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Thursday, July 7, 2016

Wooden Skulls from the Mansion

The Haunted Mansion has these great faux wooden skull mouldings in the portrait gallery when you exit the stretching room which, long story short, I needed to replicate.  I'll explain why in a later post.

I visited the old house and took a lot of reference pictures of these, with my hand for scale.  It's remarkably difficult to get a good shot in the low lighting there, but I got enough information from these to...

...Mock up a digital model.  I considered building this out of foam board or something of that sort, but I realized it was actually a prime candidate for 3D printing.  It's a geometric object that's just a little more complex than would be easy to figure out from traditional materials, especially the shapes around the eyes.  It was still tricky to do in the computer , since this isn't something I have much experience with, but ultimately it did take less time this way, and it's more precise than I'd have been able to do on my own.

I set my Printrbot to make the parts while I was at work, then came home to assemble it.  I did it at about 75% of full size, because I just didn't need anything that big.


I used filler primer to help me sand out the grow lines, but I didn't get too picky, because I followed that up with some Apoxie Sculpt to add in the rough wood texture.  This is just before molding for that other project.

But I saved the original, and painted it up for my little display case.  I really enjoy projects like this.  A fairly quick turnaround, some new skills learned, and a cool prop I get to keep!


7 comments:

  1. This is fantastic! Would you ever consider creating some of these to sell? To me? :)

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    Replies
    1. Absolutely! I'm working out the best way to run these, and I'll post when they're available :)

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  2. Any thoughts on sharing the STL File?

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  3. Echoing the sentiments above, I love how this turned out...congratulations!

    Did this ever get turned into a run, by any chance?

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