Pirates of the Caribbean: Aztec Gold Coins

That coin is beautiful. It was actually one of the first things I ever tried to 3D model, myself. Maybe I should give it a go, now that I'm a little more practiced. Keep up the great work!
 
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Thank you. Right this one’s aalllmmooossttt final, maybe :) keep seeing parts I want to adjust. Can’t help myself haha. It’s fun. It’s come on along way. Sorry for the shine, just been washed. Very soon I’ll cast in metal and get one gold plated. See how that looks.
 
Is this of any help?
 

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Back onto this project aswell now. Yay.

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Final model. Thats pretty darned close to the close up shot when Barbossa is telling his tale and the fall from Elizabeths hand. Unfortunately you cant cast metal parts that thin... well I cant at a sensible price... so ill be cold casting with gold powder. Buff the top details, age the recess areas, should look great. Id rather the detail was present than it 100% metal.

Updates soon
 
Back onto this project aswell now. Yay.

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Final model. Thats pretty darned close to the close up shot when Barbossa is telling his tale and the fall from Elizabeths hand. Unfortunately you cant cast metal parts that thin... well I cant at a sensible price... so ill be cold casting with gold powder. Buff the top details, age the recess areas, should look great. Id rather the detail was present than it 100% metal.

Updates soon
Really great 3D work you have done, but I think you may have thinned things out too much. The teeth in particular look weird. I think you over estimated how much thickness the gold plating will add.
 
Right... I'm finally done with this. Several months later :)

I honestly had no idea how difficult this would be to pull off.

I've wanted some Aztec gold ever since I first saw Pirates. I wanted a double headed skull coin as that's the one Elizabeth drops in slow motion. I also knew several where made for the film, a big close up one (the shot when Barbossa is explaining the curse and the camera gets really close to it), wider shot coins which really had no sharp detail and the cgi one from the 'waste not!' scene. Love that line :)

I wanted to combine the detail of the cgi and big versions, the size of the normal coin and the double skull of the cgi one.

What a difficult task it was.

Started off by 3D modeling the coin and printing on a resin printer. I knew from early on there was no chance I could metal cast these coins. Home metal forging without casting under pressure simply cant recreate the incredibly thin details this coin presents. Some of the details are fractions of a mm thick! Plus if you go down the route of metal plating that process adds thickness so you need to take all this into account with your resin master.

Back to the print. What thickness you model in Zbrush and what thickness you get out the printer are 2 very different things at this scale. So I went through endless variations trying to match the film coin as best as I could. Experimenting with what I would get out the printer depending what my model looks like. Eventually I got close enough... yes I know certain parts aren't exactly right but I simply couldn't get my printer to print more accurately at this scale. And its not a cheap printer!

Simply handling the resin master coin was fraught with problems. If you hold the resin cast in just the wrong way.. with my big fat fingers... the teeth can be brushed off, the chevrons can be squashed. There just isn't an easy way to hold this damned prop :) Once its metal plated its much more handleable but the amount of casts I went through trying to get a good 'master'... god endless.

Onto moulding. Another mind job that again due to scale. But also because your trying to cast this incredibly detailed thing with no seam lines. Pressure pot moulding and casting gives you a good amount of casts from a single mould but the mould doesn't last as long as a larger mould might simply because of the extremely thin walls between details. Constant demolding rips these very quickly.

The only way I could get the look I wanted was electroforming / electroplating. I tried gold leaf / spray paint etc... all just looked naff. I've gone through many tests getting this right. Many conductive inks / paints etc. Ive tried to get professional companies to plate them for me but the few I've tried haven't been successful so I've figured it out myself. I've probably spent more money than I would have liked perfecting this but it works! it looks great so I'm happy. They arnt cheap to cast though, with all the materials, paints, man hours plating.

So the resin casts are airbrushed with conductive paint, copper electroformed then 24k gold electroplated. Oil paints to age the recesses.

I think it looks pretty good.


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