CHESS BITCHEZ

So I effectively puzzled through the necessary tasks of dealing with the resin and the prep process... at least, good enough on this ghetto-ass $30/l clear resin. Look at this "majestic alicorn" (according to the designer)! Look at its impossibly spindly ankles! Look at how fully a third of its mass is the tail! It only took an hour to cut the supports off.

This did reveal one hole in the process.

My wife and kid have no problems whatsoever leaving the house with every light blazing. Apparently if there are lights on in the garage, however, that shit gets turned off. Along with everything else in the garage. So here's 2/3rds, or 9 hours, of a "majestic alicorn."

Regardless. The kid has now painted a "majestic alicorn" with rainbow tail and gold and silver feathers and she's volunteered me to print something or other for every kid in her class so we're hoping the novelty wears off somewhat soon. Because now it's time to print something to CAST and after puzzling the idea around a little bit I determined that a chess set would be the way to go - after all, it gives you six (or twelve) different forms, everything is a good size to fit in the flask, and whatever you make, it's going to be luxe as hell. There's an insanely expensive book I got through inter-library loan that has an amazing chess set by Pierre Sterle that I would love to even get another look at but what you discover is that jewelry is effectively a lost art in that everything has been done before, the craftsmen of yore knew hella more than you, and frankly if you can just get your skills up to state-of-the-art 1955 you will fucking dust everyone modern because most of the techniques have been lost to time.

But I digress.

So no, we're not making a Minecraft Chess Set. We're not making a Pokemon chess set. But if you puzzle around on the Intarwebs for a while you get some ideas. And if you're lucky, you can find yourself some copyright infringement!

Unfortunately this isn't chess pieces and a board as 3DSMax files. No, it's the whole enchilada. But this is where you remind yourself that this is a learning exercise so fuckin' hell let's see how Fusion handles meshes. And you know? It ain't bad. It took me about 2 hours to slice out all the pieces and get 'em trussed up.

First guy outta the gate looks pretty good.

Good enough that we're going to try a full plate.

This is about where you learn that even the basic stuff you've been learning from "On the Internet nobody knows you're a cat" because no, you don't want to cure your base layers for 100 seconds if you have a full plate because you need a claw hammer to get the bishop off.

Also your automatic trusser doesn't get everything you need because printing whomping flat bits causes some ugly delamination.

But by and large?

I mean... for first print? We'll take it. The production run is going to probably be bronze and pewter and I'll likely tumble those in steel shot. My cousin asked if some of these pieces were tumbled because some are clearer and I observed that's because they have straighter sides and that one wouldn't tumble resin and then I realized I've got a tumbler full of walnut shells and why the fuck not so the pawn is currently going through a walnut shell massage and ZOMG walnut shells smell delicious.