Phil Tippett's Lost Star Wars Holochess Figures

hey everybody's norm from Destin and Sean from Testim Sean we're here at one of our favorite places in the Bay Area typically I love it here so much I know it's Phil Tippett's shop of course and every time you come by he's made progress on a mad God mad god of course is his obsession his series of stop-motion films he's been working on a practical stuff yeah like 30 years or so and we can also reveal that Sean you've been helping about I did a little 3d printing for him yeah which I was honored I'm going to talk a little bit about that 3d printing today but first let's go check in with Phil I think he was working over there working on some crazy creatures and see the status of Matt god Phil thanks for having us back you're welcome yeah I think it's been a while since we were here you've been cheating Matt God for for a long time now right there are close to 30 years 3 30 years on and off what is the state of it what's what part of the anthology is it in we finished part 1 and part 2 there are four parts to it and part three we just did a Kickstarter for it and have a good amount of it shot it all needs to be composited put together then we'll do another Kickstarter for chapter 4 so for each chapter the thing you're going for is just like this is a different type of dreamscape or somewhat you know the chapter 1 got you into chapter 2 and chapter 2 is a transition into chapter 3 and then chapter 4 is kind of its own thing but they all the light and do the characters go from one to each or is each chapter a way to explore different characters there is a through line for a character the significantly changes what it's them the character I notice like walk in your shop there's characters everywhere here are things you've dealt they're lining the shelves and what is it what is this guy you're working on this is something I found online that has like that they sell these opposable figures like a free are matured bigger yeah and so I'm going to kind of kit - this thing I'm going to turn it into a Minotaur and yeah they've got these they're really well engineered and crafted and they've got you know there's all like silicon that allows you to are you know incremental for stop-motion purposes and then this is what their skeletons look like oh my god and they're pretty pretty elaborate that's a steel armature like completely prefab out of the box worked and then this is at looks like sixth scale correct and we know there's a ton of thick scale toys out there that you can make by clothing off accessories yeah I mean that was always part of the sort of production design format God was to base everything around 1/6 scale so now if I I don't have to make as much stuff really shows you're downloading all these characters and creatures into a physical form he's kind of down as fast as possible all these different characters and then some of the character that you've done since I'm working on this for 30 years had of course popped in other films this last Kickstarter there's an interesting reward you guys did Mikey talk about the two chestpiece characters yeah well Nikita who works here was archiving a bunch of photographs that were taken when we did the original chesa mm-hmm and she found a photograph that had a couple of characters she didn't recognize in it and asked what they were and I don't know and then yeah I called it John burg who I worked with - great - just set and asked him if he had any memory of anything when he didn't remember and I called it Dennis Muren and he goes like oh yeah you guys made 10 and we got on the set George only chose eight because no more would fit on the chess board right and so these four the two that were that we're used and we gave them to Dennis after the show wrapped and he held onto them for all these years so as incentives for the part three we did photogrammetry of you know the the objects of Dennis had and then cast and mold and mold and cast and painted up total figures yeah we've some photos here of like the originals that they hold up well they were never filmed but they they were armature you know I think if you moved them they would crumble and Dennis had them in a in a display case for years but yeah this is this red one I made and this green one John made and they had aluminum or armatures in them so nothing very sophisticated it weren't made to last beyond just just that scene oh we just knocked him out Wow just quickly we probably make you know one of these a day each look looking at him back now is it were you happy with them you feel like like the look of these creatures I was just somewhat I mean I I was so indifferent to it I forgot all about it yeah didn't remember that we had done that so but they still exist like in the same taxonomy as those character that appeared their family so we're just gonna mix the screen awesome these will make anything that God so I thank I seriously doubt it yeah I don't think so well thanks for letting us stop by and check out your miniature sculpt sure so Sean Phil told me that they dug up these two original characters that weren't used in Star Wars but of the same family from Dennis Muren yeah and then you work with mark to bow to turn these into actual 3d printed figure yeah so they did a lot of they I guess they got the originals from Dennis and they did photogrammetry and then Mark had to process them through ZBrush and he had to pose them digitally and then they handed them off to me so when you got the file you got this new brush file yeah you you've had a lot experience adapting to work on like an SLA print on a form printer yeah the premier and into is that zebras nozzle because they do lots of polygons and get these really intricate meshes so I think one that I think was this guy the script was like 10 million polygons and typically if you send like print to a service they wanted under a million and for my purposes I usually try to keep it three or below because it will start to choke the per the slicing program so way it dinners decimation where you have to basically rearrange the polygons and reduce them so I got them down to about three million while still retaining the detail that's the interesting for like literally decimation your powers of ten stepping it down yeah do you do that in a certain way with a certain program allow you to create member plugins in certain places or attain detail and what other places where you know that's not going to be as important mhm yeah you're seeing decimation pop up more and more as utility and a lot of 3d software like netfabb does it a mesh mixer even and they're even integrating to like simplify 3d and stuff like that the best one and the fastest one I file is still ZBrush it has a building decimation thing and it just does the best job and it's really fast what I found is like if you decimate say like like make it 20% of what it was as far as polygon count if you can bear like a ZBrush one - like some another one the other one might look a little chunky at the same count but ZBrush just arranges it just so perfectly so I typically even though I'm not a sculptor I use the brush in a utility fashion like that and I'll decimate in that now we have given any direction as to how to put these how many pieces to print them because well this is one solid piece yeah this was actually lucky Bulbasaur cyclops here was able to be one piece which was super easy the scrimp it's fairly company so they had me chop the head so I sliced this in netfabb and I after decimating it and just did these two pieces and I did a little hole for pinning it when they're done and then I was able I position these both to hide the supports as much as possible