Talked about it long enough. Began work today on making a championship belt for a fighting game today.
I wanna do a Tatsunoko vs Capcom title belt for a first try. I'll be taking a page from the IWGP title and making the side plates covered in the names of all the game's roster and the main plate will have a spot for whoever holds this title to screw in their characters name plates. This means I'll need to make 2 of every character in TVC a name plate to use but whatever. In for a penny...
Printing a texture roller to lay down a nice background pattern on clay. I'll then trace and cut out that clay in the general shape of my side plates and main plate. Those textured clay shapes for the plates will then have more clay adornments cut out and layered on top of them to add things like borders, inlaid trims, etc. I may or may not indent slots for me to insert gemstones that I'll just cast with epoxy resin to put in...or buy rhinestones but its my first belt so fuckit I may not add em at all to the clay masters since I can dremel slots and add em later if needed anyhow.
From there I'll make a plaster mold off my clay masters of the plates and melt some Zinc ingots I got into them. Those Zinc casts of the plates will get buffed, polished and refined then I'll electroplate them with a nice super shiny nickel plating and go over specific areas of that with gold electroplating. Not really hard to do that. You can make your own electroplating solutions with metal, vinegar, salt and two chunks of the desired metal alloy hooked to a 9v battery dipped in the solution or just buy the solutions for like $20 to $30 bucks (diy electroplating or electroetching is a thing. Look it up. Its piss easy.)
After that I've been working at leather stamping and leatherwork lately so I'll just get some vegetable tan leather, prep it with a pattern using metal stamps and a hammer, stain it seal it, and stitch a backing and pop eyelits on. I'll mount the plates by casting Chicago Screws in em so they'll just screw to the leather. I may hafta 3d print some more leather stamps for shit or even be forced to print out molds to cast all the name plates of the roster but meh not hard. Poly primitive with a text 3d image cast and rapped to em then boolean that to indent the poly primitive with an engraved name. Tada. Done.
Anyhoo thats the process for what I'm gonna do. Never did this before but I've done a lotta casting and sculpting in the past so hopefully it does well.
I took vacation to relax and this is what I hope to work on. As I finalize plate designs in clay or whatever I'll post images.
I wanna do a Tatsunoko vs Capcom title belt for a first try. I'll be taking a page from the IWGP title and making the side plates covered in the names of all the game's roster and the main plate will have a spot for whoever holds this title to screw in their characters name plates. This means I'll need to make 2 of every character in TVC a name plate to use but whatever. In for a penny...
Printing a texture roller to lay down a nice background pattern on clay. I'll then trace and cut out that clay in the general shape of my side plates and main plate. Those textured clay shapes for the plates will then have more clay adornments cut out and layered on top of them to add things like borders, inlaid trims, etc. I may or may not indent slots for me to insert gemstones that I'll just cast with epoxy resin to put in...or buy rhinestones but its my first belt so fuckit I may not add em at all to the clay masters since I can dremel slots and add em later if needed anyhow.
From there I'll make a plaster mold off my clay masters of the plates and melt some Zinc ingots I got into them. Those Zinc casts of the plates will get buffed, polished and refined then I'll electroplate them with a nice super shiny nickel plating and go over specific areas of that with gold electroplating. Not really hard to do that. You can make your own electroplating solutions with metal, vinegar, salt and two chunks of the desired metal alloy hooked to a 9v battery dipped in the solution or just buy the solutions for like $20 to $30 bucks (diy electroplating or electroetching is a thing. Look it up. Its piss easy.)
After that I've been working at leather stamping and leatherwork lately so I'll just get some vegetable tan leather, prep it with a pattern using metal stamps and a hammer, stain it seal it, and stitch a backing and pop eyelits on. I'll mount the plates by casting Chicago Screws in em so they'll just screw to the leather. I may hafta 3d print some more leather stamps for shit or even be forced to print out molds to cast all the name plates of the roster but meh not hard. Poly primitive with a text 3d image cast and rapped to em then boolean that to indent the poly primitive with an engraved name. Tada. Done.
Anyhoo thats the process for what I'm gonna do. Never did this before but I've done a lotta casting and sculpting in the past so hopefully it does well.
I took vacation to relax and this is what I hope to work on. As I finalize plate designs in clay or whatever I'll post images.
