Ocarina of Time Zora's Sapphire Ring

Greetings, internet traveler!  Nearly a year after I started and then shelved the concept, I have now finished creating my own engagement ring inspired by the Zora's Sapphire from the Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.  This project took a lot of power, strength, and courage!  I've never made any sort of jewelry before, let alone something requiring gem settings.  To be honest, I feel like I really lucked out on this one.

This ring was designed in the 3D modeling program Maya, printed in wax then cast into gold by Shapeways, and then fitted with gems by a local jeweler.

Ugh, pretend my hands don't look so bad

Step One: Modeling

As usual, this project started with a model.  Since I've never modeled a ring before, most of this process was trial, error, and correction.  Over and over.  Seriously, I'm pretty sure I started over at least twice, not including the times I scrapped the band.

My first two "final" models

Last model before printing the end result

A ring capable of holding gems is a complicated thing, so there were many factors I had to consider when making the model.  For readability's sake, I'll make a list.

• Design: perhaps the hardest part of all was simply choosing how to make the darn thing look.  I wanted to stay as true to the game's design as possible, but translating a low-poly 3D mesh that floats in the air into a physical thing meant making some changes.  The most obvious is probably the gems-- pentagons aren't really a normal gem cut, so I chose to arrange the prongs themselves in a pentagon and just use standard diamond-cut gems.  I wasn't sure it would work, but I'm happy with the end result.
• Band size: not every ring is going to fit every finger, so getting the size right (or at least reasonably close) is important.  My US ring size is about a 5.5.  Conversion charts tell me that a 5.5 band has a 16.1 mm inner diameter.  Luckily Maya has separate options for setting overall radius and section radius, so getting the rough sizing going was pretty easy.  Do keep in mind that Maya isn't exact, though-- you might need to measure in a separate program like NetFabb and tweak it a bit.  I went with a 1.3 mm thickness and then flattened out the inner edges, which fit my finger pretty snugly.
• Prong thickness: this is one I really struggled to find information on.  As I have no formal training as a jeweler, I kinda had to make an educated guess and used Shapeways' metals printing guide to choose a thickness for the prongs.  Minimum recommended thickness of unsupported wires is 1.0 mm?  Works for me!  I left some extra length on them, as well, so that the professional jeweler would have plenty to work with.
• Overall gem seating thickness: again, I defaulted to the Shapeways guide because I didn't know what else to do.  Just about every part of this ring is at least 1.0 mm thick, minus the tips of the wings coming from the base triangle.
• The gems themselves: as you can see from the render, I went ahead and modeled in a 5 mm diamond-cut gem to use as a reference while arranging the prongs.  This part of the design made me the most nervous.  Traditional gem setting has the jeweler cutting a "seat" into the prongs to properly fit the gem, while I modeled the prongs to already fit around the gem.  Unfortunately, I modeled the gems themselves wrong, so this seat looks a little wonky in person.  The jeweler was able to work around it, though.  I'll revise this for model 2.0.

There was one thing I didn't think about, however-- how the ring would actually sit once it was put on a finger.  The final design has it standing up higher than I had imagined, meaning it's prone to catching on and knocking against just about everything it comes into contact with.  This is mostly an issue caused by my final band design, which I tried to make a little more fancy when I shouldn't have.  I will want to correct this for version 2.0, of course, but it'll do for now.

Step Two: Printing

Thanks to Shapeways, printing was the easiest part.

Test prints

I went through three different test prints.  The first one in plastic, seen on the left, was a little too fragile and didn't quite make it through the printing process.  For the second one, center, I scaled up the base triangle a bit to give it more bulk.  I also went with a thicker band, which ended up not quite fitting with the style I was trying to create.  The last one was my metal test.  I had this printed in bronze in the hopes that a jeweler could use it to test the gem settings.  Unfortunately, this led me to finding out that most jewelers won't touch bronze because it's so brittle.  We had to try several stores before someone would agree to even take a look.  Once we finally got an OK from someone who knew what they were doing, I took a deep breath and ordered the gold ring.

Step Three: Finishing

I was on pins and needles for a couple weeks waiting for the gold ring to come.  All I could think about was the potential for things to go wrong.  I was not going to be happy if I had spent a bunch of cash on a hunk of broken ring.  Eventually it did arrive and appeared to have all the prongs, so we took it back to the jeweler to have the gems set and the polygons polished out.  The jeweler we went with offered birth stone jewelry, so they picked us out some Swiss blue topazes to use instead of the super cheap cubic zircon I had bought as test gems.  A week or two later, the ring was done.

