Right - I'm not particularly in the habit of recording WIP photographs, but this corner of Custom Hobby's looking a bit empty so far....hence this thread.
Nearest the front of my desk and the top of the to-do list at the moment is this 2nd variant on my 1/55 humvee. This version's going to be the DWF Marine version. Tamiya 1/35 version seen in the background here for reference.
(http://i76.photobucket.com/albums/j4/geronimojones/22112008177.jpg)
If you've seen pics of the M998 softskin variant released earlier this month you'll notice the main differences so far are the hard/kevlar door panels and the infilled hard roof and rear panel over the truck bed. Both are only sitting roughly in place in this shot - dry run for fitting and alignment before detailing is cut in and/or applied.
The main body is a dolly without doors or roof, the intention being to allow me to make as many variants as possible with minimum adjustment. Different door panels are easily generated from the same CAD artwork that delineated the doorwell recesses - so it's easy to make and cast them separately to suit the numerous HWMMV variants. Uparmoured, half-doors and a doorless version are all on the cards.
Grey bodywork is our normal fillite resin; you can just about make out the acrylic engine grille cover and milliput bead blending it into position. The two rear panels are machined from chemiwood - a solid polyurethane board we use for architectural modelmaking and which is far better suited for hard modelling that any combination of putties or fillers.
drool....
Looking nice :D
Looking great so far!
Current WIPS in the workshop. Probably a bit big for 28mm....
(http://i76.photobucket.com/albums/j4/geronimojones/06112008156.jpg)
Makes chunky kitkat look a bit anorexic....
Part of an ongoing project for CadburyWorld. This is a half-scale mockup for the client; we'll be casting these in their hundreds to clad retail units so that they look like giant unwrapped chocolate bars....
(http://i76.photobucket.com/albums/j4/geronimojones/26112008182.jpg)
1:1 gnarled old tree, ready for the Cadbury's Caramel rabbit to lean against. We're mounting a flatscreen monitor and video unit inside the knothole - hence the need for a hinged panel on the front.
Neither one availble at an eBay store near you soon :icon_suspicious:
That looks incredible... can I send my resume? :P
Andres
If you are casting those in real chocolate .. can my Mrs have any miscasts :icon_wink:
Quote from: Bungle on November 26, 2008, 01:00:24 PM
If you are casting those in real chocolate .. can my Mrs have any miscasts :icon_wink:
Unfortunately not :icon_evil:
We're using a brand new (ie. there's only us and 3 other UK companies trusted with it so far) sprayable fire-retardant polyurethane resin system. Sets in seconds, touch dry in < a minute, demoulds in <20 mins. Sprayed into a silicone mould a 1mm thick coat is flexible enough to come out of the mould but after curing sets hard enough to take anything short of a direct hammer blow.
Don't think we haven't already thought of BIG scenery products for wargaming :icon_w00t:
Quote from: geronimo on November 26, 2008, 01:15:24 PM
Quote from: Bungle on November 26, 2008, 01:00:24 PM
If you are casting those in real chocolate .. can my Mrs have any miscasts :icon_wink:
Don't think we haven't already thought of BIG scenery products for wargaming :icon_w00t:
good good.
Quote from: geronimo on November 26, 2008, 01:15:24 PM
Don't think we haven't already thought of BIG scenery products for wargaming :icon_w00t:
If you get onto that, I've thought of a product you could think about competing against, already! The :pound: 150 item Found here (http://www.games-workshop.com/gws/catalog/armySubUnitCats.jsp?catId=cat1430025&rootCatGameStyle=gaming-accessories). Of course, I've seen plenty of witch*ing about this item on the internet so you'd might not want to ;)
On a different topic, if you're currently working for Cadbury's, you might be interested in these:
Giant Buttons (http://www.pimpthatsnack.com/project.php?projectID=216)
and
Giant Caramel Bar (http://www.pimpthatsnack.com/project.php?projectID=24)
...further to this little thread, some pics of the progress and finishing of this part of the Chocolate Factory madness.
First one's the bunny-girl; after making a quarter-scale macquette, we chopped her into bits, photocopied the top and bottom of the slices and then cut 'em out of foam four times up, carved her to shape, bunged on some plasticene to take care of the posh bits and then lathered her in pva followed by a couple of layers of spray-on resin:
(http://www.snuurg.com/monsters/rabbit.jpg)
- next one's a bit more progress on the tree too, both it and the bunny now coated and showing how the two are going to be put together (if you're thinking the tree's maybe a bit of a funny shape, both it and the rabbit were somewhat compromised by how they had to fit into the space they were destined for, the tree got the worst of it as far as that goes:
(http://www.snuurg.com/monsters/rabtree.jpg)
...lastly, the whole thing as it ended up in the shop, plus a bonus giant flake bar/display stand what we also did do - unfortunately not the best pics as it was hard to get an angle on the bunny-tree arrangement what with all the shelves of choccies surrounding the thing, not least the ruddy enormous 5-kilo giant Cadbury's-Dairy-Milk bars that we kept tripping over:
(http://www.snuurg.com/monsters/rabflake.jpg)
They are just bloody awesome :D
More Cadburyworld stuff from the second installation. Snuurg got home at 430am today from this lot, I just helped load'em in the van :) More than enough work for the two of us over the last few (seemingly endless) weeks....
(http://i76.photobucket.com/albums/j4/geronimojones/P1010339.jpg)
Oversized roses chocolates - foam cores with resin coatings. Wrappers made with heavy gauge aluminium foil sprayed with custom-mixed lacquer-based paint, finished with laser-cut vinyl decals.
