Ivy Donnette: Week 8 Cards

I used Mudbox to sculpt the original object, a deck of cards. I went through about four different iterations of the deck before I figured out how to actually make a rectangular prism without having to smash and sculpt the cube into a rectangle. Each detail is a separate rectangle that I manipulated into the shapes I needed them to be.

For the relief, imported the Mudbox cards into Maya so I could cut the object and intersect it with the backing. I chose to do a poker chip because it fits with playing cards and I didn’t want a plain backing. The poker chip took many different tries. Like the cards, I didn’t know how to make the shapes do what I needed them to do. Finally, I applied the method of the Boolean-difference action to the indentions of the poker chip.

 

 I coated the models in XTC-3D. Then I made the silicon mold. I used clay to create a box around the cards. I tried to make the walls as thin as I could without making them too thin. I wanted to reduce the amount of silicon needed.

Next I created the brush-on mold. This was a little trickier because of the angle of the cards sticking up off the chip. I had to make sure to fill in all the negative space so the mother mold wouldn’t get stuck.

I began experimenting with glitter as well as putting different things in the clear urethane plastic.

For the final product I chose to put matches into the plastic for the full object and I put wooden sticks into the relief. For the relief I wanted to create the look of fire. I swirled orange pigment into the clear plastic and poured that into the mold. After I let it cure for a bit, I mixed more clear plastic and added in a swirl of the black pigment and poured that into the chip section of the mold.

For my other set of objects I used cement. I chose not to paint the cement because I wanted to leave it natural.