Please keep your arms and feet inside the car at all times.

The roller coaster car and prop couch back are done! I picked up the lap bar we had fabricated at B&M Welding. They did a great job as usual. The recently got a cnc pipe bender, and this was the perfect job for it. I also made the padded portion that locks on the passengers legs. Although ours is a piece of 3" abs pipe, with end caps made from 1/2" rigid pvc. The caps I drew up in Aspire, and cut on our Techno cnc.

 Here's the final pieces approximately laid out like in the shot. Although you'll never see the floor in the final shot.

 And just to show you how fast it is, Jody volunteered to take it for the first run around the track

I took a picture of the away from camera side, so you could see what it looks like.


We also cracked open the styrofoam brain mold first thing this morning.

This was straight out of the mold, before I cleaned up the seams, and cleaned off the extra bits of styrofoam. The styrofoam did melt under the heat of the resin, but as we did a thin first slush coat, the shape was already formed before the styrofoam melted under the heat.

I added 4 12v lights, and sealed them in with silicone so they wouldn't short out in the liquid. There's no brain stem, as the image will be cropped off before that point. I also added some loops of weed-eater cord through holes we drilled in it. This particular cord was very translucent , and lit up well, for what it was. If they weren't shooting in a liquid, I could have added some pretty cool luminescent wire, but that would last about 2 seconds in the liquid!

Here it is unlit. Im glad we made it glow!
Delivery tomorrow, then it's on the the time travel pod!
8)
JO

They Lie, Size Does Matter!

But only when it comes to brains!


The roller coaster car got it's electric orange colour applied this morning. 2 coats covered extremely well, even though it was as bright orange as it was.

Tomorrow we will get the lap bar on and final assembly ready for Thursday delivery.

We also started the big brain that will be shot in a bell jar. The jar is HUGE. Well it's huge for a bell jar to me anyways! It stands 20" tall and about 9" in diameter. Filling it will take a rather large brain. A normal size brain model from a medical supply place is pretty small, and would look puny in this colossal jar. So we're making one. We are lucky to have complete control on this job, whatever we like, we can do. They are shooting this 2 ways. One way will have the jar and brain upside down and filled with a liquid of some kind, and they'll flip it in post, and the other way will be the right way up with no liquid. I could have sculpted a brain out of the many weird products we have here by hand, BUT all those materials would be solid and opaque, and that's pretty boring I think. I want it to GLOW! So I found a pretty cool 3d model brain on line and downloaded it. I usually do that first for generic things. Why model it if one exists already.

This is the brain after I did some sculpting in Hexagon. I like that it now pulls down in the middle.
I quickly found out that the original geometry wasn't all that great to begin with, and after the sculpting, it was a real mess. It looks good, but it's a mess. And all this messed up geometry means Hexagon doesn't want to split it how I want it to. I can't bring this into Aspire the way it is, as all the undercuts would be filled, and not to mention it's thicker than any one material I have. Long story short, I need to slice it. After thinking about it, I decided on a new approach. I would strategically place cubes around it, then remove the cubes in Aspire, leaving the portions of the brain I need.

Here I added a center cube rectangle in the dead centre. This gives me the left and right brain halves. When I import this into Aspire, I'll sink the model into the zero plane so the brain part is the only thing sticking up.

The brain is symmetrical, so I only needed to mirror the other side, instead of  importing it twice.

I continued to work my way around the brain with the cube method. Now it was important that the cube faces be touching, not overlapping. This would keep the brain pieces working together properly.

Here's how one piece looks when I'm importing it in to Aspire. All the cubes come in, with the brain and I'll just trim them off after they've been pasted down.

After trimming the cubes off, I'm left with the portion I need.
Now for the fun part! I don't want to machine this as the final piece. I want to make a mold. I said before that I wanted it to glow, and we have clear casting resin in stock that hardens up in around an hour. I could have machined the brain as a 'positive' shape, and made a rubber mold. But this would have required waiting overnight for the mold, then we would have had to make a "jacket" to support the rubber mold, then the couple of hours for the resin to harden up. We just don't have the time on this, it shoots on Thursday.

