Sculpting the Star Wars Battlefront 2 Messenger Droid Mask

Mike's Feedback and Sculpting Process

Buddy Mike is always willing to lend his expertise and offer guidance on my sculpting endeavors. One day, he even stopped by to share some valuable notes on how to improve my piece. He took a closer look at my sculpture and pointed out some areas where I could make adjustments. His feedback was particularly helpful in refining the shape of the nose and the overall contours of the face. With Mike's input, I was able to make significant changes that brought my sculpture much closer to completion.

The Sculpture and Next Steps

After receiving Mike's feedback, I decided to leave the sculpture where it was. While it wasn't perfect, I felt that it had a certain charm that worked well with the hologram projected inside the helmet. Instead of trying to fix every detail, I opted for a more relaxed approach, allowing the sculpture to maintain its unique character. This proved to be a wise decision, as the finished product turned out beautifully and added a new level of depth to the overall design.

Creating a Mold

To create a mold of my sculpture, I decided to use a stone mold instead of epoxy or fiberglass. The advantage of using a stone mold was that it allowed me to work quickly and efficiently, making it easier to meet production deadlines. Additionally, since the material is relatively inexpensive, there's minimal risk if something goes wrong during the process. I took great care in crafting the mold, ensuring that every detail was accurately replicated.

Casting and Painting

Once I had created the mold, I sent it off to be cast using a company that specializes in making masks. They were able to create multiple copies of my sculpture, each one perfectly rendered in silicone. After receiving the casts, I began the process of painting them. My approach involved evoking the look and feel of digital imagery, with a focus on cooler colors and subtle shading. To add an extra layer of depth, I incorporated some scan lines into the design, giving it a unique and eye-catching appearance.

The Final Touches

With the casting and painting complete, my sculpture was starting to take shape. However, there were still a few finishing touches needed before it was ready for use. I took the opportunity to remove some extraneous details, such as the ears, which wouldn't be visible in the final product. Instead of spending time on these details, I focused on refining the overall design, making sure that every aspect worked together seamlessly.

Testing and Feedback

Before presenting my sculpture at any events or exhibitions, I wanted to test it out in a real-world setting. This proved to be an excellent opportunity for feedback, as I was able to gauge how well the costume would hold up in different environments. In this case, Gunther's slender core didn't seem to cause any issues, and the final product worked beautifully within the context of the helmet and lighting.