so all the ports support - underneath on Balbus here and then on the screen pies that look kind of like lamb on is back and the night the really nice thing about this is that you can you can really dictate how small the contact points are for the supports so I did really small contact points I just had to have more of them and but they broke off really easily and due to the texture of these guys they just inherently kind of hide it as I talked about I talked to Ken in case you did the cleanup on these and they're like they do they didn't have to do much cleanup from the 3d prints at all which is great right so let's go check in with Ken and Kate from the model shop and see how they turn these 3d printed figurines into the collectors pieces that the Kickstarter backers going to get [Music] [Music] we're here what Kate saboteur has been helping Phil on making all the models in the castings for this you've been working with Ken Cheung there's a little camera-shy so let's walk through once we had the 3d prints that I hand it off to you guys what happens after that so what we did obviously there's a few different ways to make a mold and we had to decide whether they were going to be a two-part mold one part mold something like the ears we try to do as a one part and it was going to be impossible to get it out so we ended up changing that so one of the things you do is you look for where you want the sprues to be to let some air holes release so it would glue on bits of wire you can see yeah in between his arms it just allows the airflow to go through and all the bubbles to escape you can see what we ended up with for we're calling this guy the the bulbous zombicide cloth yeah so we ended up with this two-part mold here where you add some registration mark so it fits together and you can see through the bottom of his feet we put two tubes so that we could pour okay I think I got it and then we added wires here so that all the air could escape it led to some pretty annoying screws trying to get out of this mold and this guy you had you just did this in one piece yeah and now this one you did have me when I printed you had I was given the model and then we chopped the head yeah because that would be a little tricky to get the whole thing out yeah especially with that sort of claw shape of the whole thing it would be like nearly impossible and as it is these shapes are kind of hard to get out without snapping these and because it ends up getting a little more bulbous at the end so it's best to do it in a few parts you run into the issue of how you're going to reattach that later and wanting it to be strong but I think we came out alright in the end on that one you can see that we refer to this guy is the scrimp and you can see what we ended up going with with his mold here he pours through the feet and so as you combine these two here we rubberband it you pour through both of the feet you kind of give it a little massage we've got the air bubbles and when you're done we just take it over the stander and sand it slip because that's about most feet what you literally take the the mold and put it on the sander yes and it's okay yeah so you get a hold on tires gonna fly across the room and that's kind of a silicone holds up okay can you try not to let it have too much contact but alright do you leave it do you leave it in the mold so that it supports everything while you're sanding it so I mean on the one hand that keeps it a lot stronger and more secure but on the other hand is also because this surface here is exactly what we want his feet to be flush with oh that make sense so if you've got that you know as you guys cuz when you use the sander it's easy to maybe put a little more lean on one side by the other than that I know to me yeah that keeps things simple cool and then you were you actually did tint the residence as well like this is I that was some of the scrim presence yes I'm so he has a little bit of pinky yeah the resin that we started out with with a bright white and we knew that because we're going to be making some many of these we wanted to cut down on the you know amount of paint that we had to use build up so starting with something like a pink for the scrimp and we have you can see here this was more of a almost fluorescent green worded for the bulb is reject and that way it just it made it a lot easier to start out with like an automatic base coat yeah exactly so then okay so once you had them all you have them cast you have the feet sanded is there any additional prep that you have to do on these or do they come out pretty clean or I mean obviously with this guy you're going to see there's gonna be a lot of screws you have to cut and you know you'll get a little bit of seaming where the where the molds join together obviously our intent was to get as little possible but you go through with an exacto trim that maybe a little bit of a dremel action for the most part they're pretty they're pretty good I mean we design it in a way that we could really run through them because we needed at least you know about 30 each maybe so the rewards yeah and then so that we have the base coat kind of molded in and then are you airbrushing paint like what's the paint problem so the very that we wanted to do a three step process our art director Mark Du Bois set this up and said all right well we start already tinted you're going to do an airbrush pass and then a wash and then dry brush so you can see here this is our scrimp we did our fellow model maker Ken chunk jock did a great red pass with the airbrush and because you can make it heavier and lighter there was already some really great shading of like it's a little Pinker in some areas so you came out red then we gave it a number wash you know fill like two likes to get things put on dry encourage Angie's payments that you know this is how I did it originally yep so I want this to be a bit darker so we added that and then we go back through with a dry brush of like a pale pink flesh color to really bring out the highlights and some of that texture awesome kind of same process with this guy as well so then and then these are going to be put in a little display cases how we've we've got some great closure jars with bases coming so they'll be totally filled and glass really fit for a collector to display awesome I cannot wait to see the ultimate finished product thanks so much for walking us through all this and having us in the shop of course I love doing this Sean here they are yep the scrimped and the bulbous it's just so cool to have this metal lovely guys tangible piece of history yeah right from the crate same creative universe as the chest pieces in Star Wars they are of the same family and then you are a part of bringing this back to that very small part but so want to thank team here at Tibbett studio for walking through us through that process yeah how they pulled these from the archives and then reconstituted them through technology photogrammetry 3d printing and having the artisan model makers traditional wave as well yeah and congratulations to those Kickstarter backers we're going to get these and put them further in their in their collection mad Dodd is an ongoing project that Phil Tippett's working on parts 1 & 2 are already on live web links below where you can watch those and keep an eye out on their Facebook page see when part 4 might be available yeah and Shawn I'll see you next time

Channel: Adam Savage’s Tested

Views: 130,933

Keywords: tested, testedcom, mad god, phil tippett, star wars, casting, modelmaking, stop motion

Id: SyDJRxDLV14

Length: 17min 11sec (1031 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 16 2017