No Game No Life - Sora's Crown Build

[Alatar]

Posting a quick project I used to dip my feet into the 3D modeling & printing world, part of a Sora costume from No Game No Life. Namely the crown, which he usually wears on his arm rather than atop his head.



Even with these references you can see how loosely defined the dimensions are. To put it nicely, anime allows for a lot of freedom when costuming. Once I had pictures, I picked a 3D modeling program to learn. There were a surprising number of free options. In the end I went with Blender because it's versatile and because apparently I'm a masochist (dat learning curve). I spent a lot of time flailing around with the program until I had learned enough of the basics to get on with.



Getting anywhere in Blender took a while. Having played with Google SketchUp before Blender, the lack of line drawing tools enfuriated me. I finally went and found a wonderful addon called Snap Utilities Line. With it I drew the basic shape on a cylinder, proportioning it as best I could to the pictures. I only needed to do half of it, while mirroring the rest. I tried to do the same technique with the crown tips, but it didn't work as well as I'd liked (overlapping surfaces everywhere). Once it was done I just added a solidify modifier.



By the time I knew enough to make the crown, the gems were much easier. I decided to build these separately for ease of sanding and painting down the road. Using the Boolean modifier I carved into them so that they'd lay flat on the crown. At the time I didn't know about the glorious combination of Subdivide Surface / Creasing that would have cleaned up those rough polygon shapes. It didn't matter much though, as I was soon to find out.

 

[Alatar]

A friend of mine had recently purchased and assembled a delta 3D printer kit and was kind enough to perform the prints for me. Below are pictures of how it came out of the printer. It's just a basic PLA print, and it was clear that the machine needed more fine tuning. Coming from a background of fiberglass props though, this was a glorious step forward.



The next hurdle was deciding how to clean up the piece. Sanding off the excess strings was easy, but the intense striations between layers required a lot of attention. Turning to advice from the internet, I decided to try some of Smooth-On's XTC-3D.



It quickly became apparent that this was a horrible idea - the material only seemed suitable for sealing finished pieces. Though it did fill the striations, I wasn't able to coat it thinly enough to prevent runs. It was also hard to sand, the difference between it and the PLA meant I had to recoat it if I sanded through. After a few tries, I abandoned it for my old standby, Bondo.

Bondo worked a lot better, and I feel silly not getting more pictures of the crown during this lengthy stage. It finished up just like a fiberglass prop at this point though: roughly sand bondo, fill scratches with spot putty, spray will filler primer, and fine sand to gauge smoothness.



Since this part had to hang magically at my shoulder, I decided it was once again time for my favorite costuming standby: Rare Earth Magnets. I dremeled a few holes onto the inside of the part and superglued round magnets inside. These paired up with magnets sewn into the fabric of my shirt. Paint simply consisted of more primer, golden aerosol paint (airbrush someday...), and clearcoat. I taped off the areas the gems would attach to. For the gems themselves I just used some cheap acrylic paints rather than buy another 3 spray cans.

Once the paint was said and done, I finished off by supergluing the gems to the crown. Given the inaccuracies of these methods, it was no surprise that the gems didn't sit perfectly on the crown. Lesson learned there, but for a convention costume it gets the job done. Here's the finished result (after one convention's worth of battering):

 

[Natsumi Dragnel]

can i get the 3d print file and the name of the program you used

 

[acidnet]

Hello I was wondering if you would be willing to share the .blend file or the OBJ file. That or if you will a little more info on how you modeled the crown.
Thanks a bunch for any info you can give.