BTS: Building the Aluminum Com-Watch (by Nate Taylor) (Patreon)

Actually cast in aluminum resin what???

[OPENING NOTE FROM IAN]

Heck yeah! Another guest post! This one's from my friend Nate Taylor. Nate's worked with me on almost every project since 2008 or something (all the way back to Project London days). He's been present on almost every shoot, and helped me build almost every prop and set (the cyberpunk set in the church? He came over for 4 days and we just went nuts). He also does VFX, so we've worked on a ludicrous number of random VFX gigs and music videos together.

He's been involved with Dynamo since nearly the beginning (he's the zombie that gets exploded in the Kavonaghan episode. Actually- if somebody dies in Dynamo, it's almost always Nate in disguise), and at every shoot we'd say, "wouldn't it be amazing to be able to work on this stuff full time?"-

Which is basically where we're at now :D. Nate's been PUMPING out some mind-boggling props (very excited to show you guys "The Jacket" in particular), with results that are impressive on their own but doubly-so in light of it being the first time he's working with a lot of these tools.

It's become a little frustrating lately, where VFX can make certain parts of the filmmaking process so creatively satisfying, but then we cut to the main character and he/she's just wearing whatever we had scattered around in our closets or found at local thrift shops- having props that properly exist "in-world" has been the dream, and I thank all of you here on the patreon so much for helping make that a reality.

So Nate put together a breakdown of his process of going from 3d model to finished watch! He uses a lot of various tools so it's maybe not a follow-along-at-home type thing, but at the same time getting an aluminum-looking model from a blend file without having to forge anything is a darn good trick!

ALSO LOOK I think these watches would make kickass merch but don't exactly know how to go about it (having Nate make em at 4-days-a-pop doesn't seem particularly scalable). If anyone has any ideas, I'd love to hear them. In the meantime, you can always print your own at home if you feel like it (Download the blend file/STL here).

Anyways- enough of me babbling- here's Nate and the build! 

[END OPENING NOTE FROM IAN]

Hi, folks! I’m Nate - I’ve been contributing to Dynamo for a while in a handful of different ways. You may have seen some of my VFX work, some setbuilding work, some… y’know, uh, roof running - I’m just kinda there, hiding in the dark corners of the show. It’s not as creepy as it sounds, I promise.

Recently Ian set me loose on creating a series of hero props for the upcoming episode of Dynamo Dream, which has been (oh no here it comes) a Dream come true. I’ve long loved making stuff with my hands, although I primarily work as a VFX artist professionally, and so sinking myself into some build projects has been amazingly fulfilling. I’m planning to do some write-ups of my builds as I go. These won’t be full-on tutorials, at least not yet, but I will do my best to talk some about my personal practices and materials so you can get a feel for my approach.

It’s probably important that I mention I have no formal training in any of this, I’m just an avid hobbyist who likes to build needlessly complex Halloween costumes! Okay that’s enough intro, let’s get to it!

So this isn’t my first of our ongoing build projects, but it is the first one that’s been completely polished and which I’ve had a chance to get some glamour shots of -

THE COMMUNICATOR WATCH

For this build, Ian sent me a blendfile with a model that he’d made for a communicator device that could be worn on the wrist.

Once the model is manifold (you can think of this as ‘watertight’ and ‘physically plausible’ - no impossibly thin interior surfaces, no holes or gaps, that kind of thing) it’s ready for printing! 

All of the 3D printed parts for my build logs are coming off the Prusa i3 mk3 (no affiliation), in PLA filament, using a mix of the standard 0.40mm nozzle and an 0.25mm nozzle. In hindsight, this project would have benefitted enormously from the use of the latter, but I hadn’t acquired it yet and so this piece was in fact printed entirely using the 0.40mm end.

Here’s what the raw prints look like - Quick tangent here, those other pieces next to the watch body were continuous links I thought would make for cool bands. And although they were a very fun engineering challenge, I ultimately scrapped them in favor of traditional watch bands for both durability and style.

Off the print bed, there were some pretty chunky striations on the curved and sloped surfaces, from the various layers of plastic. And that means that it’s TIME TO BEGIN SANDING**

**my current #1 tip for making nice props is that you have to be willing to spend four times as long meticulously sanding things as you spend doing literally any other part of the process.

