Happy New Year & thanks so much to all of you for your support! I have to apologize my lack of updates & i really owe you some insights on how things are going over here. Last year we totally had a blast with our toys & stuff! 2010 was a great year for our little smallstuffstudio and the upcoming year will even get better & is already stuffed with tons of new things! We have many toy series, new ideas, shows & collaboration projects lined up, so be sure to stay tuned & sign up for our Newsletter if you haven’t yet!

Before i forget, here’s a little thingy i want to share with you folks. A small X-mas gift i did for my family & friends. These snow stars are made out of Swiss maple wood, hope you like them.

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Here at smallstuffstudio we’re always keep an eye out for new tools to do small series of top grade handcrafted Designer Toys. To be able mold & cast larger resin toys we decided to start building our own Rotocasting Machine! This is a project in collaboration of Pepe head of smallstuffstudio and swiss based artist Inigo Gheyselinck who does stunning ceramic work. After many hours of research and some technical advice from the very best sources we think we are able to build this double rotating monster!

We would like to share all our experience and researches in this continuous tutorial series with our readers! When we have this thing up and running we’ll also share all resources and technical plans here. Our DIY instructions aren’t the only way to build a rotocasting machine so feel free to tweak it to your needs/size and take this more as a guideline. If you have questions or helpful suggestions & improvements about this rotocasting tutorial please drop a comment or send us a email to info [at] smallstuff.ch

Now let’s get ready to rumble!!! :]

Before we start with a quite large project like this, it’s essential to do some technical researches and find suppliers for the hardware you will need. When everything is more or less definite about the materials you want to use, you can start to draw building plans. This is the most important step and if you do this properly it can save you a lot of time and money!

You can see in the first picture our plan of the support rig and the two rotating frames printed in scale 1:5. Also the two X axis and the Y axis for the inner frame are defined so far. Now we begin our adventure with building the two frames. For the frames we’ll use 40x20mm hollow aluminum profiles. You can easily go with a smaller diameter or even with wood timber but our intent is to build a sturdy machine with a long lifetime. First we saw the eight hollow profile to the precise length we need and bevel the sharp edges on each side ot them.

Here you can see aluminium profiles of the two frames ready for further machining. Click on the thumbnails to see the pictures in a larger resolution.

To bolt down the frame profiles we’ll use aluminium blocks with two screw threads which will fit inside of the hollow space at each end of the four shorter beams. We also have to chamfer these slightly to fit perfectly. Of course you can also use angle brackets outside to do this join.

In the next session we will assemble the two rotating frames, drill the metric screw threads, the holes for the axis and do the two beams for clamping the mold in the middle of our inner frame.

One of the tricky parts of this project will be the power transmission from the main frame to the inner frame. We’ve been watching videos of the home made rotocasters people have made and it’s kind of confusing to see how many people have used the same gear on the main shaft as on the secondary shaft. That’s not very good at all, because the mold should rotate with a slight out of sync movement, this helps to better distribute the resin. We will cover this subject in a following part of this tutorial series.

As i mentioned, we are also willing to share here on smallstuff.ch our material take off and the finished & revised plans for free after everything works as it should. We hope this motivates you to start with your own rotocast machine and you will stay tuned for Part 2 of the Rotocasting Machine Tutorial! :]

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“GOBBO” – a hunting trophy i brought back from the swamps

support my design & VOTE now on DeliciousDrips for my GOBBO Skully Custom:
deliciousdrips.com/submissions/submission.php?i=421

-> short update: WIP Making of Slideshow of GOBBO

GOBBO made it to the 3rd place in the PVC Contest!!! HERE are the results
thank you all for your support & the votes for my custom Skully GOBBO!

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Designer and Architect Mathias Bax from Germany has created his first DIY Resin Toy the Ham-ster Cavy. I’m pretty shure the Ham-ster will become a nice plattform to realise lots of awsome custom jobs. The Ham-ster’s comes in two versions one with movable arms and one with fixed arms (for kids;). A piece will cost approximately 10$ plus shipping costs.

So get your hands on your own DIY Ham-ster straight from his creator and place an order at bax.architekten@arcor.de. He will handling production and shipping by himself. The first cute fellas will find their new owners right now in January 2010.

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Voting for the DIY Designer Toy Challenge on aarting.com is on!!!
Please vote for SQUIMONK till 15. november 2009 (every vote counts, you can vote every 30min for my design). If my concept wins, SQUIMONK will be produced by Aarting and you can grab your own 4.5 inch blank D.I.Y SQUIMONK for customizing!

VOTE HERE! thx

SQUIMONK – my second entry for the Aarting DIY Toy Challenge.
Today is the deadline for the DIY Contest at aarting.com. I really want to participate with an another toy design than my “monopear”. But to realize with 3D modeling what I’ve got in my head, time was to short to learn all the stuff so quickly. Now then, I’ve done my second entry the old-fashioned-way: sculpting, sanding, molding, casting in resin, again sanding and finishing with white primer (well i guess, not really less time-consuming… ) The prototype stands only a 3/4 inch high, so i would love to see them much bigger as an Aarting DIY Toy ready for you to customize!

