Handmade By Radish: 2014

This one I anticipated would take a long time.

The making of the Hunter from Halo stretches for a couple of months which in and of itself is not a massive amount of time, but it sure feels like it.

This is also the longest post ever - so if you just want to see the end result skip to the end. This post isn't really a teaching thing either as if I know what I'm doing - it's just what I did and if it helps anybody then great!

PLANNING

Finding decent reference material for the Hunter is tricky - although there are many screenshots of the thing in games and various concept drawings there wasn't much to go on in terms of real world sizing and proportion. The guy is always standing in a hunched manner which makes it difficult to ascertain height.

I did find however after much searching a 3D model from the first Halo game which I could open in Photoshop, scale and work from.

With this I could get much more concrete measurements - such as how long the legs are in relation to the body, how wide the body is, how long the feet are etc. All things which are difficult to work out from game screenshots.

The plan was to make a Hunter from Halo Reach who had many more details to play with.

"Halo Reach has a theatre mode you know, wouldn't that be handy....."
I don't have an Xbox because I'm a sad panda.

The 3d model was positioned for a front, side, top, bottom and rear view and printed to the size I wanted the final figure to be.

When getting plans such as this be sure to view the drawing in Orthographic mode. This eliminates any distortion to measurements in things that are titled away from the viewer.

After that, I just work out what order I want to do things and we're ready to go. For this project all the limbs and bits will be assembled independently.

SCULPTING THE BODY

Dive in then. The very beginning of a project is my least favourite stage. Not because it isn't enjoyable, but because things in their infancy tend to look crap - at least they do for me. That is until some base shapes are established - then all begins to feel better.

The first step is the armature. Aluminum wire is laid over the plans to make sure the dimensions of the wireframe are accurate. After that is sorted it is covered in tin foil. I was going to do the head and body at the same time - however as this character has a collar around the neck I thought it best to do them separately mainly to make painting easier.

Sprinkling fairy dust onto Super Sculpey makes it sculpt itself - which is certainly a timesaver! .... yeah, no. At this point measurements are taken with callipers from the plans I printed to ensure I don't go to tall or too thick. I wanted my Hunter slightly hunched in the end, so I factored this in.

I skip ahead a bit here, but nothing of note is really happening anyway. As this piece nears completion I smooth it out with some white spirit (note: SOME) and prepared for baking! The clay is baked in a small halogen oven.

SCULPTING THE LIMBS

For the legs and arms I made only one set, then I mold and cast them - that way both sides of the finished figure will be symmetrical.

A thigh!

To get panel lines of a consistent thickness I use a sewing needle during the sculpting process.

A foot.


a head!

the shield arm

upper arm (made from super sculpey and bits of PVC pipe)

THE BACKPLATE AND SPINES

The back plate is a large curved piece with spikes sticking out of it. Due to its size and the accuracy I needed, sculpting it would have been unnecessarily difficult and using an epoxy or Milliput would have been wasteful. Instead the wireframe was made with styrene sheets and blocked out with insulation foam - a well known method to many of you prop builders out there.

The shape was first planned in illustrator and cross sections were drawn up. The shape was scaled from the 3D drawing I had and looking at how the plate curves from screenshots.

The plans were tested first in paper and then I started to slap the foam in there. (This foam is tricky for me to find for some reason because I live in a lost world, I found this foam in the much sought after skip of not want.)

To get a hard shell over the foam which I would sand I wanted to try something different. So I poured some resin over it (I know it's a bit 'duh' now)

For anyone who tries this I'll tell you want happens. Resin reacts badly to moisture (which was all over the water based filler I used for gaps) and gets all bubbly, so you can only guess how this looked when it cured.

Instead I did what normal people did and used car body filler - which is much easier!

The whole thing was then sanded until my hands went numb and fell off. The positions for the spines were drawn on and spaces for them were carved using a Dremel tool. The edges were made straight afterwards by inserting styrene into the sides of the channels.

Much straighter now!

The spines, of which there are six, are all copied from one which was sculpted and molded.

THE SHIELDS

Both shields were first planned and scaled in Illustrator and cut from styrene sheets.