So below is what the prop looks like after a light grey filler primer pass, followed by sanding, followed by a dark grey Rust-Oleum Automotive Primer (wet-sandable, for a really nice smooth finish). The value differences show where the first layer of primer was revealed through the sanding process.

Another layer of Automotive Primer left me with a very nice covering, which I followed with yet another sanding pass. Fun fact: I do most of my sanding on something this size with little cuts of sandpaper wrapped around toothpicks. Every sanding pass for this project was 4 steps, 250 grit > 400 grit > 800 grit > 2000 grit. I forgot to get a picture of the fully sanded final prep piece, but here’s what it looked like right before the last sanding pass!

After that, it was time to make the mold! For this project, to achieve all those tiny details without ruining the mold itself I used a high shear strength silicone material, which was very viscous and therefore needed vacuum degassing to remove air pockets from the mixture. This is my first time using a vacuum chamber for molds, and holy cow what a neat technology. Here’s a before and after; with all the bubbles forcibly drawn out of the substance, it created a crazy cool alien flesh type pattern on the surface of the silicone.

The resulting mold was extremely detailed, and free of surface bubbles. It’s a little hard to tell from these photos, but some of the little nuances in there are less than half a millimeter across and were captured beautifully in the mold.

I made this piece using a Cold Casting method - I’m using an extremely low viscosity 2-part Art Resin, and an ultrafine -325 aluminum powder. I first hit the inside of the mold with Ease Release (strongly recommend you always do this if you want nice clean parts), followed by an even, thin inside surface coating of aluminum powder. I mixed my cold cast slurry for this part at a ratio of 1:1:1 (Resin A / Resin B / Aluminum) by volume. Thoroughly combined, the thickness of the mixture goes up thanks to the way the aluminum affects the resin, so I poured as slowly and carefully as possible into the details, and did another vacuum degassing pass after the resin was poured to further pull any possible bubbles out of the result.

24 hours later, the resin is fully cured and I pop it out of the mold! At this point, it has the approximate heft and feel of a solid aluminum cast, and can be polished just like metal! So my next step - maybe you’ve guessed it - was to spend about 4 hours meticulously sanding with fine paper wrapped around toothpicks! I also decided to add a functional LED to the housing, so I carefully sanded down a diode until it was just barely encased in plastic, and I dremeled out a cavity in the back of the body in which to hide a terrifying-looking circuit. I’ll try to explain what’s going on here: There’s a sewing pin on the left which is springy steel, and it’s attached to a cut-off finishing nail, the very head of which extends outside the body and serves as the button to turn on the LED. In its resting state, the nail does not touch the positive end of the battery, but the other side is permanently in contact with the negative pole of the diode. The copper wire here is soldered both to the positive end and to the tip of the nail - so when it’s pushed, the wire comes along with it and reaches the battery, completing the circuit and activating the light. When you release pressure, the sewing pin springs right back to its resting state, opening the circuit again. In practice, very very simple. In appearance, very very janky. But it works like a dream!

I also printed a little readout plate to fit in the upper housing, and painted ‘grime’ using water based acrylics into the crevices, followed by another polishing and sanding pass to highlight and shine the raised bits and larger surfaces. The last step was simply to punch some holes in the top and bottom tabs, and affix a watch band! I went with a grey weathered band to match the style of the body and give it a well-used look.

I printed a few spares for background characters as well- these will only ever be seen from a fair distance, so they were not given a particularly detailed treatment, but they should still read nicely on screen for supporting cast members!

Aaaaaand that’s that! This particular build end-to-end took me about 5 days, although 32 hours of that time (some of that overnight) was spent waiting for curing times for the mold and the resin.

I intend to have more logs in the future for my bigger and more involved build projects - there’s three others ongoing which are all nearly ready to write up. I hope you’ve enjoyed this lil look at what’s going on in the practical side of things for Dynamo Dream right now!

OH I ALMOST FORGOT ALWAYS WEAR PPE WHEN WORKING WITH MOLD MATERIALS, THEY ARE BAD FOR YOU RESIN IS BAD FOR YOU DON’T BREATHE ALUMINUM DUST SERIOUSLY THIS IS IMPORTANT DON’T POISON YOURSELF