This afternoon I’ve grabbed my cam and finally hunted some blank SQUIMONKS in the wild …check the picture series.

SQUIMONKS lives high up in the threes and rarely come to ground to pick up the jummy fir cones. That’s the reason why they have a slightly beer-belly, they know very well how to do really tasty fir cone beer in their brewery

Please vote on aarting.com for the SQUIMONK!

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Last week i spoted on aarting.com a D.I.Y Designer Toy Contest. Check the submission guidelines, download the templates and design your own toy. This is your chance to design the toy’s actual shape. That’s right, designers from all over the world will be able to customize something that you designed! This means that you’re now free to come up with any original shape you want, in any style. The deadline for the toy entries is the 30. Sept 2009.

If you don’t want to participate yourself, please just register shortly over arting.com and vote for my designs, i would really appreciate it!

The last weekend i get over my weaker self and finally started to get into 3D Modeling with Autodesks Inventor. The reason for learning such a tool are obvious, first it’s a good practice for defining precise form and proportion of my own toy ideas and second it’s beside of clay and stuff like that another way to get my toys go alive! I can export the data as a .stl file and send it to the 3D-Printer and my toys assume shape in ABS for further production Maybe you wouldn’t choose such a technical program for organic forms and figurative modeling but because we do our architectural models at work with Inventor and to avoid compatible problems i give it a try.

For the time being i’m working on a new series of five critters for a small limited series. It’s a new way to sculpt my creatures out of wax after done a quick mold of the clay prototype. I haven’t finished yet my actual sculpting tutorial on this but i do take hearty work in progress pics, so be sure to check the tutorial section again. Until then, i’d like to share with you some of the finest online resources about sculpting, d.i.y toymaking and molding stuff. Enjoy!

SCULPTING:

Smellybugs Maquette Tutorial
best clay sculpting tutorial i’ve seen so far! just watch and learn

GoreGoreGore
not much to read, but tons of pictures about the sculpting and molding process

SouthernGFX Tutorials
clay / super sculpey tutorials (you have to scroll down the page one section)

AB Sculpting Studio Tutorial
andy is sculpting a bust in 1/3 scale

FigurePunk Interview on mnartists
sculpting tips and how to produce your own vinyl toys in china

Fanboy – Vinyl Toy comes to Life
step-by-step guide to the making of organ donors

BehindTheToys Figure Creation Process
how an action figure gets created

Gremlins in the Garages – How to
work in process articles and how to make garages kits

Willow Products – Demonstration Videos
all about sculpting waxes and tools to work with it

Dave Pressler – Making Stuff
dave describes the process of making his first vinyl toy

MOLDING:

Dan Perez Studios – Workshop
molding / casting tutorials and some sculpting tips

Hirstarts Mold Making
how to make simple silicone and latex molds

James Rogers Sculptures Studio
figure molding, check how they make the air canals into the mold

MyHeap Molding and Casting Resource
process of making molds, casting up to things like making milk plastic

Jumping Brain – flickr sets
flickr prototyping photosets from emilio garcias jumping brain

Tessetoys – Silicone Mold Guide
how to produce a figure using silicone rubber and resin plaster

B9RobotResource – Molding
silicone rubber mold making – how-to guide

Paint-Sculpt – Mold Making Tutorial
mold making step by step

Alumilite – How to
all kind of mold rubber & cast resin video tutorials

Freeman – Mold Making Videos
silicone rubber and urethane casting resin video tutorials

TAP Plastic – YouTube Chanel
video tutorials about their own rubber products

Pity Mold Suply – YouTube Chanel
different techniques and sfx related molding video tutorials

You have some topic related links to share? please drop a comment and this archives can grow, thx. I will add some book references and communities soon…

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Over the years, many of you have send me a message to get my free vector outline XBOX 360 Faceplate & Case Templates from my old blog faceplatecarver. So i decided to move the files over here to my new place smallstuff.ch and get them ready for you as free downloads.

It’s quite a time ago since I’ve done my custom 3D Faceplates, but i think nevertheless a game console is a nice canvas not only for painting, also to sculpt stuff on it. You can use my templates to scribble down you ideas first before you do the case modding stuff like cutting holes into your Xbox360 and things like that… at least it’s never bad to have a plan where the holes could be

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click on the icons to download the templates:

You can download the sheet as PDF and print it out. The outlines of the XBOX 360 Faceplate and case comes in light gray so you can easy scribble and do sketches over the templates. If you like, you can use the templates and color them up with some adobe suite programs. In this case download the Adobe Illustrator file (.ai). Have fun!

note:

I’m always curious about others artwork based on my templates,  i would be pleased if you drop a comment, a linkback to my site or just contact me if you have questions …and you don’t have to become desperate without Adobe’s Illustrator. You can do your own scalable vector graphics with a program like this very good open-source solution for osx, win, linux -> inkscape.

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