Sculpter for Hire

As I mentioned in my previous post I have been doing things, just not posting about them.

Here is one of those things:

In January, what we may refer to as "the before time", I was contact on Shapeways by a fan (!) who wanted to know if I could sculpt a ship for them.  In this case, they wanted a board-game scale model of the ISS Charon from the show Star Trek Discovery. 

If you have seen the show, the ship in question is VERY large, and fairly complicated.  The original designers suggested that they wanted to make the ship look like it was made from whale bones, so aside from its complicated shape, it is also covered in various ribbing.

Here is my simplified design of it:



 The client approved of the design, and ordered it from Shapeways.  Very graciously, they sent me a picture of the final ship "in action" on their game board.

After a bit of reflection, the client decided that the ship was a bit smaller than they wanted, and that it would be ideally printed in red so that the ball of energy in the middle would be easier to paint (by essentially not painting it)

I doubled the size of the ship, but transferring it to another material presented a lot of challenges with the details, and also with the pointy tip portions of the ship (dual prow?  Rams?  Warp field stabilizers?).  Despite being twice as thick in all dimensions, the material standards were so different that it took a lot of re-engineering to get something that was at all printable, and even then Shapeways kicked it back during final review for another re-engineering step.

Annotated figure from Shapeways detailing where the problems were

 In the end though, the client was happy, and that is what is important.

In game shot of the larger red version

In the end this was an interesting process, and it was certainly a challenge to make this ship.