is 100% definitely fubar'd. I don't feel like talking about it so I'll just say that it sounded like a pack of firecrackers when I plugged it back in AFTER the storm an hour ago, so don't expect to hear much from me for quite a while.
 
Well done! Im a big fan of Morrowind, and love that you did the glass knife! Really cool to see a RL version of it. :thumbsup
 
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