Do do do dooo!

<3

During this time, my boyfriend and I decided it was time to settle down.  We didn't exactly know how long this process was going to take, so we kinda jumped the gun and had the proposal before we got the gems set.  Oops!


I'll eventually get around to making corrections to this model and then releasing it for sale on Shapeways.  For now, I kinda want to just enjoy knowing that the ring on my finger is completely one-of-a-kind and represents me and my fiance better than a store-bought ring ever could.  End of sappy post.

Ocarina of Time Coasters: Part Five

Hello!  Hey, listen!  Welcome to the fifth and final part of my Ocarina of Time coaster project!  In this part, I'll finally get around to finishing these things so I can move on with my life.  For the previous post, see Part Four: Casting.

Part Five: Finishing

After giving my coasters a day or so to fully cure, I peeled them out of their molds to see how they turned out.  I'll be honest, they're not great.  There are still some surface bubbles and rough edges in the molds themselves, which transferred directly onto the casts.  I cleaned up what I could with my X-acto knife and sanded down any jagged edges I created in the process.

Since my originals didn't get a super smooth finish, the casts came out a little dull.  I tried to remedy this by giving them a quick spray with some glossy sealant I had on hand.  For whatever reason, this ended up being a terrible idea.  The sealant ended up pooling up on the surface in some spots, causing ugly little bumps I can't even reach with my sandpaper.  It looks like I'll need better molds to get a shiny surface on these coasters!

Despite this setback, I decided it'd be best to just continue on now that I'd gotten so close to being done with this set of coasters.  I bought a roll of adhesive-backed cork-- originally meant to be used as a shelf liner-- to use as a backing for the coasters to prevent them from sliding around and scratching up the tables they'll be used on.  Cutting them with my X-acto knife was a little messy, but it let me hold them down and cut an outline into the backing before I peeled off the paper.

My poor table gets cut a lot...

At long last, I've gathered the six medallions!  This project ended up being a lot more complicated and time-consuming than I expected, and I'm glad to finally call it done.

Woo!

I had originally thought to sell these, but considering how wonky they look and how many man-hours they require, I'm not confident that's a route I want to take right now.  Either way, I've learned a lot from this project, and I hope you have gotten something of value out of reading these posts.  Happy crafting, dear reader!

Skyrim Dragon Priest Mask: Part Two

Hello again, internet person!  I've been debating what to do about this post for a couple weeks now.  If you remember Part One, this started out as a challenging project.  Part Two just got worse and worse, so I'll focus on what I did wrong and what I should have done so that I'll have some good notes to use should I attempt something like this (again) in the future.

First, I'll share my results so you know what I mean when I say this turned out pretty bad.

Final Results

Glamour shot, if you will

So this is a pretty good picture simply because you can see most of the flaws right up front.  Weird splotches and holes in the layers of resin, blobs around the eyes and mouth that weren't supposed to be there, a nice big dent in the forehead section, and some warping around the bottom.  I know what caused everything except that dent-- seriously, the heck happened there?-- and will outline which step caused what below.

Step Two: Molding

Creating a glove mold for this mask seemed like an easy enough thing to do, but many of the surface flaws came from me not knowing what I was doing.  I used Smooth-On's Dragon Skin rubber, brushing on a few layers over the course of a couple days.  This was a good choice of materials, but I skipped a very crucial step-- adding a thickening agent to the last couple layers to beef it up.  This is especially important to do on something like this mask, which has some really pointy high-points and corners.  My mold ended up ripping around the eyes, mouth, and nose areas when I went to demold, which caused those weird surface anomalies.  It also made a huge mess in my mother mold.

Of course, the mother mold had its own problems outside of some spills.  I tried to go the cheap route and use plaster bandages for this hard outer shell.  Pro tip-- don't try to use plaster bandages.  They were not nearly sturdy enough for this job and my mother mold ended up too floppy and soft in places that needed to be rock-hard, like the entire jaw.  That might actually be where the dent in the forehead came from, now that I think about it.  As a bonus, the powder from the bandages goes everywhere and there seems to be nothing you can do to stop this.  I will most likely look for another Smooth-On product next time I make a mother mold, as I think they have a paste meant for this purpose.

The other problem I had was that the rubber kept flopping around inside the mother mold any time I tried to rotate the whole thing, which is definitely not ideal considering the mother is meant to hold everything in place.  I ended up fixing this by taping everything to a piece of cardboard, but it wasn't elegant in the slightest.  I believe the proper method is to bolt everything to a piece of plywood when you have an open-face mold like this, but I'm still looking into it.  It might just be a matter of making things properly from the start.

