Cities of Death-- prototyping

I am a big believer in free form features. In other words, crap you glue on. But I think this only really works well when the crap you glue on is sort of already finished out. You don't want to take an electrical wire cap drill two 1/32 holes in it, take speaker wire, strip it, seperate it, create cables comin out of the wire cap and glue them to a perpindicular brace made from some kind of drywall screw contraption...or at least you don't want to do this five hundred times. My suggestion is this: if you see something in a store, it's the right scale, it requires only one moment of glueing (and it will glue with a modicum of attention), then fine: use it as is. Case in point, I find that 3/8" Lagshields with mini christmas bulbs make great sci-fi columns. They're kind of mad scientist-ish, but note: I buy both products in packages of fifty, and I glue one to the other and I'm done. I would not do this if I also had to sand, drill, cut, and or grind, because all of that takes time, space, money. Not to mention it makes a mess, which means you'll need a workshop or have to work outside. In the latter case, inclement weather is sometimes a problem.

"But," you say, "all the really cool stuff looks really cool because of detail." Yes. What I am saying is that you do not attempt to mass produce detail by hand. One building will take you a year. Mass produce easy to produce (or already produced) features by hand, glue those to the building, but for the serious stuff, the various pipes, the various hoses, the skulls, the layers of relief, the vents--these things require cutting with tiny scissors and holding them down as the glue dries with toothpicks. Don't do that five hundred times for the same effect.

Instead, do it once, and then mold the thing. Basically, what I'm saying is have a prototype, a mock up of what you want the thing to look like when you're done, mold that (and possibly make multiple molds of it) and then cast it five or ten times for the desired effect. This is the principle behind the Cities of Death plates that they sell you. They don't give you a sprue of little detail things, they give you detailed plates all ready to be used. I would suggest thinking in terms of prototyping on any piece of detail that takes longer than fifteen minutes to make.

As far as actually constructing the prototype is concerned, you build the prototype exactly as you would build anyother piece except for a few things.

First off, you're going to mold this piece. Yes, it is possible to make two part molds, but they take longer to use. Keep that in mind. The best things to mold have big flat surfaces and no "holes" in them . There's a lot to say about molding, and I'm not going to do it here, suffice to say, that you should think about how molding works when you are designing your prototype.

Second, when you design a piece you are normally looking for a few things that you needn't worry about when you build a prototype. First off, color and paintability are not a problem. What comes out of a mold will be made up of whatever material you cast it in. So, if the material you normally use requires three coats of primer before it will take a drop of paint, don't worry about it: it's replica won't. Also, normally when you construct a piece, you sort of do so under the acknowledgement that someone in your group is likely to break it. So, you don't want to use soft materials or anything that is likely to just break off. When you build a prototype, however, you don't have to worry. At the very least, your replica will be made out of some kind of mineral, possibly stone; it will be one continuous and solid piece. This means that you can (and I have) make something out of wet clay, mold it, and pour out solid versions of it.

Three things, though. If your prototype is too soft, it will probably be destroyed in the molding process. Balsa wood is fairly notorious for this because the mold rubber tends to want to stick to the balsa and...well...one of them has to give. A wet clay prototype isn't going to be around after you scrape it from the mold (but note, one pouring and it will probably clean out the molds details. Second, the preferred material for building is pink styrofoam insulation. Great....but it floats, so you're going to want to anchor it down first with glue or else it will keep trying to get a 1/4" off your tray and will ruin the mold. Third, if you have a prototype that is durable to survive the molding process, it can be re-molded. This allows you to have multiple molds going if you need lots of the same piece. Hirst Arts, for most of their projects, recommends casting a mold 20 or 30 times. I think that's a bit ridiculous. Make two molds, or mold bigger sections. I don't think it's too liberal for you to think that each molding will take an hour. This means that when you're making your prototype, if you want a whole bunch of an item, you should probably make the item out of more durable stuff than wet clay or balsa. At the same time, it doesn't have to be that durable. I use a glue gun for most of my molding stuff--anyone whose used one before knows that it's not the most durable of bonds.