Conclusion

The process of creating a detailed sculpture like this one is never easy, but it's always rewarding to see the finished product come together. From Mike's feedback and my initial sculpting efforts to the creation of the mold, casting, painting, and finishing touches, every step was crucial in bringing this amazing costume to life. As we look forward to future projects, we're excited to continue exploring new techniques and methods, always pushing the boundaries of what's possible in costume design and fabrication.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enthis episode is sponsored by Electronic Arts hey everybody its norm from tested and Frank contestant so at New York Comic Con this year we unveiled our latest costume project it was the Sentinel messenger droid from EA's Star Wars Battlefront - yep super cool yeah well that's in the future for us he hasn't seen it yet so we're going to walk you through some of the processes of how this thing was made yes so the messenger droid it's a robot droid that has a holographic projection of Emperor Palpatine and in coming up with the costume for this we discussed many ways we could create this effect you know within the dome of a helmet could we get a could we projector in there yeah like try to squeeze it in somewhere or a screen or some kind yeah it just even though we can get really small projectors we just couldn't get the right we couldn't figure out how to get the right angles to make it like really wrap around that and do it justice and we knew this was gonna be a performance character there was gonna be an actor wearing this costume so we end up deciding the best way to solve this to tackle this was to use a mask and traditional special-effects yes silicone masks are so good these days like it's totally gonna be great for what this is we could have gone the route of a prosthetic makeup but then I would have had a like travel out there and put günther through hours of makeup to make him look like this but this is really quick because then it's just a slip on and with the lighting effects that we're gonna put underneath it it's gonna look just like that hologram so that's the stage where we're at right now where you're a process of sculpting this mask the likeness of Emperor Palpatine or gun throne aware so talk me through walk me through how the sculpting process works do you have a core of günther underneath here no we didn't do a live cast on him we used the the pretty standard immortal core immortal masks makes silicone masks all the time and the cores are they fit pretty much everybody so it just makes sense to use one of these things since we have access to them so easily that gives a couple of caveats that the shape of the core is a little bit restricting so to interpret the the emperor's face onto that core takes a little bit of fiddling right and I do you would have if we wanted a lot of movement for example you would do a life cast and you maybe do a prosthetic this you've done before in the past that allows the actor do a lot of expressions but we didn't need that no we didn't need that and also I don't think the Gunther's face is the perfect proportions to do a likeness of the Emperor whenever you're doing a likeness you want to have somebody that has correct eye spacing and Ida mouth spacing size of Mouse eyes and nose size shape of the head there's so many things that go into doing a good likeness makeup you can't just pile on all kinds of rubber and make them look like that person it doesn't move right so that makes this an interesting sculpting challenge so walk me through how you started well we started with obviously reference always need a lot of reference we have reference of the actor that played Palpatine reference of the Emperor from the video game the Emperor from Return of the Jedi we even have some reference from some of the licensed toys because it's really hard to find pictures of the Emperor without his hood on so the toys are pretty good place to go and when you look at the physical characteristics of Palpatine without the hood on what catches our eye where do you think people are gonna notice and say that looks like the character is it in you know the ridges in the forehead the soul in this underneath the eyes what would you start there there's a lot of forms that go into any like this makeup and having the actor's Anatomy underneath that like that's that's a really important thing to nail sort of first and then on top of that you put all the characteristics like these big giant brows and just split up the middle of the ridge of his brows and then those big eye bags that's really cool you're talking about not only sculpting something that's gonna look like Palpatine as we know from the movies but also trying to get the actors likeness you play Palpatine yes underneath that sculptor as well yeah double sculpting exactly yeah but all those characteristics really play in because if you look at the Emperor's makeup pretty much his chin his mouth and his nose are the actor so we have to get with a nail that likeness right there to really make that show and then there's a lot of proportional things that are really funny about how that makeup goes together and I even my buddy Mike he'll even pop by the other day and gave me a couple little notes on how to improve what I was doing what it might have to say I was little things about the nose the the shape the overall shape of the face I was sculpting it a little too thin a couple of things on the corners of the and some of this chin stuff but mike has such a great eye that just giving me like 10 minutes of notes like you know set me in a whole different direction and really helped me bring this a little bit closer very cool and where is it right now how much more work yet to do on this I probably have a couple more hours there's still a little bit of fiddling I'm starting to block in some of the detail forms but there's there's still a lot of stuff to do and then from that I assume a mold gets made nothing we can epoxy mold guys over an immortal inject some silicone into there and then we'll paint it up awesome we'll let you get back to sculpting and can't wait to see what this looks like when it gets out of mold all right Frank this looks like a mask it