Step Three: Casting

The casting process had its own challenges, the main one being that I was very timid with the slushing part because I knew there was a good chance my mold would leak or spill since it was so poorly-built.  You can see this in the picture as the spots that ended up grey instead of red-- that's where a layer didn't quite cover the entire surface of the mold.  Getting the jaw and chin area covered was especially difficult, since it was prime "spill it all over myself if I do it wrong" area.  They ended up very flimsy as a result.

Because of this lack of coverage, I ended up doing too many layers of the red resin.  This was a clear-cast resin I had tinted with the intent of leaving a glass-like layer on top of the dark grey base.  In some spots this kind of worked, but overall the effect didn't come through like I had intended.  I think if I try this again, I'll paint the first layer onto the mold instead of casting it so I can control it a little better.  I'm not sure if XTC-3D would work for this purpose, but it might be worth trying.

Step Four: Sanding and Weathering

This step worked out about like I planned, so I'll just touch on it briefly.  After the cast had finished hardening, I wet-sanded it starting at 400 grit all the way up to 1500 grit or so.  This wouldn't have been necessary if my original had been nice and smooth, mind you.  I'll give it another sanding session before I attempt another mold so I can skip this post-processing on the pulls.

Once it dried, I mixed some black acrylic paint with water and just slopped it into the seams and scratches of the mask and wiped up with excess with a paper towel.  I could have done a better job of this, but I think it turned out kinda nice considering how much of a mess the rest of the mask was.

More Pictures

Here's the rest of the pictures I took before sending this mask off as a Christmas present.  I've also compiled them into an Imgur album if that's less painful to view.  Hopefully this summary of my comedy of errors saves someone from making the same mistakes!

Before post-processing

Front view

The other side

Close-up of the bad layering

I taped up the back in the hopes of
reinforcing it, since the edges were very frail

Christmas Pokemon!

Laeta Saturnalia!  As the holidays are approaching, I have bestowed upon myself the pretty stupid task of making all of my Christmas gifts this year.  Naturally, I put everything off as long as possible and now have about two weeks to finish and then hand out all my gifts.  I'm a genius, I know.  Note-- this post will be published well after the date it was started, as I don't have all the Pokemon done as of the time of its writing and want to have a group picture at the end.

To keep things relatively simple, adult relatives are getting a bottle of the mead I started back in August and friends are getting Pokemon!  I might decide to blog about the mead later, if anyone's curious, but this post is about them Pokeymans.  I'll do a quick run-down of how I'm making them and then a list of lessons I learned along the way, i.e. things I screwed up in the process.  Enjoy!

Prepping the Models

The only way it's even remotely possible for me to crank out 10 Pokemon figurines in 14 days is by borrowing the models off this cool website that pulled in-game models from Pokemon X/Y.  Normally the thought of ripping models out of a game would make the game developer inside me cringe, but modeling them by hand wouldn't have really eased my conscious-- either way, I'm dealing in unlicensed reproduction territory.  But anyway, the models from that site come with textures and rigs, so I've already saved about a billion hours of work by using them.

Although the rig is there, the models don't seem to be properly weight-painted when I load them into Maya, so I had to repaint them myself.  It's been an eternity since I last weight-painted anything at all, so there are still some weird bits of deformation going on.

Lol, no idea what I'm doing

Once weighted and posed, I scaled the models down to a size that could fit in my printer comfortably.  The first few print attempts were pretty bad-- I've never printed something this organic before and haven't really gotten my printer calibrated for it.  Since I'm in a hurry, I decided it'll be best to just print the Pokemon in pieces as needed and reassemble them by hand.  Not super graceful, but that's a problem for 2016.

Poke-pieces!

Post-Processing

After they come off the printer, the Pokemon figurines have been meeting one of my closest friends-- super glue!  All those little pieces need to be attached, meaning I'll probably be losing parts of my fingertips in the process.  Hopefully I'll remember to preserve enough of my right index to successfully use the weirdly high number of fingerprint scanners in my life.

Next up is sanding.  Lots of little jagged edges on these guys, as you can see from the pictures.  Some of it is support material that didn't pop off properly, but some of it is just from the models themselves not being optimized for printing at this size.  I'm using a 120 grit for the really rough bits and finishing it off with a 220 grit.  This should leave enough texture for the primer to hold onto.  It's not necessary to wet-sand, but I prefer it to getting all that plastic dust everywhere.  I swear I've found it in my eyes before-- probably not healthy.  Any holes and gaps in the print that I find get a dab of Bondo and another quick sanding with a 400 grit, then they're ready for a layer of XTC-3D.

