Book Review: The Professional Creature Design Handbook by Jordu Schell

The Professional Creature Design Handbook (Part One) by Jordu Schell, $5

In an effort to re-invigorate my sculpting work I picked up this ebook the other day. It has just been released and I am really glad I spotted it.

The focus of the book is on creature design for the film industry, however, after having a quick scan through it, it will prove invaluable to anyone who plans to design fantasy, alien or supernatural creatures, whether they be for film, illustration, kit collectors/painters, or the wargaming table.

Jordu Schell has worked on a huge list of movies over the years ranging from Avatar and Hellboy through AvP: Requiem and Evolution to Babylon 5, Batman Returns and Alien: Resurrection. He has amassed a great deal of experience in designing and sculpting fantastic creatures.

This book is the first instalment in a series (as the "Part One" in the title suggests) of ebooks that will eventually cover every aspect of creature design.

It gives a little bit of insight into the author's career and motivations that drove him into creature design before going on to go over some basics of the design process. What works and what doesn't, where to draw inspiration (no secrets there, it is mainly Nature), and then gives some examples of good movie creatures.

As the first part of a series, this is an excellent beginning. Well worth the $5. I would highly recommend it to anyone interested in creature design.

To order the book you will need to PayPal $5 to jordu2011@gmail.com. I received the download link within a few hours, although I believe he has been rather swamped, so it may take a little longer to receive it.

You can also visit his website:-
https://www.jorduschell.com/

By the Way, the book also touches on choosing colour schemes for the creatures. This may not have any relevance for sculptors but it is quite useful for miniatures painters as the theories involved are spot on!

Why the Frostgrave project stalled. I was sculpting a Cthulhu Wars monster...

My post about my terrain build for Frostgrave dried up a bit, earlier this year. The main reason was that I landed a job to sculpt one of the monsters for the Cthulhu Wars expansion from Petersen Games.

I haven't been able to say much about it until now. However, Petersen Games have added a photo of the mini to their Kickstarter update, so I can finally let it all out...

The Librarian of Celaeno is a big beastie, the round plinth that she is standing on is around 80-90mm across.

The plinth with the piles of books was supplied by Fenris Games (the manufacturer of the minis).

I really enjoyed this sculpt, it is amazing how easy it is when you don't have to work within the restrictions of human, or known animal anatomy.

Playing with a CNC Milling Machine

We have had a small CNC Milling machine in the workshop for a couple of years and have used it for the occasional job (with mixed success). However, we have ad some time to play with it this summer and are improving our experience with it.

I do not have enough knowledge of 3D design to have designed this job, I downloaded it from Thingiverse.

I have run the file several time, either in styrofoam or Model board.

The first one was done in styrofoam and cut quite quickly (under 2 hours). The detail is low, but it will make a good weathered stone statue.

After the foam model I wanted to up the quality so I decided to use model board (a dense polyurethane foam board). I also used a very small pointed cutter and set the layer height to .3mm.
The job took eight and a half hours, but the detail is far more impressive. This video, taken at several points during the cut, shows how slow the process was...

 This if the finished piece.

Next I plan to try a hard wood version with a small ball nose cutter...

Some time to think, planning future projects... Frostgrave!

This summer has proved to be a very difficult one for my model making projects. Earlier in the year we went through some family health issues which led to a bereavement. While dealing with that I found it impossible to concentrate on any model making or sculpting work. Due to this I had to back out of a sculpting job that I had been really enjoying, and that would almost certainly have led on to more work.

On top of that, in my day job we have just moved to a new building, which has meant creating a whole new model making workshop and also taking on a new guy to help me out... The move is more or less complete, however we are still waiting for all the new workshop machinery, which will hopefully arrive in the next couple of weeks.

Stepping back from the sculpting work gave me a chance to consider where I want to concentrate my sculpting. I have decided that I am going to restrict myself to personal projects that I have been planning for some time and not take on any sculpting commissions for a while (although I am still taking on commercial model making work). I have a couple of ideas that I have been working on and it is about time I took them in to 3D. I can't reveal what these projects are at the moment as I want to get several pieces sculpted before I do the big reveal, consequently I doubt that I will be doing many sculpting articles for a while, so the focus of this blog will be on my model making, for a bit.

On a personal level, once my gaming pals and I have finished our Star Trek: Attack Wing campaign,  we are planning to start playing Frostgrave (from Osprey Publishing) and this has inspired me to start a new terrain building project. I have gone through the rulebook and listed all the terrain needed for the scenarios. This is the starting point for the project as I want to make terrain  that can be used for these, but will also be useful for more generic games too.

