Today we plunged headfirst into the styrofoam work for the 4 miniature sets we're building.
The Batman mountain got sculpted using various chisels, saws, and whatever else that worked. This is actually 3 layers of 6" styrofoam. You can see the "mountain road" winding it's way up the side.
This will get covered in our scenic mud, then painted and glazed. We have to keep the top as flat as possible, so the toy play can happen. The other side actually has a cut-away piece, so the kids can get as close to the action as possible.
For the Spongebob set, the actual set is a kidney shape, that needed to be textured like the bottom of the sea. I found a tile-able texture online, and scaled it to the 12' X 8' kidney shape. The set will get broken into 3 pieces, and finished at the studio on Monday. I probably could have carved it by hand, but our Techno cnc will mill away, while I work on the stuff the router isn't doing.
I toolpathed it with a 1/2" ballnose, at 550 ipm, with 100 ipm on the Z axis. It didn't run nearly that fast in real life, as there was a fair amount of texture in the file. If I smoothed the model in Aspire too far, it lost a lot of the ridges, so this was a bit of a compromise.
I ended up having to bump up my Z carriage up to the next set of mounting holes to accommodate the 6" slab. I also set the machining boundary to the edge of the kidney shape. Sadly I don't have the travel or cutter to be able to cut the part out, so we'll use the border of the relief as a cutting guide with a reciprocating saw.
So far the first piece looks great! I had no reasonable way to hold the sheet on the machine, so I ended up using 2, 50lb barbel weights to stop the styrofoam from sliding around. It worked very well!
We also had a meeting with the art director today, so that took some time, but all in all, I'm happy witht the progress today.
Tomorrow I deliver some more stuff for the TV show The Amazing Race, then picking up a pile of material, then working at the shop. Busy day Tomorrow!
Jody and Anna will be hard coating the batman mountain, and hopefully I won't keep them waiting too long on materials.
Phew!
I never thought I would build a mountain, and the bottom of the ocean all in one day :)
8)
JWO
I had to laugh at using the barbells to hold the foam in place - inventive! It never ceases to amaze me how something like EPS can be so light but strong and durable.
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