After they're nice and smooth and have been given a good coating of primer, it's time for the arduous task of painting these tiny little bastards.  I've never really had a steady hand-- hence my love of Control-Z and all media digital-- so this is probably the hardest part for me.  Luckily I have a bunch of tiny paint brushes, masking tape, and cheap acrylic paints on hand.  That's all you really need, right?

My messy workspace after a night of painting

Once the paint dries, I hit them with a light coating of a spray matte sealant, as the paint I use is kinda shiny and also cheap enough to stay very slightly tacky.  This stuff reeks, so it's best to use it outside.  After a few hours of drying, they're done!

Finished set for far-away friends (not pictured-- another Charizard and a Feraligatr)

Finished set for work friends

Conclusion and Lessons Learned

Well, this has been fun!  Tiring and kinda stressful, but look at the cute little Pokemon!  They look derpy as fuck, I know.  Naturally, I've made a few notes and observations along the way, which I'll outline below for your amusement.

• Don't get carried away with your raft settings if you're having issues with it detaching from your print.  It's entirely possible to have them so firmly attached that you can't actually detach them again, which kinda defeats the purpose in its own way.
• If using someone else's models feels a little cheaty to you, try putting them in your own poses.  It's a nice little way to add your own flair to the print.
• Don't be afraid to chop your models into pieces when you need to.  I'll admit that it's much more satisfying to pull a complete figurine off your print bed, but assembling pieces is worlds better than throwing out a dozen failed prints because you just can't get your printer to cooperate anymore.
• The most obvious, I'm sure-- don't wait until the last minute to make presents for your friends, especially if you know well ahead of time that you're gonna want to make everyone something!  You'd think by now I'd have figured this out for my personal projects, but it seems you'd be wrong.
• Don't use cheap paints.  My paints vary greatly in quality just from tube to tube, and it's super obnoxious to need 3+ coats of the reds and oranges when blue goes on silky smooth with no problem.  When I can justify blowing more money, I might get myself an airbrush and some nice paints.
• Painting on eyes is not trivial, if you couldn't tell by how I went for the lazy method and just went with Ditto-styled black dots.  I will be trying actual paint markers in the future.  Or stickers.  Stickers seem even better!

Ocarina of Time Coasters: Part Four

Click here for Part Three: Making the Molds

After an eternity of sanding, molding, and cursing, I finally finished all of my molds and could start the casting process!  The end of this project is finally in sight-- yay!

Part Four: Casting

Compared to all the other parts, casting was probably the most frustrating to figure out but the most relaxing to actually do.  Once I got in the groove, settling down to cast all six coasters in one go was kinda pleasant.  However, getting into that groove really tried my patience, and I nearly gave up on this project while trying to get a good cast.

The first issue I ran into was bubbling.  So much bubbling!  This was really discouraging-- after all, if you can't get rid of the bubbles, how on earth are you supposed to get a good cast?  The cause turned out to be three different issues that combined together to make a mess.  First, I was trying to use a clear-cast but fast-curing resin, which are very much prone to bubbles if you don't have a $200+ vacuum chamber sitting around.  Switching to an opaque resin helped a lot.  Second, I was trying to cast in 110-degree weather, meaning my pot life of 3 minutes was turning into a pot life of like 50 seconds.  Luckily, the fall came in while I was trying to solve my coloring problem that I'll cover later.  Third, I kept trying to use every sort of dye except for the expensive stuff meant specifically for use in resin.  This was adding moisture to the resin, which in turn made more bubbles.  I'd imagine a slow-cure resin or vacuum chamber could help with this, as well, but it was much more cost-effective to just buy actual resin pigments.

Some of my ill-fated early attempts

The second issue I had was deciding on how much of those fancy pigments to use, and then how to consistently measure that amount each time I mix up some resin.  Switching to opaque resin meant that I had to add enough dye to overcome its natural white cure color and not accidentally create pastel colors.  And since I have six different colors going on, mixing up a large batch for each color (as is frequently recommended) didn't seem very cost-effective.  So after many failed attempts and some bad advice off the resin casting forums I visit, my dear future brother-in-law recommended industrial syringes.  It feels a little creepy to have a bunch of syringes lying about, but I can get (mostly) exact measurements now, up to 0.01 mL accuracy.  After some trial and error, I decided on about 0.1 mL per cup of resin, which I'm using approximately 50 mL of total (25 mL of part A and of part B).  That's well under the recommended max of 3% dye per total volume that Smooth-On lists on their site, so it shouldn't be enough to interfere with curing.  Hopefully.