The first step is to get the basic shape cut. To get the height I cut a length of styrene and lay it sticking up like a little post. When I stick the top layer of styrene on I have the basic shape at the height it is supposed to be.

The angled edge is then added in with Milliput. With the base shape down, additional elements are added on top. Styrene sheets of various thickness are used to ensure things stick up (or not) the correct amount.

The main shield was constructed in the same way.

THE GUN

The other arm to the Hunter is just a gun because that is how he rolls.

The size of the gun was tricky to work out because it wasn't on my plans. The look of the gun changes considerably from game to game. So I had to use just screen shots for this!

I worked on the assumption that the total length of the gun hadn't changed and its thickness would be equal to that of the shield arm which I did have measurements for. Working on those numbers I plotted out the surrounding elements and checked the proportion of these against screen shots.

To get scale I enlarge screen shots of the gun to the size I'm working to, for a Gun which is around 90mm long (a number which was taken from my 3D flat plan, not a made up measurement) I make all screen shots big enough for the gun in the picture to also measure 90mm. It's harder if the gun is angled or facing in odd directions so finding a good side on shot helps immensely. Does that make sense....sort of?!

The gun itself is assembled from PVC pipe. Detail is added with styrene sheet. Veneer pins are added to look like panel rivets. The domed top to the gun is a ping pong ball cut in half. The muzzle is part of a container for super glue.

There are 3 distinct elements to the gun which I called - The Claw (white, left), The Tab (center, grey) and the fuel rod (right). These elements repeat multiple times across the gun - so one of each was made then molded and cast! All of these parts were made from styrene apart from the fuel rod, which was cut from a cylindrical lid to some allergy spray I had lying around.

The clones are coming for you!

For the people keeping count - there are 3 claws, 4 tabs and 5 fuel rods.

Holes were drilled into the gun body for the bits to pin into.

The fuel rods were tricky. I didn't want to paint them green - I wanted them to BE green.... These were cast using a clear resin - and green oil paint was added to the mixture to dye it before it cured. The resin foamed as it cured and gave the rods an unusual colour consistency which - while not wholly intended, I actually quite like. (I would have liked something fluorescent or glow in the dark but I was worried about curing issues with the resin.)

The gun then began to take shape.

MOLDING AND CASTING

Various pieces were copied for symmetry, notably the legs and arms. These were molded using an addition cure silicone which just happens to be translucent but it needn't be.

Most of the parts were then cast with Easyflo 60. The fuel rods were cast from Easyflo Clear.

one leg, two leg ERMEGERD

DETAILING

Extra details are sometimes added after baking to sculpted parts. Simple geometric shapes are much easier to take from something rather than sculpt from scratch!

After the body was baked it was sanded with various grades of sand paper and finished with some really fine wet and dry. Flat panel areas were added with styrene. These simple areas would have taken longer to sculpt and ensure they were totally flat as opposed to simply cutting styrene sheets to size.

The hunter eyes are added after baking using bits of circular plastic

A threaded metal rod is added to the feet after baking for extra detail.

There are some marks on the Hunter also - take a look at this 'real life' screen shot

To do this I decided to print some decals. You can get transparent water-slide decal paper for inkjet printers, so I drew up the marks, printed them on the sheet and would stick these on after painting the parts.

PAINTING AND WEATHERING

Most of my other figures are painted with System 3 acrylic which I manually water down. The issue with doing this is that the consistency to the paint is always a job to match coat to coat. Sometimes it's too thick, too watery or whatever - It's a pain!

So instead I used Vallejo model air, a pre-thinned paint which you can use straight from the bottle. The paint is great and a lot more stable than System 3 was through an airbrush!.

The colour of the Hunter depends on the game (and also whatever coloured light he's annoyingly standing under). In the first few it's really blue and in Halo Reach he's kind of grey blue.

I found a Vallejo colour called light sea grey which I only needed to add a bit of blue to get the shade right.

Weathering was done by wet sanding the top layer of paint off. All pieces were first primed and painted a light grey which would be my show through colour. As the grey blue was removed it created a nice worn effect.

After painting, all the parts are sealed with Plastikote satin sealer (which smells bad, do it outside or in a different country to your own)