The official YETI trailer

I found the "official trailer" for the Yeti photo shoot online today. DA Media Group guys did a great job with it. I can remember them shooting video all day at the location. The final image came out great! Thanks again to Matt Barnes for including us in a tight deadline, but super fun project! Follow the link at the bottom to get you there!

THE YETI (Official Trailer) from DA Media Group on Vimeo.

Is this fur real? We get to do this!

Well today was a fun day. We all got on the same page pretty quick as how the fur should be applied. Here Karen, a wonderfully talented artistic collegue of ours, is starting the fur. It's amazing how much hair is now in the air just from getting this far! These pieces are extremely tedious, as we cut them all into little strips and applied them individually. After this part, we will be able to start furring with larger, serrated strips. That should make this move along faster. While that was being taken taken care of at one end of the shop, I was able to start coating the face, chest and hands with a mixture of plaster of paris and white glue. This was used instead of our regular Urethane hard coat system for a couple of reasons. One was the expense of the Urethane vs. this method, and 2 was hardening time. Our Urethane coat requires a creamy, water based primer, and we didn't have the time to wait for this additional step to dry. Being that our Yeti really only needs to survive the shoot, and then be displayed high out of reach at the studio, the Urethane hard coat system was a little redundant.

 Being that we would never set our yeti up fully at the shop, it was very important that each piece be fiitted to the next one in the chain. As the day progressed, we made leaps and bounds on getting the fur and paint applied. We didn't really do very much air-brushing on this fellow. He would never have a close up in the final cut. Jody was able to apply a pretty cool mottle texture with 3-4 colours on the exposed skin, and then we air-brushed white translucent spots around the fur to skin edge. This helped blend the white of the hair to the relatively dark skin.

 After this step, we did the eyes and bleeding cuts (after all, he is attacking a 1960's era expedition) When it came to the teeth, I decided to just build by hand. Aspire would have easily taken this on, but there was no indents in the mouth for them. So it was just as easy to sculpt them and the gum portion together.
The tonque was also done by hand, as the cg file looked abit weird after we posed and sculpted the face in the computer. I suspect we will be here pretty much all night tonight as tomorrow will be the shoot day.
In a neat turn of events, Matt asked if I wanted to appear in the final picture as a Himilayan Sherpa! I'm not sure if it was my charisma, or my face that didn't get shaved this week, but I happily agreed nonetheless.
Sherpa Jamie........... I think I like it.













 

Shoot that thing!

After changing a flat tire in the pouring rain and driving to the tire shop, Jody and I arrived to the shop 3 hrs past when I was hoping to get there. We only had a little bit of hair to go and fingernail painting left. We took care of that pretty quick and loaded him up for his starring role. After a 2 hour journey, we arrived on location and it was still downpouring.

The frozen lake we were shooting on was a slushy snow plateau. I was a little concerned at first because the wind was really starting to pick up, and the yeti was 10' tall. We did put a steel pipe in his back,
and were able to position a grip stand behind him for added wind support. The stand was very well hidden behind his giant girth.
After we got it all assembled, we got to drizzle blood all over him, the actors and  anything else that wasn't
red! It was now time for my guest appearance in the shot. I headed to the cube van where a Sherpa outfit was waiting.

 The weather quickly turned into a blizzard at that point, but at least I was dressed for it. Matt shot pictures for about 30 min, we all changed positions a few times, did some running back and forth and then that was it.
By then I was cold and wet, and Sherpa wardrobe boots are not waterproof at all!

All in all it was a great build. Matt is a great guy who is very flexible to work with. The crew was fantastic, as well as Donna Irvine in the wardrobe dept. It seems a bit crazy that all this was started only 3.5 days ago. Being able to use straight forward, easy to navigate software, our Techno cnc router and our experience in creating weird stuff, we were able to pull off a huge build in an extremely short time frame.


I will post the final picture of the shoot as soon as it becomes available to us.

