Baby Steps are still Steps (day 2)

I’m continuing my “hundred day challenge” to rebuild the habit of working on model projects and re-engage with my Zaku Kai scratch build, a project which has dragged on forever and which I desperately want to finish. Tonight I geared up to make my new shoulder pauldron sculpt.


A major point of frustration for me with my first attempt at sculpting the shoulder pauldron was aligning the spikes properly, along with the “fringes” surrounding them. I had sculpted out the rough shape of the pauldron, then cut holes and tried to align the spikes and their fringes – but I found it very difficult to align the parts correctly.
To correct this problem, this time around the sculpt starts by positioning and aligning the spike fringes, and everything else proceeds from there.
So tonight’s goal was to design the styrene parts which would come together to form the basis for the new sculpt. I used my Blender model as reference to produce a front-view profile of the part, as well as two cross-sections that would align the spike fringe.
In Blender these cross-sections can be produced by using alt-B to view a rectangular slice of the model, and then rotate the view so that slice can be viewed over the coordinate grid. For this work I also decided that I wanted to align these cross-sections to the direction the spike fringe should be tilted.

Using the Blender model data as a reference, I drew the different profiles onto grid-printed styrene sheet. There’s still more to be done: in particular I need to make a second template to use to build the back half of the pauldron. But, a good bit of progress, and I should hopefully be able to start the new pauldron in earnest tomorrow.
As for the mold I made yeaterday for the spike fringe – I actually kind of messed it up. It occurred to me that it’d really be a lot easier to accurately place and align the spikes if the fringe parts had a flat bottom. So I decided to re-do the mold, using a flat styrene plate under the part when making the mold. That way, when casting, another flat styrene plate can be used to form the flat bottom surface of the part. Also I kind of destroyed the mold I made yeaterday by trying to take it out of the legos too soon. I had thought the mold rubber needed 12 hours to cure, it actually needs 24. So it was like taffy, and I had to scrub it off the part. Derp. Hopefully that’s the only reason, and there wasn’t a problem with the mold rubber or how I prepared it…