 So instead, I machined the brain as a negative component, and I used styrofoam as the mold material for machining. The casting resin will bond really well to the styrofoam, but that's not really a concern, as we are going to bust it off in the morning, and clean-off any styrofoam bits with lacquer thinner. This wont hurt the resin at all, as it's a urethane and very durable. I made sure that the styrofoam blanks were lined up exactly along the Techno cnc's axis.

Making sure the blanks were aligned to the edge of the material made the task of trimming the mold parts on the table saw very easy!

After all the parts were trimmed on the saw, I heavily coated the gluing surfaces with Super 77 spray contact cement. I used alot of it in hopes to create a seal so the resin wouldn't poor out the seam joins.

It's a little hard to see in this pic, but this is the result of all the blocks glued up, leaving the open 'brain cavity' mold.

We mixed up the clear resin with some tint in it to give the brain a fleshy, translucent colour, rolling it around to coat all of the inside. After it became solid enough, I drew veins all over it, in hopes that they would  show through faintly when the light is added.

We added one more layer of coloured resin, then backed it up with a few more layers of just clear. I don't want to opaque it out totally. The resin does get quite hot, especially in an insulated mold like this one. I'm hoping that the first thin layer was enough to protect the styrofoam from melting under the heat. It should be o.k. but I won't know until I crack it out in the morning.
Let's hope!
8)
JO

No wheels on this car!

I worked most of the weekend getting the roller coaster car framework built. This was pretty simple as the work had already been done in the computer. I was supplied the size that the car needed to be already, and they would have spent a great deal of time on sizing it. When I was modelling it, I just used the dimensions supplied. With the computer model ready, and signed off on, I was able to extract the pieces I wanted from the model, and convert them to usable cut files in Aspire.

I find that Aspire, Corel Draw, and Hexagon work VERY well together for us. I saved the extracted geometry out for import into Corel, where I would get my usable vectors from.

Once imported into Corel, this is what I had. Notice that the corner rads are faceted. I could have pulled the curves from Hexagon, and imported them as AI files, but the faceting would still be there.

So to get good clean vectors, I simply had to draw over the outline with new vectors. This allows me to get smooth rads on all the corners. And as the model was draw at real size in Hexagon, there is no worry that the sizing will be different.

I made the model with the side panels being 2.25" thick. Using the vector file I created, I was able to offset the shape inwards to give me my top curved thickener piece. For the long flat runs, I cut 3/4" MDF into 1.5" strips. The curved pieces would get 2 layers of 3/4" making up the 1.5" to work with the strips. The skins were 3/8" MDF to be strong, yet lighter than solid MDF would be. The whole thing is going to come apart so it can flat pack into the van for delivery.

 The car parts are all built and have a coat of sealer on the raw edges. We got another last minute job today which should be fun. An oversized alien brain in a bell jar. This shoots on Thursday, the same day the roller coaster car shoots. Thankfully they are both shooting at the same studios, although its for something completely different.
8)
JO

This is gonna be a Roller Coaster ride!

We received the approval for our newest build. This shoots fairly soon, so we will be full bore by the end of the week. It's a print ad shoot, so the camera angles are already determined, and how much we need to build has already been decided as well. We will construct the first row seat of the front car of a roller coaster car. As well as a portion of a living room couch. Hey, I don't make this stuff up! I can't say too much, but I think it's for a huge new tv coming out.

So I quickly rendered a mock up, based on the real-world dimensions supplied. The shot will be an over the shoulder view, fairly tight, so the floor of the car will never be seen. In fact, we won't even be building the seat, the people will be sitting on crates, or 'apple boxes' as they are refered to.

We also had our meeting yesterday for the 'Time Travel" pod for an upcoming indie film. Can't say too much about that either, but their is some recognizable talent.
I modeled up a quick render for the meeting of what the base of the pod may look like, based on some simple line drawings we received.

 Tomorrow, I will get the styrospray on our sign for out-front, and as it's kicking, I hope to get to the fabric store for some roller-coaster couch fabric. How many people get to say that. How many people might NOT want to say that!
8)
JO