Crafts

Three-Dee Thursday: More Laser Cutting

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Here are some of the laser cut designs I made tonight. Most of these designs I’ve drafted on the bus to/from work. It was pretty quiet in the Fab Lab today so I was able to send quite few jobs through! I was also able to experiment a bit with the deep etching I’m using on the Tetris pieces and try out some special acrylic glue – I had designed most of my cuts to hold together via friction, but having taken them home and had a play I think I’ll need to head back some time and get some more glue in them.

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Regretting not picking up more colours from the acrylic supplier… another time, I suppose.

Three-Dee Thursday: AVCon Trophies

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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.

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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.

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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)

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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.

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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.

Tepig

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Finally finished off Tepig today. It’s been sitting around with just the tail to go for a while. The curl in the tail was very fiddly (I can’t imagine doing that at the original model’s scale!) but fun. The tail was a bit droopy but I’ve used some hot glue to make it stand up. I usually use acetone based craft glue, which is great for sticking the tabs together. For attachments however, hot glue is the way to go.

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Also, here’s a photo of WIP Lapras.

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My work process for Lapras has been a bit different than for the starter pokemon. Since each polygon is so freaking huge, using cereal boxes is a bit impractical. Instead, I’ve had the templates printed at A1 size and I’m pasting them to 200gsm brown craft paper. It’s flimsier stuff than the boxboard used in cereal boxes, so the shapes don’t hold together as convincingly. As I progress more, I’ll have to add more support (I’ve been kind of papier mache-ing around some joints as I go) and may need to make some kind of scaffolding structure for the insides. Another consideration is going to be portability – I’d like to take Lapras out of the house, which may mean making it modular.

I’ve put up a video of Lapras on my new Tumblr page.

Squirtle

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Whew! It’s about time for another one of these life-sized Pokemon. This one’s been waiting a while to be posted. I started on the templates on the drive to and from Manifest last year and have had it sitting mostly-assembled on my table for a few months now. I stalled in sticking the limbs to the body because I’d toyed with the idea of making them poseable, but I’ve finally given up on that idea and have just stuck them on.

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As usual I’ve gotten my papercraft templates from pokemonpapercraft.net. Those guys do really awesome stuff!

Next papercraft: Tepig.

Bulky Buddy Box

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I’ve been talking about making a Weighted Companion Cube out of Sculpey since at least May last year.

Finally got around to it! Bad photo because I lost my phone last week 🙁

The main exercise here was to learn how to make canes, I made my heart cane based on this tutorial.

[edit] I made more! Each one I made was smaller than the last, until they got real teeny…

Giant NES Controller

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The other major build which I initiated, but for which my father did most of the work for. All I did was some of the measuring and soldering. He completed this in less than three weeks, when I realised that the AVCon VG budget could fit the construction costs in.

Giant NES controllers aren’t so novel and rare these days, and they’re a pretty straightforward construction (says me who palmed off the actual work to her father). Here’s a list of the sites we used to as reference:

Instructables walkthrough

Sparkfun walkthrough

Giant NES controller Coffee Table

A version based on a GameCube controller by the Mario Marathon guys.

An explanation of how the controller transmits button-press data back to the NES

Some progress photos…

Here’s the MDF box with buttons in place.

I was thinking with the tight deadline that we’d just take it to AVCon unpainted was as there would not be time for painting. However my dad likes to do things right…

Unfortunately during painting he missed putting down one strip of tape to protect the gray from being painted over with the black. Spot the error!

Here’s my dad posing with his creation.

 

Here’s a look at the underside of the D-pad, with an ingenious improvised pivot to ensure that no more than one button can be pressed down at once.

During testing, we found that hitting the D-pad in a certain way would occasionally trigger the A-button. I concluded that we were getting invalid inputs, causing the IC to output the wrong data to the NES. I placed the blame on the D-pad and we spent a good while fiddling with the pivot and the button-holes, making sure the buttons weren’t jamming.