is a mask yeah alas I left you you were still fooling around with that sculpture yeah and you were thinking more about it you got some consults what did you do next well it's really funny to try and find this kind of happy medium between all the different incarnations of the Emperor and then finally using like the videos that are coming out from this game of that hologram that's projected inside there I decided to quit fiddling and just leave it kind of where it is because it kind of works with that hologram being a little bit weird and a little bit off hmm okay so you got the clay sculpture but this isn't clay this is silicone yeah so I assume you had to make a mold yes where's the mold here is the mole Oh typically we've been doing these you know really nice fancy epoxy molds this one we kind of went old school I guess and I did a stone mold just a two-part mold like we do everything else mm-hmm but I was able to do both sides in one day so that way we can get everything moving really quickly so the advantage of making a stone mold is just fast yeah I mean there's ways to do epoxy and fiberglass molds and you know in one day but I mean stone was just really quick and it was the easiest and you know like if you're trying to make like your own mass or do your own things like plaster is really cheap um and if you screw it up it's not that expensive so you know people should go back to the old school sometimes all right and then you put a you corn there and I see you poured some silicone through there yeah we I just sent this mold over to a mortal and since they're constantly cranking out masks there we'll just stick my mold into the production and they ran the silicon and seamed it up for me so this is that casting film casting and clearly it's painted so what was your approach for painting this again we I wanted it to look like that hologram and that hologram is kind of bottom lip so a lot of my shadows are all you know on the top of ridges and you know so that the light would be coming from the bottom and then I also painted in some of these scan lines different images show the scan lines vertical or horizontal I just want the vertical I thought it looked kind of nice and I just tried to paint it like the like the game graphics right it's not flesh tone it's almost digital yeah you're evoking a lot of like the cooler colors of digital imagery and also I noticed you shadow route but back yeah you'll never see any of that stuff so there's no reason for me to like that's why I didn't I took the ears off of it like I it didn't make any sense for me to spend time sculpting ears they're never ever gonna get seen so there's really nothing behind that so all we really needed was this little front part and of course because you don't have come through here you worth the work of the pretty generic core and want to put this on Gunther and see how it looks yeah okay how do you think about that test day um I kind of figured that his face would push it out because this is a really slender core but I think it works fine and especially in the context of being inside that helmet and lit the way it's gonna be lit I think it's gonna working fine well you guys have already seen of course Gunther in costume at New York Comic Con but that's instill in the future for us but we'll be back next time with more looking into the process of making this amazing costume stay tuned and frankly I will see you next timethis episode is sponsored by Electronic Arts hey everybody its norm from tested and Frank contestant so at New York Comic Con this year we unveiled our latest costume project it was the Sentinel messenger droid from EA's Star Wars Battlefront - yep super cool yeah well that's in the future for us he hasn't seen it yet so we're going to walk you through some of the processes of how this thing was made yes so the messenger droid it's a robot droid that has a holographic projection of Emperor Palpatine and in coming up with the costume for this we discussed many ways we could create this effect you know within the dome of a helmet could we get a could we projector in there yeah like try to squeeze it in somewhere or a screen or some kind yeah it just even though we can get really small projectors we just couldn't get the right we couldn't figure out how to get the right angles to make it like really wrap around that and do it justice and we knew this was gonna be a performance character there was gonna be an actor wearing this costume so we end up deciding the best way to solve this to tackle this was to use a mask and traditional special-effects yes silicone masks are so good these days like it's totally gonna be great for what this is we could have gone the route of a prosthetic makeup but then I would have had a like travel out there and put günther through hours of makeup to make him look like this but this is really quick because then it's just a slip on and with the lighting effects that we're gonna put underneath it it's gonna look just like that hologram so that's the stage where we're at right now where you're a process of sculpting this mask the likeness of Emperor Palpatine or gun throne aware so talk me through walk me through how the sculpting process works do you have a core of günther underneath here no we didn't do a live cast on him we used the the pretty standard immortal core immortal masks makes silicone masks all the time and the cores are they fit pretty much everybody so it just makes sense to use one of these things since we have access to them so easily that gives a couple of caveats that the shape of the core is a little bit restricting so to interpret the the emperor's face onto that core takes a little bit of fiddling right and I do you would have if we wanted a lot of movement for example you would do a life cast and you maybe do a prosthetic this you've done before in the past that allows the actor do a lot of expressions but we didn't need that no we didn't need that and also I don't think the Gunther's face is the perfect proportions to do a likeness of the Emperor whenever you're doing a likeness you want to have somebody that has correct eye spacing and Ida mouth spacing size of Mouse eyes and nose size shape of the head there's so many things that go into doing a good likeness makeup