Clash on Kobol!

This page is a Work In Progress. Please check back for updates.

The Project began with this LOGLINE: When two rival star-fighters crash on a desolate planet after a dogfight, the rival pilots, an organic creature and an android, must put aside their differences to survive the harsh environment and ever lurking pirates.

Concept Drawings

My Primary focus was the organic creature named Ku'Roda. I began with concept drawings. I wanted a creature that could look both fierce and friendly. I drew heavily upon Characters from Star Wars, Buloo from Disney's The Jungle Book and the film Eric with Benedict Cumberbatch. 

The above are drawing plates of Costume details.

After several sketches I did a 3D model in Zbrush. The 3D model served to produce a maquette, digital renderings and modeled organic elements to export into engineering applications.

Rendering Turnarounds in Zbrush

The above document details the planned animatronic functions of the wearable head piece.

The build required a fat suit to build up the fat and muscular bulk of the creature. Instead of building from scratch, I purchased a cheap fat suit costume and made some modifications by adding accessible areas to stuff the fat suit with a combination of sculpted foam and additional polyfil. 

In the character design the creature wears a utility harness with pouches and tubes. I made the harness out of military surplus items with leather and metal embellishments.

Using the 3D Zbrush model of the head, I was able to design an aluminum framework and shells to support the animatronic elements and the silicone skin of the creature.

My original plan was to use the Zbrush model to resin print parts for the skin and make a model from the printed parts. After realizing the size of the head in the 3D printing app I realized I had some problems. The first problem is that I had missed one measurement of my actor and had the wrong scale. This was an easy fix as I had obtained a 3D scan of the actors head and was able to rescale the model. The next issue was that even though I was able to reduce the size, it would still take a lot of time to print the parts and reassemble. I was facing 20+ hour prints to risk that they do not print correctly and wasting alot of time. I sought advisement and decided to do an clay sculpt of the skim in order to make a mold.

To begin making the clay sculpt, I used my Fusion model and divided the modeled skin into 2 inch slices as seen above. I printed the cross section of each slice on a plotter and cut them out as seen below. 

I then traced each cross section onto a 2 inch thick sheet of insulation foam. Using a hotwire foam cutter, I cut each crosssection from the foam sheet. I then glued each slice together to get a close approximation of the head form. I then referenced prints of the head from tghe Zbrush model and used a rasp to shape the foam head. 

After sculpting the foam head form, I began to do a clay sculpt on top of the form and separating different elements such as the eye stalks and upper and lower mouth parts with the mold making processes in mind.   

Work in progress To Be continued..........

The second character in the film is a droid named L33.

Concept Drawings