(http://i76.photobucket.com/albums/j4/geronimojones/P1010340.jpg)
1 of 4 retail units sculpted to look like giant bars of dairy milk chocolate. Individual blocks are urethane resin sprayed into a female silicone mould, backed up with styrene foam and timber strapping. I did nothing but make these blocks for approximately 5 weeks....somewhat mind-numbing !
(http://i76.photobucket.com/albums/j4/geronimojones/P1010336.jpg)
Giant glass-and-a-half dairy milk retail unit. Built onto a custom laminated oval unit, sculpted in foam and milliput, spray-coated with urethane resin, sanded down for about two man-weeks, then covered in 3 coats of primer, two coats of paint, and two coats of lacquer. The glasses are made from the same styrene foam with resin coating, built over a solid steel core hidden inside the pouring "milk", with PETG plastic clear sections fixed to their tops to complete the illusion.
That's it for Cadbury stuff for the immediate future, though we have quoted other stuff for them. Next on Snuurg and my plates is a 1/1000 mountain range complete with luxury development in the heart of the carribean....
AWESOME!!!!!
Very nice work.... now... do you need someone to do any surveying in the carribean? :icon_suspicious:
WOw that stuff is awesome mate. Im in awe of people who do this kind of thing for a living. Not to mention you also make great terrain and basework.
Top notch!
That is just ridiculously fantastic, geronimo! :)
Well done! I assume you both got a buzz finally seeing it in-situ and knowing they're finished at last? ;) Has it put you off chocolate? :D
Quote from: Keeper on April 22, 2009, 06:16:13 AM
I assume you both got a buzz finally seeing it in-situ and knowing they're finished at last? ;) Has it put you off chocolate? :D
I managed to get out of installing these onsite - poor old Snuurg had to do a 24-hour shift to get them fitted, and arrived home around 430am. They do look fantastic onsite, but we're pretty much glad to see the back of them, to be honest - and yes, I'll happily never look at Cadbury's chocolate again :)
a couple of extra pix - a fuller-figured one of the Roses chocs and their box (would've been better with the box-flaps on top, but that's designers for ya.... also not helped by the fact that the big box doesn't match the design of the new boxes that are being sold from inside it, d'oh!):
(http://www.snuurg.com/monsters/roses.jpg)
also just a quickie of the giant liquorice allsorts we did - not the Bertie, he was done by a branch of the company who hired us for all the other stuff, they have their own animatronics folks so they dood him themselves - this one would probably look like a better display if the shelves had been stocked up, but we didn't particularly fancy staying any longer. Could also say something about the fact that the installers didn't particularly bother with the instructions for bolting 'em on, they're supposed to be kind of stacked on top of one another in a sort of cascading zig-zaggy column, not just stuck into the bolt holes and then tightened up, but eh well:
(http://www.snuurg.com/monsters/lickerybits.jpg)
Meanwhile...
Quote from: Bungle on April 21, 2009, 03:56:17 PM
...do you need someone to do any surveying in the carribean?
- no such luck, don't even get to go out there ourselves :(
...for your entertainment though, here's the thing so far - it all starts off with a big old drawing and a load of coloured-in contours:
(http://www.snuurg.com/monsters/contours.jpg)
but soon enough starts turning into a mess of mountains by way of layered-up foam:
(http://www.snuurg.com/monsters/firstmount.jpg)
...might not look like much just yet, but give it a week or two :)
Let me know when you need more staff, I can commute no worries!
I wish i could commute :icon_tears:
I want to move over!
- 'ere you go, just bashed up a quick making-of page for the big chocolate-fountain-thing, for any that's interested:
http://www.snuurg.com/a%20glass%20and%20a%20half.html (http://www.snuurg.com/a%20glass%20and%20a%20half.html)
Its amazing how much you both do with really so little to go on from the start. Really interesting how its all done, yet you see a display like that in the shop and most people don't give it a second thought.
What happens to the displays afterwards though, just thrown away or stored for future use?
I remember making a 3d visualisation of a map like that when I was in junior school. I hope it is still as much fun for you chaps as it was for us then :)
I've always seen the area around Ladybower Reservoir differently, since then :D
Quote from: Bossco101 on April 23, 2009, 04:17:36 AM
Its amazing how much you both do with really so little to go on from the start. Really interesting how its all done, yet you see a display like that in the shop and most people don't give it a second thought.
What happens to the displays afterwards though, just thrown away or stored for future use?
Depends on the client's needs - the cadbury stuff, for instance, is a permanent installation in the shop at the end of the Cadburyworld tour. The mountains (and most sales models) have a lifespan that's usually limited to the length of time it takes the client to sell all of the properties on that particular scheme; they're usually scrud*ped afterwards. We usually scavenge back stuff like trees, cars, and the perspex used for the cases, but most of the rest goes into the skip....
- a bit more done on the mountains of madness - actually they've been at this stage for about three weeks now, we went and got 'em done too quick and the client wasn't ready with the further information needed - so they've been sat in the shed waiting to go since then... though in the meanwhile I've built the baseboard for sitting 'em on, several big bits of lovely lightweight honeycombed aluminium screwed together and then given about a hundred-weight of bracing - you can stand on the thing if needs be :) (which we just might, since the thing's so damn big you can't easily reach the middle from the edges).
Anyway, this is them as currently carved and waiting for whatever's next:
(http://www.snuurg.com/monsters/madmountains.jpg)