you can't just pile on all kinds of rubber and make them look like that person it doesn't move right so that makes this an interesting sculpting challenge so walk me through how you started well we started with obviously reference always need a lot of reference we have reference of the actor that played Palpatine reference of the Emperor from the video game the Emperor from Return of the Jedi we even have some reference from some of the licensed toys because it's really hard to find pictures of the Emperor without his hood on so the toys are pretty good place to go and when you look at the physical characteristics of Palpatine without the hood on what catches our eye where do you think people are gonna notice and say that looks like the character is it in you know the ridges in the forehead the soul in this underneath the eyes what would you start there there's a lot of forms that go into any like this makeup and having the actor's Anatomy underneath that like that's that's a really important thing to nail sort of first and then on top of that you put all the characteristics like these big giant brows and just split up the middle of the ridge of his brows and then those big eye bags that's really cool you're talking about not only sculpting something that's gonna look like Palpatine as we know from the movies but also trying to get the actors likeness you play Palpatine yes underneath that sculptor as well yeah double sculpting exactly yeah but all those characteristics really play in because if you look at the Emperor's makeup pretty much his chin his mouth and his nose are the actor so we have to get with a nail that likeness right there to really make that show and then there's a lot of proportional things that are really funny about how that makeup goes together and I even my buddy Mike he'll even pop by the other day and gave me a couple little notes on how to improve what I was doing what it might have to say I was little things about the nose the the shape the overall shape of the face I was sculpting it a little too thin a couple of things on the corners of the and some of this chin stuff but mike has such a great eye that just giving me like 10 minutes of notes like you know set me in a whole different direction and really helped me bring this a little bit closer very cool and where is it right now how much more work yet to do on this I probably have a couple more hours there's still a little bit of fiddling I'm starting to block in some of the detail forms but there's there's still a lot of stuff to do and then from that I assume a mold gets made nothing we can epoxy mold guys over an immortal inject some silicone into there and then we'll paint it up awesome we'll let you get back to sculpting and can't wait to see what this looks like when it gets out of mold all right Frank this looks like a mask it is a mask yeah alas I left you you were still fooling around with that sculpture yeah and you were thinking more about it you got some consults what did you do next well it's really funny to try and find this kind of happy medium between all the different incarnations of the Emperor and then finally using like the videos that are coming out from this game of that hologram that's projected inside there I decided to quit fiddling and just leave it kind of where it is because it kind of works with that hologram being a little bit weird and a little bit off hmm okay so you got the clay sculpture but this isn't clay this is silicone yeah so I assume you had to make a mold yes where's the mold here is the mole Oh typically we've been doing these you know really nice fancy epoxy molds this one we kind of went old school I guess and I did a stone mold just a two-part mold like we do everything else mm-hmm but I was able to do both sides in one day so that way we can get everything moving really quickly so the advantage of making a stone mold is just fast yeah I mean there's ways to do epoxy and fiberglass molds and you know in one day but I mean stone was just really quick and it was the easiest and you know like if you're trying to make like your own mass or do your own things like plaster is really cheap um and if you screw it up it's not that expensive so you know people should go back to the old school sometimes all right and then you put a you corn there and I see you poured some silicone through there yeah we I just sent this mold over to a mortal and since they're constantly cranking out masks there we'll just stick my mold into the production and they ran the silicon and seamed it up for me so this is that casting film casting and clearly it's painted so what was your approach for painting this again we I wanted it to look like that hologram and that hologram is kind of bottom lip so a lot of my shadows are all you know on the top of ridges and you know so that the light would be coming from the bottom and then I also painted in some of these scan lines different images show the scan lines vertical or horizontal I just want the vertical I thought it looked kind of nice and I just tried to paint it like the like the game graphics right it's not flesh tone it's almost digital yeah you're evoking a lot of like the cooler colors of digital imagery and also I noticed you shadow route but back yeah you'll never see any of that stuff so there's no reason for me to like that's why I didn't I took the ears off of it like I it didn't make any sense for me to spend time sculpting ears they're never ever gonna get seen so there's really nothing behind that so all we really needed was this little front part and of course because you don't have come through here you worth the work of the pretty generic core and want to put this on Gunther and see how it looks yeah okay how do you think about that test day um I kind of figured that his face would push it out because this is a really slender core but I think it works fine and especially in the context of being inside that helmet and lit the way it's gonna be lit I think it's gonna working fine well you guys have already seen of course Gunther in costume at New York Comic Con but that's instill in the future for us but we'll be back next time with more looking into the process of making this amazing costume stay tuned and frankly I will see you next time\n"