D-con 2011

It's that most wonderful time of year again!!!

After some time spent in hiding, the DragonCon approacheth, and again there's excitingly [over]ambitious plans on my end. It's a bit of a piecemeal approach this year, doing a free-form sort of idea again. I liked the idea of lights and costume-age from last year, so that theme is being expanded this year :>

I had the fabric bases in about a month ago (thanks to Chinese wholesale clothing manufacturers for saving me the pain of sewing lycra!) so the next step was to develop some kind of character sketches and mechanical decorations.

First I tried to tap into the Dave Doerr design auteur mode and checked out some inspiration pics (mostly from a found copy of Shirow's Intron Depot/GITS), and some thoughts about what I wanted to achieve last year but didn't get around to. The main goal was to make something cool and glowy and put a much stronger electro-mechanical bend on it than last year's. I put that into a few sketches to plot out an overall look and feel.

Next I tried out some of the sketch concepts. Initially I thought some glowing water would be great! So I hooked up an aquarium air pump to a cereal container with its own rubber gasket. But the weight of the water in the container was heavy, the seal was janky, and the overall durability of it seemed dubious. So then with a lot of space open on the back, I got to thinking about skeletal elements (always have been a huge fan of the biomechanics and whatnot) and the spine was perfect for all the free real estate on the upper back. But where to locate such detailed information for the reforming? I checked the interwebs for a bit and sure enough, a site called http://www.anatomyexpert.com/a_to_z/ provides a wealth of sectioning and multiplane images of such parts. Sculpting a spine in 3D would be have been a massive pain, and one of the luxuries of working for a Prof who specializes in manufacturing methods is the access to some sweeeet machines. In lieu of a 3D, handmade sculpture, I decided to try to mimic the real thing and make some 2D cross-sections, and connect them with a vetebral cord of sorts.

To clean these up these image sections for manufacturing, I took the images into a 3D modeling software (Solidworks) and cleaned up the profiles to make them symmetric, and rescaled them with adjustments to emphasize the curve of the spine in the width axis and in the depth axis for viewing from different angles (plotted in excel to check out the slopes).




The sections were also cut with a center slit for extra glow (cut edges help angle the light to your eye) and to allow them some give when stringing the spine through them. Two side holes were cut for red vinyl wrapped steel wire which simulated spinal nerves.

Next I cut these on the laser cutter out of acrylic (aka Plex) of 3/8" sections. The tube that went inside was a piece of 7/8" PVC tubing.




















The coup de grace, however, was a nice piece of LED tape lights that shine out a solid 300 lumens/ft (for comparison, most LED tape lights are ~60 lumens/ft). To power this beastie, I had to buy a small lead-acid scooter battery! This was small enough to carry in my belt, and has enough juice for 3 hours of power.

The next step was to attach this thing. I drilled some holes in the back of the PVC and threaded in some heavy gauge wire, and after threading through the wires I stuck some tiny c-shaped metal bits around the red "spinal nerves" to hold the acrylic sections in place.

The whole spine was attached to a metal gasket found from a car parts salvage yard (best field trip EVAR!) by wrapping the wires from the PVC around the gasket. Longer wires were soldered to the LED light to reach the belt battery. The gasket was then attached to elastic straps to wear backpack style.

Phew!

Here's some shots of glowy, attached spinage!




Lots more work to do and only a week left--I'll keep you posted ;D