Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “From Digital Sculpt to Concrete: A Halloween Pumpkin With A Creepy Grin”.
Welcome back to the channel today, i’m going to show you how i went from a digital sculpt to this cool, concrete jack-o-lantern. This video is going to be a little bit different than our usual videos uh. It was a personal project that i’ve been wanting to do for a while. I don’t really take a lot of opportunities to use all of the awesome equipment that i have access to to do personal stuff and i thought it’d be cool to have like a semi-permanent decoration for halloween.
So you know, let’s get started, let’s go through it and during the process, i’m going to tell you about some of the awesome stuff that we have going on at make. We actually do a lot more than a lot of people are aware of who only come to us through maker faire or these videos. Let’S, let’s get started so first off, i’m going to start with a digital sculpt.
This is nomad on the ipad. I use it. Ipad pro and this sculpting app is super cheap.
I think it was like 15 or something it’s super powerful, it’s kind of like if you’re familiar with zbrush. If you’re, not it’s like you’re, actually sculpting digital clay and the process is fairly simple. You you start with like a low resolution, basic shape and you slowly refine it more and more into the shape you want, while increasing the resolution as you go, i was inspired by the mouth of audrey ii from little shop of horrors, one of my favorite movies Of all time, if you look at the mouth, while i’m sculpting, you can definitely see the inspiration there. Of course, i very you know i moved away from that, because i wanted eyes. I wanted to be a jack-o’-lantern, more or less, but like super creepy and exaggerated features, i’m going to take a few moments here to tell you about all the incredible stuff we have going on at make.
There are tons of things that we do, but i’m gon na point out seven and it’s it’s surprising, sometimes how many times people don’t know about some of the big things that we do at make. Let me start off, of course, with this youtube channel. You know about this youtube channel already you’re watching one of our videos. You can go back and look at all the incredible stuff we’ve done over the years up.
Next is the magazine. We have an actual print magazine that you can subscribe to and get feature stories about people projects in your mailbox regularly. We have a podcast where our founder, dale dougherty, actually interviews people about what they’ve made and how they’ve built businesses – and you know what they’re doing in their communities and stuff like that.
It’S on our blog check it out down, on the right hand, column towards the middle of the screen. That brings up our blog. We have a blog where we share snippets from the magazine as well as cool stuff. That’S going on around the internet.
That’S mixing dot com, then there’s the maker shed where we sell cool stuff, like kits and electronics, parts and and old magazines. Some of our back issues of the magazines and books which actually brings up. We have a whole division that produces books.
Things like my favorite here, make fire by tim deegan. That explains how to make things like those those big uh fire poofers that you see at burning man and stuff, like that, we have that whole books division. You can find inside the maker shed and then there’s maker campus, where makers can hold live classes to teach other makers how to build things and then maker faire. No, i may have gone over seven. I lost count maker faire.
We have maker faires all over the world. These are events from tiny to huge, where makers come together to show off what they make to share tips and tricks to just have a good time together, go to makerfaire.com and look at the map and see when there’s a maker faire near you all right back Back to this sculpt after the basic sculpt here, let me give you a tip, i like to add some asymmetry to it. Often, whenever you’re sculpting, these programs there’s a symmetry option, where your everything you do on one side is mirrored perfectly on the other side.
At the end, i like to turn that off make a copy of my work, a backup of my work and then go in and move things around. So it’s no longer perfectly symmetrical for me. That really makes things kind of seem more natural and and look more organic, because nothing really is perfectly symmetrical in the real world after the sculpt is completed it’s time to 3d print. In this case i’ve thrown it on my prusa mark 3s and i’m printing. It huge i’ve cut it in half both for space and also because my plan is to make a concrete mold out of this i’ll, get to this more in a moment, so the print came out absolutely beautiful. I love how this turned out in this. Unfortunately, blurry footage, you can see me drilling holes in the model and that’s so that when the vacuum former creates suction the crevices that are kind of like in the middle and whatever they have holes, that’ll suck the plastic down in and here i’m throwing it on. The molding machine now let me just take a moment here – to address something you’re, probably noticing the sculpture, comes in a bit and then whitens out a bit which is horrible for mold making.
Those of you who have made molds or done vacuum forming are looking at this and just screaming to yourselves and i don’t show it, but i did have to cut the mold a tiny bit to get out the print. That’S usually called a plug so or a buck um, so i get the print out and the mold has a little cut in it, and that’s fine in this case, because i’m doing concrete it’s not going to leak through. If i tape that closed, if you were doing resin or something better, you would have to design your mold so that there were no undercuts, no things that come back in, so you could pull the the 3d print back out of the mold. In this case, it’s not an issue, so we go on to the part where we’re pouring the concrete i’ve decided to do the front and the back separately so that i could mate them together.
First, i do the front – and you can see here – i’ve mixed up. Some concrete, i’m i’m doing this very kind of willy-nilly, i’m just doing it by eye. I mix up the concrete i dump it in. I put this piece of foam in there to act as a key to put the two pieces together later after the fronts. Are nice and dry? I cut them out. You can see that that mold was sacrificial. It’S not going to be used again, so i cut them out. I pour the back half and then i used i put the front half on top of that back half using that foam to hopefully mate them together it worked beautifully for one, the other one they did not attach to together no big deal.
The final result here turned out pretty well. However, i had some weak points in my concrete work. Uh the stems of both of them broke off. I should have reinforced those, and i probably should have added some more sand or something to my concrete to help.
It bind together better also, i should have vibrated it to get those bubbles out. All in all, i love how they turned out. I i think they look fantastic and i’m just so happy that, after a few months of practice, i’m now to the point where i can think of an idea and sculpt it and make it real. You know, there’s a there’s, a long learning curve with lots of frustration where you think of an idea and you go to sculpt it, and it doesn’t quite turn out how you imagined, and you can’t quite get there well, i’m finally starting to get there. And i love it, so i’m really happy with how these turned out. I i hope you enjoyed this video. I hope you learned something. Give us a thumbs up.
Have a happy halloween, we’ll see you later, you .