As a terrain heavy game that will have wizards and their followers fighting through the ruins of a long dead city, it means anyone running the game is going to need a fair bit of terrain. I hope to be able to show that this is not too daunting a task, and that you can put together a lot of reasonably good looking terrain quite quickly and without spending a fortune!

I have started the project by cutting a series of boards that will be used for the bases for the terrain pieces. I cut and sanded a number of 20cm x 20cm pieces and also several 20cm x 40cm pieces. Each base will hold an individual ruin and once they are all brought together they should give the feel of a ruined city. Also by using this modular system it should be possible to generate different tables every time we play!

In my next post I will look at the first ruin I am building, A wizards tower!

Step by Step Sculpt Part 04!

Part 01, Part 02, Part 03.

Not much progress in the last few days, I have had a few health issues and they have meant I haven't done much sculpting.

I have done some more work on the doctors coat, which is starting to take shape quite nicely. I have also started to work on the arms, but more on them in the next post.

I am not totally happy with the smoothing of the polymer clay, and I have read that a soft brush and some oil (possibly baby oil) is good for this. I am going to have to do some more research before I try this as I don't want to ruin the work already done.

Step by Step Sculpt Part 02!

 Part 01

 In part one I looked at the construction of the armature. Now I am ready to start some of the actual sculpting work.
After filling out the armature with a hard epoxy putty (Sylmasta A+B), I also used a little ProCreate to bulk out the feet. Once this was set I moved on to the polymer clay. I have never used polymer clay for a professional sculpt before, but I am aware that it is used by a growing number of European sculptors, and looking at their work it is hard not to be impressed...

I have used polymer clay once or twice for simple crafty projects, for example, the year before last I made this Santa for my sons school project out of Fimo...

I had had this Fimo lying around in the workshop for at least 20 years, and I was surprised that it was still relatively workable! However, for this new project I wanted the best quality materials, so I decided to look at some alternatives. Around a year ago I was given a block of Super Sculpey to try out and this seems like a good place to start. I also ordered up a couple of packs of Bees Putty, as it seems to be getting good results too.

Having done a little reading I understand that there can be issues with getting the polymer clay to stick to the armature. I left the epoxy putty I had underneath fairly rough and this seemed to work well.

 I like to build up my figures with basic anatomy before I move on to clothing them. This is a good practice as it helps to ensure that the proportions come out OK. I found working with the polymer clay to be very enjoyable, slowly adding more clay and working my way up the legs and lower torso. Having an unlimited time to work the sculpt, rather than being restricted to an hour and a half as the putty sets, certainly is a refreshing feeling and removes a lot of the stress of the sculpting process. As it turned out, the removal of the time restriction, didn't actually lengthen the time spent on each area, but it doest make for a very different approach over all.

Once I was happy with the basic shape of the legs I started to add the drape of the fabric of the trousers. Now, obviously, as the clay does not set, it is very important not to touch or damage finished parts before baking them. For this reason I decided to finish the legs, and bake it, before moving on to the upper torso.

Some of the drapery and folds on the figure look a little odd at the moment, as there are, for want of a better word, "armour plates" to go down the left side of the figure, as well as various other bits of detail that will push the fabric around (his boots for a start).

 I am happy with the legs at this stage and I don't want to work on them any more, so I have baked it. It is important not to over bake the polymer clay as it can give off fumes. The clay on this figure, at the moment, is very thin, being around 1mm at it's thickest, so 15 minutes at 130 degrees centigrade was perfectly adequate.

Next post will see slow but steady progress up the torso!

Anatomy For Sculptors Book Kickstarter

I have just found this Kickstarter project!

Anatomy for Sculptors looks like an amazing book and extremely useful for any figure sculptor.

I've backed (without hesitation)! As I write this there are only a few hours left on the Kickstarter, so I suggest that anyone interested moves quite quickly!

What can I do with a 3D Printer?

The two Up! Plus 3D printers arrived in the workshop last week and now that I have had a chance to play around with them I am reasonably pleased and I think they will be very useful (once I get the hang of designing 3D stuff on the computer).

As with the 5 Axis Milling Machine, I have initially started by finding files only to practice with. A great resource for 3D files can be found at Thingiverse.com. I have printed several files from there over the last week, and generally they have given very good results.

