Vrogy.net

I’ve been working for a while on a costume in an entirely new genre: everyone’s favorite meme-spawning, massively addictive, massively multiplayer game- World of Warcraft. Specifically, the zombie-ninja race-class combination of undead and rogue. Stunlock, physical damage, detachable limbs, head-banging, all that.

First was to head over to Wowhead, a database tool which allows me drool over item stats- and set up a character with a bunch of armor, see what he looks like, etc. Think of it as paper doll 3.0. http://www.wowhead.com/profile=19858901 Then I sat down and looked at materials, construction techniques, different parts of the costume, etc.

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Starting in on a commission for a CNC’d assault rifle.

Coating the foam:

Scale:

A big problem with my current armory is that I’ve got lots of costumes, but no weapons. If anyone out there’s interested in trading weapon props for marine armor, drop me a line. In the meantime, I’ve been pouring time into these whilst staying home sick from the TechShop.

They’re HyperNURBS’d models, built in Cinema4D.

The idea is to CNC them out of 2″ expanded polystyrene foam and try various coatings to achieve a finish-able surface. As usual, the base meshes were from Martyn Ball.

I finished up three sets of halo 3 marine armor, headed to dragoncon, and trooped in the parade in it.Was pretty fun.

Here’s some pics of the gear broken down into parts:

Figured out how to lasercut pepakura. I’ve got all the settings down for a 45W Epilog CO2 laser, from pepakura’s export options to good, thin fonts for cutting, and how to just cut enough that parts will tear cleanly out of a piece of cardstock. Takes about ten minutes per sheet, though- most of that is the edge IDs.

No cutting. No scoring. Just folding pre-scored lines and gluing it together. Contact me with some pre-sized files if you’d like me to cut you some.

So I work at a TechShop now, which means I have access to lots of great CNC machines. The old gauss rifle files have been dusted off, and I’m giving them a go- here’s the first cuts of the gun.

Might try this with soft plastic soon, the MDF is a bit fuzzy to go straight into molding.

This was a test piece for my CNC, but I might as well make it available to everyone now- I know there are some others working on their own CNC machines to build armor with now, maybe it can help them.
Modeling was done in Cinema 4D, OBJ was exported from Pepakura 3. Included is an STL and C4D, as well as the basic model.
You don’t want to unfold this.

http://www.vrogy.net/cad/MKVI_handplate_forCNC.zip

Recently finished a major upgrade on the mill; from 1/4-20 threaded rod to 1/2-10 acme leadscrews. Also eliminated couplers between the motors and leadscrews, pinning the motor shafts directly into holes lathed into the leadscrews. Fewer connections, and tighter tolerances of the new hardware has backlash down to less than .01″.. for MDF and cheap off-the-shelf parts, that’s good.

So, what’s that good for? Well, it makes programs run faster, and parts cut out faster, as well. That’s a good thing, because the carbine model I finshed recently is taking a long time to run- it had to be split up into about two dozen separate milled parts. As the carbine alone will be around 2-3 days of machine time, and there’s a queue of two other entire projects after it, it’ll add up to a lot of time saved.

Speaking of other projects, I’ve been updating the halo 3 marine files to be CNC’d, maybe they’ll hold up as vacuum-forming bucks.

Modeled purely for the gcode generation.

.OBJ: http://vrogy.net/cad/carbine.obj.zip 32.47MB
.C4D: http://vrogy.net/cad/carbine.c4d 298KB
e-mail for more formats; address is on the about page.

Thanks to Martyn Ball for the original 2k or so of tris, and Peter Lack for the expanded reference pictures.

I’m working on a Covenant carbine model, because there wasn’t one available in the resolution I needed for the CNC machine. I suspect I’ll have to do this with about everything I want to CNC.

Currently about 39,000 polygons. It’s a work in progress, but I hope to have it sliced up and start on cutting it out by next week.