Smaller components for 3d printer

here is the last bed of 3d elements i will need to print for my model not including spares. The parts include rear diffuser and exhaust system holder, rear and front light l.e.d holders, rear light honeycomb patterns, wing mirrors, petrol cap, license plate, indicators, window wiper components, alloy badges and rear and front badges. all parts are modeled in rhino and 3ds max with the use of photographic reference and my line drawings from the blue prints.com
I have organised the bed with components as close to one another as possiblke with some elements inside one another to save on material costing and carefully planned the orientation of each part to ensure the lowest possible pricing. When loaded in to netfabb my models were almost all aplicable for the Objet 3d printer straight off with only minor, easily editable errors. i hope to gain clean prints from this job although i am semi scepticle about the size of some on the smallest pasrts and will have to wait for the outcome to know if alterior paths must be taken.

Body work and Professional practice

i was able to get very clean 3 layered fiberglass pulls from my mould which were a lot easier to clean up in this material than to get perfect in the clay. I guess this is where the world of automotive and product differs because i was creating a product model in the style of automotive techniques because i wanted to progress and inevitably show of my skill set. In modern practice and as i found from my visit to amalgam, like for like 1:8th scale models are now created by taking scans from the real cars, editing the meshes to make appropriate for scaled models and then cncing the parts.
Although the clean up of the body work took a long time is was a relatively straight forward process and i still believe for a model this scale it was hard using tiny tools to make the finished sculpt perfect. i still believe that i made the right choice in stopping the sculpting short of perfection to alter and refine the model body in resin. Whilst refining this main body of the model there are smaller jobs i can do in between waiting for filler and paint to dry.

New version tyres

Because the wax lasercutting attempts didnt work out quite as clkean as i had expected i decided to go back to the drawing board in modeling and 3d printing th tyre tread pattern instead. to save somewhere in the region of £100 in 3d resin costing i printed only the exterior 3mm of the tyre tread making a sleeve that sliding on perfectly to a newly turned chemiwood inner for the tyre. i chamfered the inned edge on the tyre and lasercut the bridgestone logo for the official bridgestone tyre tread. When mould in a simple box mould i played around with gum foam and fast cast resin mixes to create a high density black pigmented ready finished foam that correctly portrayed the tyres appearance giving them slight give and a rubbery texture and look. multiple were quickly cast to be time efficient.

50 hour Daedric dagger prop

 Based on a real time frame, the idea was to create a hero prop and multiple other props for varied use in different materials within 1 working week as part of my studies for FMP along side my 1:8 scale lotus exige. Having done similar work in the past on various movie sets but nothing purely off my own back, i decided from my mock interview that it would be great to broaden my portfolio and demonstrate a like for like model which i could be asked to make working as a professional in the film industry. I created the sculpt in around 1-2 full working days from start to finish from y2k le beau touche automotive modeling chavant. The wooden and wire armature along with the durability of the clay gave enough strength to withstand detail and fine/ thin parts for the blade where water based or wed could not have. I created a 2 part mdf/silicon slam mould, identical in spec to the ones created for axes on Thor : The dark world, as this would later enable a number of processes. This type of mould meant i could base paint and/or select different materials for different parts of the prop the quickly slam the mould together with t bar locators and fill the mould with another desired material. i could control different appearances and weights of the prop as well as the vulnerability to breakage if needed for a breakaway prop. For my hero dagger i buttered the handle with a polyurethane gum foam, which is a self skinning expanding foam used widely throughout the prop industry to create soft props and guns for stunt scenes. This gave the handle a leathery wound texture with a bit of give to it. I layed up Fast cast resin with black pigment and aluminium powder in the blade for a darkened metal and then filled the core with pigmented black fast cast. When painted and aged this dagger will look great and this project just goes to show the real scale working times of the industry. If necessary i could successfully complete this or similar projects in my professional career and cast multiple props for various uses. i intend to follow my hero prop with a breakaway version cored with biscuit foam and spaghetti. When splintered in slow motion cinema this gives a great realistic sharding effect.

Wheel arches

In the backlog of images i have building up i found this. to ensure consistency between the 4 wheel arches i turned the correct diameter piece from chemiwood which i then created a silicone box mould of to cast 2 fast cast wheel arches from. i then hand finished them as neccesary to ensure correct fitting and placement for the 4 parts of the coresponding bodywork. This idea inevitably saved me a lot of time sculpting perfect arches and ensures for a cleaner pull from my final bodywork mould

Bodywork mould

I created a brush on, or butter on silicone jacket to ensure the detail and shape of my pattern was captured. after painting on a think silicone layer, i painted on another layer of silicone with thixo in it and added scrap chunk bits cut to size. Because the pink silicone (smartsil 25) has a lower shure rating and a lower viscosity i find sometimes that it is too floppy. What the green (supersil) chunks added to the 1 part jacket was a thicker reinforcement that gave the silicone inner a backbone to stand in its correct place. This also saved me roughly 1 kg of silicone as the third and final layer with thixotropics only needed to fill the gaps created by the green lattice shapes. Once the silicone had set i scalped in to the inner and shimmed ready for a 2 part fiberglass jacket to ensure undercuts such as the wheel arched could easily be released foor my fiberglass pulls.

Finishing stages of sculpt

Nearing the finish of the base bodywork for the lotus i used my steel ribbon tools to get the y2k to the smoothest finish possible within my time frame. because of the working hours required for the rest of the project elements plus another 50 hour project this meant the sculpt wasnt quite to the standard of a 1:1 scale automotive model but nor did it have to be. I had got the sculpt to a point where time spent smoothin in this material was wasted in comparison to moulding and casting my pattern for finishing in a harder material. I found that by finishing a element of the sculpt to perfection and then begining on another element that the first part would get knocked and the lines less crisp just because of the softness of the material in comparison to something with a hard finish. I relaised that by making a mould i could lay up a fibre glass copy which i could work to the perfect shape.