However, it wasn’t the D-pad’s fault at all! The vibrations across the controller were enough that they were causing the A-button to bounce in place and trigger the switch underneath. We used sponge rubber underneath each button to help the buttons stay properly suspended and to improve the feel of the button response.

Finally, here are some attendees on stage at AVCon, playing Super Mario on the controller.

Balsa Wood Man

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Balsa Wood Man, Balsa Wood Man, doing the things that balsa wood can…

A little figure made from balsa wood. We were asked to make a small human model demonstrating our understanding of how a figure would appear based on eight-head high proportions. (Most people are actually less than eight heads tall but this was for convenience.)

To understand what I mean when I say “eight-heads tall”, observe how the height of the figure divides into eight equal portions, each the size of the figure’s head. Along those portions are particular landmarks, eg. the start of the torso.

Some of my classmates used modelling clays and one even made hers out of a bread and PVA mix.

Mine has rotating limbs!

USB Key of Clow

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I made these tonight. The idea came from a couple of sources…

Some time back I saw this decorated USB drive on deviantArt and thought I might try something similar at some point. However I didn’t want to make a copy – I wanted to try something different. My initial ideas were to do something based on a butterfly’s wings. I then started worrying about how to disguise the USB drive and how to get a cap on…

Eventually this thought evolved into the idea to create a piece of fan art using a USB drive, and with my mind moving to  the Clow Key I was hoping to hide the USB connector in the beak. Looking up various USB drives and the sizes available I realised perhaps it would work better to point the drive downwards and have the connector as a stand in for the key part.

Anyhow, the USB drive I’m hoping to use is this one, which conveniently is about the width of some chipboard I have lying around. To model these keys I’ve partially wrapped each piece of chipboard with some alfoil and modeled things around that. The chipboard fits quite nicely into a USB port!

Once these are cured in the oven I’ll paint them and substitute the USB drive for the chipboard.

Tetris Tangrams

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Sorry for the lateness on this one (not that anyone cares).

For AVCon this year I made a ton of cardboard Tetris pieces and puzzles to go with them. The inspiration for these puzzles comes from a game for the GameBoy called Daedalian Opus, though tangrams and the sort go back a long time. Both my housemate Alex and my mother mentioned playing with similar wooden-block puzzles as children.

Here are some photos.

The very first seven pieces.

Puzzle prototyping. Alex found a different solution from the one I’d been designing! He tried to write a program to discover all of the possible solutions but stalled.

Painted puzzle pieces, stacked and ready to go.

My workspace. Very messy!

A puzzle laid out at AVCon and solved by a clever attendee.

Ticket to Ride UK

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During Thursday-night board games at the house of Leaflocker we were introduced to the game Ticket to Ride. Very simple yet very fun, we were hooked immediately.

With John’s birthday come and gone I was torn about getting him a copy of the game. After all, which version should I get? The superior Märklin set with its wonderful train cards, or a new board? Or perhaps purchasing a copy of the game on Stream would do?

The Steam copy didn’t allow hotseat play, however, so to get any play time together we’d have to buy multiple copies. We resolved to make a copy of the game so we could play hotseat on one computer… though inspired by Thom’s home-made Settlers of Catan set I was equally tempted to build a bootleg board.

…Then, while browsing the Days of Wonder website I found links to a number of fan maps. Building a copy of a fan map felt like a great way to celebrate the game and try a map that isn’t the German map without making an investment. And I could absolve my guilt about bootlegging an official map.

Quickly disappointed by the Australia map, I settled on UK v 2.0 and built myself a copy…

It folds!

The folded board is nice and compact, a little under 26cm square.

We playtested on Wednesday night. Alex won on 139 points.

Jimmy would have been on 138 given one more turn, he also had the most trains left by far.

I ended the game with no trains left. I would have gotten 136 points instead of 107 had I placed my last train differently, but it didn’t make the difference between me winning so there will only be minor whining, not incessant whining.

Anyway we had good fun on this map, mispronouncing our way through the UK. My next step will be to make up some proper cards for trains and tickets.