The 3D printers we have bought are not high end machines, they are called the “Model T” of the 3D printing world, by their manufacturuer. However, compared to the 3D printer that I used around 10 years ago, they come out very favourably (at least, the print quality is very similar, and that was a much more expensive machine). These machines are certainly not of a high enough quality to produce 28mm miniatures, with anything like the level of detail that would be expected of production figures. However, I can see a use for building larger creatures (or figures), and using them as a starting point ready for detailing and finishing. Also they will be ideal for producing equipment, vehicles and possibly architectural pieces (which is after-all what we actually bought them for).

In this photo the tree frog is about a quarter built. This was the first model I ran, and it was interesting to see that it could cope with quite a good overhand where the legs ran up to join the body, without adding any support material.

As we are got these machines for architectural model making it seems appropriate to try out a building. The ground floor turned out exceptionally well, as did the roof.

However the first floor warped a little (a common problem with ABS 3D printers apparently). I hadn’t fully read the manual, and I don’t think I had pre-heated the bed of the machine enough, so hopefully I can avoid too much of this happening in future!

The building is quite small, the doorway on the photo is about 15mm high. So suitable for 10mm gaming, or it may be be possible to get away with 15mm…

Finally I have produced this mobile phone stand.

Not elegant, but a nice little test of the mechanical properties of the ABS and the 3D printed form.

Oh and as for the tree frog, my sons painted a couple of them up over the weekend!

Playing around with the 5 Axis Milling Machine!

I have not had much time recently to experiment with the new equipment that is coming into the workshop. However, I did manage to run a couple of quick samples through the new milling machine.

The software that runs the miller works with .stl files and these are fairly standard in the 3d modelling and rapid prototyping field. So as well as getting the hang of the machines I have been trying to find the time to learn to use some 3D modelling software. I am using Rhino for the primary work but I am also looking at some of the open source and freeware alternatives that are out there, namely Blender, Sculptris and SketchUp.

Ideally I would like to use SketchUp as it seems the simplest to pick up. However the free version is limited in the formats that you can save (or export) the files in. I do have a pro licence for SketchUp, but I am not sure how far down that road I am going to go. It may turn out to be better to persist with the more advanced software as once I know what I am doing with it it should be quicker to use.

Sculptris is somewhat different to the other software I am using in that it is an organic sculpting tool (something of a younger cousin of Z-Brush, which I can’t justify buying at the moment). Sculptris will come into it’s own with the figure sculpting side of things and I think that combining it with the 5 Axis milling machine and the 3D printers it should prove to be a very interesting tool to develop designs on.

As for my first attempts at running a file on the milling machine, the installation came with several sample models, which the engineer ran through with me. Once I had played around with those I wanted to try something for myself. As I am not far enough down the road of learning to create 3D files just yet I hunted round and found a 3D model of a treasure chest online that seemed like a good test piece!

The file was in an .obj format so first I took it into Rhino and converted it to an.stl file.

Then I transferred it to the software that drives the milling machine and set up the job. While I am still learning to use the machine I have decided to stick to cutting styrofoam. It cuts easily and will not damage the machine if i inadvertently crash the cutter into the material.

The first attempt confirmed my decision to use styrofoam, as the depth of the cut meant that the collet that holds the cutter did crash into the foam. Fortunately as I was using the foam, gave way under the tool and caused no harm.

As you can see the result is not exactly fantastic, but as a first attempt I learned a lot and found it very useful. I used a 6mm end mill on this one, which proved to be to large for a lot of the detail.

You can see the rough lip at either end of the chest where the collet crashed into the foam. Also, the shallow angle of the slopping lid of the chest led to some fairly heavy stepping.

For the second attempt I reduced the size of the end mill, down to a 3mm cutter and reduced the overlap of the tool passing over the surface. This meant that the job took a good bit longer to run, but produced a much finer finish. I also spent more time working out the cut path so that it didn’t crash into the material this time.

Clearly still not perfect, but a vast improvement on the first attempt!

I still have a long way to go with this, and I definitely need to spend more time learning to use the actual design software. Still the initial playing around is fairly positive and I am getting more and more enthusiastic about my new toys!

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A couple of days after posting this article the Fabbaloo 3D Prinitng blog posted this article about creating printable models using SketchUp. I haven’t had a chance to fully digest it, but this will be a big help when I get far enough on to actually start designing for 3D print.

Moving on from the Laser Cutter – Other High-Tech tools for the model maker…

My posts about the laser cutter have been some of the most popular articles I have done on this blog. We are upgrading the workshop at the moment which has meant I haven’t had access to a lot of my machinery over summer (including the laser cutter). However, we are now fully back up and running, with more space and some nice new toys to play with.

