Hello. Well, winter depression hit about as soon as it was time to winterize the motorcycles, and that killed any motivation I had for a while. Fortunately, I could still come up with several ideas to try to motivate myself to get up off my ass, cherry-picked my favorite, and spent way too much time bringing it to life. I purchased a HUGE resin printer (the Anycubic M3 Max) a few months ago while it was on sale. It sat, unopened, in its obscenely giant box – taking up half of my tiny kitchen space – for a couple months before I could finally gather the motivation and courage to sculpt something large enough to justify opening it. Being either ballsy or stupid or a bit of both, I skipped the test print stage and printed this giant sonofabitch. Somehow, it all worked out without a hitch:
Hopefully it shows, but in case you cannot tell what you are looking at, my idea was to make a life-sized human/vampire bat hybrid skull. I wanted to go for extreme accuracy and realism–melding recognizable features of each into one coherent package. This meant sculpting a brand-new human skull around the teeth and nose and ear bones of a vampire bat, then creating a jaw that could function around these strange new shapes.
The lower jaw was indeed a challenge, as neither the human nor bat jaw as they stand in real life could rotate on their hinges properly while clearing the giant teeth, and still have the bat’s characteristic under-bite, but I believe I came up with a solution that looks as good as I could make it, and more importantly, one that functions.
And since I like the look of this model much more with its mouth in the open position, I decided to use my terrible woodworking skills and rudimentary woodworking tools to butcher some oak and felt and make a stand for it.
This took approximately 70ish hours to sculpt in ZBrush using one of my real human skulls and several pictures of vampire bat skulls as references.
The print itself in the Anycubic M3 Max printer took about 24 hours and over 1kg of resin. Unfortunately, the autofill did not work, so every three hours for 24 hours I needed to manually top off the resin vat. Sleep was severely lacking that day…
Once the print finished, it was yet another several hours cleaning up and curing the clear resin print, but at that point I was happy to do so as the largest print I ever attempted on a brand new printer actually worked!
Finally, it was time for painting. I started with a base coat of some paint and primer spray paint in a matte ivory silk color, and then, once that was dry, attacked it with a paintbrush and acrylics followed by a bunch of washes and sponge dabbing and dry brushing. When that was dry, I applied some matte clear-coat and painted over the teeth with epoxy to give them a realistic shine.
I don’t hate it. The amount of work put into this was obscene, but I ticked off something I have been wanting to do since I was a child: I sculpted a realistic life-sized skull that doesn’t look like complete shit. That has to count for something, right?
idrawcrap 