It’s time to kick off Blaugust again, the time of year that I can actually feel good about not updating my blog frequently, because it means that I have a bunch of content to throw up each day while other Blaugust participants have to create new content. Suckers.
Actually I think I’ll end up creating a fair bit of new stuff for this month anyway, so I don’t know when my older stuff will get to see the light of day. I guess I don’t have as much of a backlog as last year. My rough outline for this year’s Blaugust will be as follows:
- Sheet-Music Sunday
- Musical Monday
- Watercolour Wednesday
- Three-Dee Thursday
- Fan-Art Friday
I also plan to do Strippin’ Saturday content, for which I intend to make comics, but that’s a bit uncertain. Tired Tuesday will be my day of rest, though if I’m feeling not-lazy I’ll find something to upload.
Anyway, today I’m showing off the trophies I made for AVCon this year, of which I’ve shared a couple of times on the Twitter machine.
I’ve spent a lot of time in the Adelaide Fab Lab lately, where I’ve been getting quite familiar with their laser cutter. My first project was to make approximately 300 tokens for us to give away to AVCon attendees. I was then inspired by some trophies on display in the Fab Lab and realised we could make some really cool customised trophies for AVCon.
Also thanks to the Fab Lab I’ve been getting back into 3D modeling, so the first thing I did was to mock up a 3D render of how the trophy might look.
Using Blender I was able to work out the geometry of the trophy and ensure that there weren’t any impossible intersections of the material. I was also able to use Blender to export out the correct alignment of the required cuts in the trophy base.
Initially I had wanted to use some kind of stained wood for the base, and I experimented with MDF. (You’ll notice the plaque has been enlarged here from the demo render, the result of some trial and error, AKA poor conversions)
However as it turned out, there was a ton of scrap red acrylic available at the Fab Lab, and lazy me also didn’t want to work out how to do attractive wood staining. The final draft used acrylic throughout the trophy, with some gold paper for the inside of the Invader.
I ended making up additional thank-you trophies for our special guests as well. Chris Cason took a really flattering photo his!
Next time I try this, I’m going to have a go at mounting some little LEDs along the sides of the Acrylic. Apparently the effect is very cool.