Due to the clear interest in new technology for the model making workshop I have decided to follow up the laser cutting articles with some new insights into some other processes and techniques that may be of interest. Our CAD facilities have been expanded considerably this year, or at least they will be once all the new gear has arrived.

We received a 5 axis milling machine a couple of weeks ago, we are expecting two 3D printers any time now and will also be installing a CNC Router over the Christmas break.

With all of this equipment arriving more or less at once there will be quite a learning curve. I hope to document some of my trials and tribulations here, as I become familiar with these machines.

So what do all of these things do, and how can they be utilised by model makers/wargamers?

Lets briefly look at all of them:-

5 Axis Milling Machine

A milling machine uses a cutting tool to shape solid material into a form. I haven’t used a milling machine in over a decade, and those were manual machines, so it will be interesting to see how much of it comes back to me. Also this machine is totally CAD driven, so I have to learn all the 3D software to generate the files to be cut on the machine…

3D Printers

3D Printers are already a fairly familiar part of the modern figure sculpting industry. Many companies are already designing their figures in CAD and using 3D printers to produce their masters. As I learn the basics and get up to speed with the machines I will explain the various processes involved in create a 3D printed model.

CNC Router

A CNC Router shares much with a hand router as found in most woodworking workshops, except clearly it is controlled by a computer instead of by the joiner or carpenter. We use the CNC router for cutting out large 2D shapes as well as doing some shallow 3D work, terrain modelling for example.

I have already started playing around with the milling machine and I will describing my initial finding in the next few days. I am going to Glasgow tomorrow for the day to receive some basic training in these new machines. Hopefully this will help speed up the learning process and let me get down to some real work sooner rather than later…

Jabbergluck(?) and other stuff…

 

I seem to have been very busy with lots of different things over the past few months but I haven’t actually produced much that I can talk about here on the blog. I have been trying to get my head around some vector graphics design software (Serif DrawPlus X5) for a project that I am working on with Sholto Humphries of Scheltrum Miniatures, however, I can’t really talk about that yet.

My day job is very chaotic, without producing much, as we totally rebuild the workshop. At the moment I am working out of (not much more than) a cupboard. The good news is that once the building work is done the workshop will be a fair bit bigger and that should be completed just in time for the arrival of some new CAD/CAM machinery, a CNC Router, 3D milling machine and a 3D Printer. This means I an presently investigating training for these machines and ,once again, am not getting very much completed work done.

Looking at figure sculpting, I have had a pretty quiet year (to busy in other directions), I completed a commission in early April, more about that further on. Then started work on a personal project that would involve a 54mm figure in modern clothes in a very simple pose. It is a challenge to pull of a simple modern figure and achieve a really satisfactory result. I made up the armature and started bulking out the figure but that is about as far as I got with it. I am hoping to get back to it in the next couple of months. I also decided to take part in the Hasslefree Miniatures Sculpting Competition which is currently running. I have the design pretty much set, but again haven’t progressed very far with the actual sculpting just yet…

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So what can I show you? Oh yes, the commission I completed in April!

I sculpted a convention figure for the KantCon 2012 convention which was held in Kansas City at the beginning of this month (August 2012). KantCon has been using the Jabbergluck as their mascot for a number of years and I was given the job of realising a 3D version based on the drawing by artist Jay Carter. Jay had not designed a miniature before but did an excellent job of developing a figure design that would translate well into 3D and survive the mould-making and casting process. This was the final design that I received for the job:-

The first thing I did was print it out with the sized version in the top corner so I could get a feel for the actual size of the figure. The commission stated that the figure should be approximately 40mm high, now taking this as being the height of the figure if it stood erect (or as it happens the overall height of the sculpt in the pose given in the drawing) this would qualify as a small troll, or very large Orc.

As I say Jay did a great job of designing for the manufacturing process, especially as he had never done so before and he only had an email (a fairly long one admittedly) from me explaining the problems with figure design for manufacture.There were a few things that had to be tweaked, but nothing insurmountable!

I sent regular photos of the progress to the crew at KanCon for approval and the sculpt went very well, with only a few minor revisions along the way.

These photos show the virtually finished figure. The company that was casting the figure for KantCon did ask for a few changes, the removal of the head being the main one. So, the final sculpt that was shipped off to Kansas looked like this:-

I am waiting for some sample casting to arrive at the moment.