---Sherpa Jamie

Quickly taking shape

This afternoon I laid out the rest of all the parts in the computer.Luckily our Yeti will be mostly covered in hair.
This will allow us to use a giant stepover of 70% or so. It should mean that we can be pulling parts off our Techno cnc router fairly quickly. As it turns out we are cutting an entire sheet of parts every 30-40 min. Just what we need, as the ever approaching deadline doesn't seem to be changing!

As the parts have been coming of the Techno, we have been furiously getting them covered with water-based
contact cement. We use this product as styrofoam is so sensitive to the chemicals found in most other adhesives.Plus the dry time is fairly fast when all the fans are blowing on them.

Here is the leg assembly after all the layers have been glued up. You can see the results of the giant stepover we chose to use. Again, it doesn't matter as we still have to apply 20 yds. of fur.

cutting the chest pieces

This morning I was able to set up the chest layers. These were done exactly like face layers were. I imported the the whole front of the chest and using the slice component feature, cut them into 3" layers. I was able to grab each component in the 2d window and move the parts around for a better fit on the sheet.

Then using the fit vectors to bitmap feature, I could define the top of the sheet that I didn't want to toolpath.

Having done that, it was right onto applying the cutter toolpaths. Selecting all the vectors as my cutting boundaries, I picked the 1/2" ballnose cutter from the tool data-base, set up my material parameters and hit calculate. The thing that I quite like about Aspire is how FAST the toolpath engine runs. It was able to calculate all that cutting in just under 5 seconds. And I did time it :) If you look closely at all those blue lines, those are the lines that our Techno cnc router is going to travel, milling away the foam and leaving the final shape.

The final step was to run a cutout pass to release the parts from the styrofoam sheet.

These are the parts run on the simulation in the computer. This is fantastic because I can see exactly what I will have before I even fire up our Techno!

Next up will be all the other parts that need cutting out.

After bringing in the face portion, and this is where Aspire shines, I was able to slice the model into 3" thick components. We chose 3" styrofoam for 3 reasons. 1 was our under gantry clearance 2 was our cutting tools flute length. I wanted the cutter to be able to cut the material in 1 pass. And 3 was that styrofoam is LIGHT! After moving the components around to maximize our sheet space, I defined where I wanted the cutting borders to be. I obviously didn't want the router to waste time by cutting the flat portions of the top of the material sheet.This was very easily done by selecting a component in the 2d window and selecting the "fit vectors to bitmap" feature. This let me define the top of the sheet and automatically create a boundary vector. I also put a border around the base of the component as well. With our 3 day deadline, these features are indispensable!
 The next step was to apply a toolpath that our router would use to machine the parts. I used a 1/2" ball nose cutter to reduce machining times as the model was definitely large enough that it would still have lots of detail. After running a simulation, I could see that the eyes didn't have the detail I wanted. Easy enough. I drew a vector bounday around each eye and applied a 1/8" cutter tool path to just that area. The final step was a cut out pass.

I have gotten far more efficient with my toolpaths over the years. I purposely stayed away from all the vertical edges of the model by limiting the tool to not going all the way over the edge. All of the vertical edges would be undercuts anyway, so it is way faster to do it this way and just do a final cutout. We still have to do SOME manual labour!  

"Yeti"-nother project

Well today we started a pretty cool job for our client Matt Barnes. Matt is a pretty cool guy as well as a highly sought after photographer. Every year he does an epic photograph and his style is very unique. You can check out his work at: http://www.thatsthespot.com This year he contacted us to fabricate a 10 foot tall Himilayan yeti creature. I won't lie, the deadline was very tight! Due to time constraints, we purchased a 3d monster model instead of modelling it ourselves. As the 3d model was already rigged with bone structure, we were able to work with Matt in finding the pose that he was looking for. Now the hard part begins. We started by slicing all the appendages off the 3d computer model, then splitting those parts as close to the middle as possible. After we had our pile of body parts in the computer, we exported them all out in the STL format that our Aspire software could import.