Fifth time's the charm, I guess?

The last major issue was simply that the molds ended up kinda crappy, partly because of the issues I listed in the previous section and partly because my originals just weren't that great.  Unfortunately, this isn't something I can just fix-- I'd have to completely start over again to get better casts.  Considering I still haven't finished version 1 and recently lost all my 3D models in a computer crash, this isn't exactly something I'm willing to do right now.  That being said, the pulls I'm getting could certainly look a lot worse, so I'm going to focus on doing the best I can with them until the molds fall apart and need to be remade.

Issues aside, I'm super excited to go demold my casts and see how they turned out.  It looks like I could revise the dye measurements slightly on some of the pieces-- especially the red of the Fire Medallion, since it turned into hot pink instead-- but otherwise this round of casts look like they just need to be finished off and then tested.  And by tested I mean scattered around my apartment as decorative coasters!

My phone isn't great with colors, but here they are in their molds

Hopefully this has been educational, if not kinda interesting.  My next post will cover finishing off the pieces to make them into actual coasters, as well as do a recap on what I did and maybe what tools I used.  May the super glue be with you, not on you!

Tricks and Tools: Home-made Dremel sanding drums

Hello again!  I've gone a while without any updates, so I figured I'd pop in and share a cool new trick I found on Instructables on how to make your own sanding drums for your Dremel tool.  This was a great find for me, as I just bought a big pack of wet/dry sandpaper sheets and am already incredibly sick of trying to sand everything by hand.  My Dremel only came with very low grit sanders, which aren't exactly useful when your prints don't come out looking like hell, so I'm eager to try these out.  It's too late for my coasters, but I'm gonna put a few of these together for my Dragon Priest mask in the hopes that it'll speed up sanding significantly.  My little arms are tired!

Disclaimer: making your own sanding drums might be dangerous, as they could fall apart and get flung towards your face or otherwise injure you or your Dremel.  Please use this tip with caution.  I'll report back if something terrible comes from this experiment!

Skyrim Dragon Priest Mask: Part One

Hello!  I've decided to go ahead and share another project I've been working on, since I'm getting bored from the constant set-backs of my Ocarina of Time coasters.  As the title suggests, this one is a Dragon Priest mask from The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.  I'm using a model I found on Thingiverse for this project rather than trying to model it myself.  I'm still new to modeling for 3D printing, so this saved me a ton of time and frustration.

Part One: Printing

The biggest challenge to printing this mask was the size.  This thing was way too big for my measly 100 x 100 x 130 mm print bed, so I ended up cutting it into fifteen different pieces, which I then had to struggle to glue together.  NetFabb is a nice tool for this sort of work, as even the free version will cut a model and repair the resulting holes for you.

Here you can see my cuts in NetFabb Basic

Once I got all the pieces down to a good size, I started printing them.  Obviously this took some time, and each piece had to be oriented just right to both stand up to printing and get a nice-looking print surface.  I also started encountering an extrusion issue with this print-- parts that needed a lot of retraction ended up with lots of little clogs that eventually started ruining my prints, as several layers would go by with my printer blissfully unaware that it wasn't actually extruding plastic.  I still haven't found a good solution to this, but I managed to work around it for now.

Trying to glue all these pieces together was a pain in the butt.  Since I had never tried cutting up a large print like this before, I didn't know that I'd end up with such thin pieces that simply did not provide enough surface area for super glue to bind to.  And since I couldn't fit them together all nice and neat, I ended up with a few uneven spots where the corners met and a number of gaps between seams.  It was an all-around mess, really, but it eventually pulled together.  I tried smoothing it out as best I could with my Dremel and a layer of XTC-3D, then used some cheap putty to fill in whatever I missed.

So far so good, eh?

It's still not quite ready for molding, as I've learned through my other projects.  I'll be going over it with several grits of sandpaper until its a smooth, uniform surface with no noticeable imperfections.  At that point, I'll look into how to get a mold going.  Until then, may the super glue be with you, not on you!


UPDATE 7 November:  Turns out "water putty" was a bad choice, as it kinda dissolves in water and doesn't really stick to a smooth plastic surface.  Go figure.  Instead of continuing this ill-fated attempt to be eco-friendly, I'm buying myself a tube of Bondo, which seems to be the go-to of this maker community, and will refill the gaps I uncovered.  Live and learn, I suppose!