Re: Tallis - Dragon Age: Redemption - BioWare Contest
I'd love to see your technique - post away!
Alright, what you need is an Olfa utility knife and a dremel with a cylindrical cutter and either the router attachment or the 565 multipurpose cutting kit. I am using the Olfa L-1 Heavy Duty cutter and the 565 kit on my dremel. The Olfa is the first utility knife I have seen that lets you set the blade to any depth you want which is important since you may not want really deep details.
Set the blade to the depth of the detail you are adding and then cut your lines. In this set of images, it is pretty simple straight lines but I do not see why it would not work with curves too. You can see in the last picture a more complicated series of cuts to make different shaped details. This is 1/2" foam. It is okay if your cuts are deeper than your final depth but you want to get them close.
Then you set the dremel attachment to the depth you want the detail to be. Run the dremel near one side of the detail or the other. You do not want to touch the walls, of course. You do not have to be particularly straight either, just keep it near one edge or the other for narrow channels like this.
Spin the part around and favor the same side again. In a narrow channel like this, it will rip the foam out for you. There should be very little clean up.
I included this picture just to show what can happen if you remove/insert the dremel while it is still spinning. If you look on the left hand side, at the first turn, you can see the circular cut where I knocked the corner with the dremel while trying to extract it or put it back in while the dremel was running. If you are going to remove the dremel to turn the piece, turn it off and wait for it to stop spinning before you lift it out. Turn the dremel on after you have put it back in if you have removed it.
You can almost see my progression when I was working out the way to do this. The far right was my first attempt, where I think I tried using a ball end. I switched to a cylinder halfway through the far left and then you can see in the middle that it is a lot cleaner. You may notice the faint cuts at the bottom where I was not paying attention to what it should look like and cut all the way across with the utility knife. Oops.
