When I lent my services to a collegue who was working on a film about 12 years ago, I was introduced to the world of cnc. I remember watching this huge machining centre milling out a slab of mdf and turning it into a fantastic set of gears. I knew that it would have taken me hours to achieve the same thing with traditional power tools. I decided then that I would invest in a cnc router for my own business Oxenham Design. At that time I could turn on a computer, but even to check email seemed like a crazy set of operations. I persevered and learned every piece of relevant software I could get my hands on. I am now fortunate enough to be using Vectric's ASPIRE software, and Techno cnc routers, which has helped us to create some amazing projects, both in part, or in full. I thought that this blog would be a great place to share "behind the scenes" adventures with the software, materials and equipment we use, as well as the projects we build.

Tuesday 22 December 2015

Back to the Miniatures!

We sort of got caught off guard with 2 builds, and 2 new shoot dates for before Christmas. We shot the second one yesterday, but I can't disclose anything until next summer :(

But, back to the interrupted miniatures build we were working on!
The next little asset I had to make was the picnic table that will sit outside the ice cream store.
I re-modeled the original umbrella model they supplied, just to make the machining a little cleaner.
I brought my model into Aspire, and found a good height for the split. It was a little too thick to double side machine from 2" material, so I cut it in 2 halves.

We also got a request for 4 more additional buildings to populate around the set. They didn't need to be as complicated as the ice cream store, but they needed to still look good. And with the deadline quickly approaching, I decided to try a different approach to them.
I brought the buildings into Hexagon, rotated them to camera a little bit, then squashed them on the z axis. I did have to elongate the depth on all the details, so when I squished it down, there would still be some detail to be able to paint.
Once into Aspire, I set the z height to exactly 2 inches, so as to fit into the material we're working with.


The end result looks really good with some side lighting to make the details really pop.
Meanwhile, Jody was making some pretty decent headway on the painting portion of things!




I finished up on the interior components, and Jody had finished working the little ice cream chairs.
We went with laminated prints for the walls and menu sign. The case-goods were built from .060" styrene, and put together much the same way you would a real cabinet. There was nothing from the cg company for the interior, so we designed it on the fly. This is a 3 walled set, with no ceiling. We just extended the walls up high enough, that no ceiling wouldn't be an issue at all.
8)
JWO






1 comment: