February funtimes

'Allo folks!

Swedish lesson of the month: "vabruari". Combination of "VAB", aka 'absence from work to care for sick child' and February. Pokes fun at the huge amount of seasonal illnesses during the January/February timeperiod. Relevant because I apparently caught a SECOND seasonal illness, cold/flu/covid/…, which knocked out way too much productive workshop time. Argh, blargh, etc.

On the upside, still got a bunch of stuff done!

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Suit rig:

• Finished the basic assembly puzzling. Turns out it's a lot easier when you label all the pieces, who'da thunk that eh? Still a bit of a hassle to get them all to fit perfectly. Small shrinkages add up.

• Attached all the supporting anchors. Printed 'mini-anchors' that I just glue onto the shell, and the big spine with wooden ribs. Probably a bit of an overkill, but I'd rather overdo this one.

• Got the foam backing in place. Had some two-component hard PU foam stashed that I'd grabbed earlier for just this project, so happy it finally got used. Doesn't look pretty, but it should do the trick. Also, this was a fun lesson in workshop tetris.
  In a bigger workshop I'd just have laid out the mold on a flat surface, had some space to walk around it, and voila. With the tetris situation that wasn't quite as easy... Lots of heavy lifting to wrangle it in cramped spaces. One of the main issues with the seasonal illness - the 'flu weakness' limiting this kind of stuff. Anyway, got it done in the end!

• Got the backpiece rig-stand cast. Not much drama - with the foam in place it's pretty easy to flip it upwards, support it a bit and just fill the 'gap' beneath it with more foam. I'm starting to like the PU foam y'all!

• Verified mold fit. While 3d-printing's got the vibe of "computer precision!!", reality does tend to interject with tolerances and material jank. End result - all is well, but with a minor jank factor on the foot backpiece. Can work around it though. Confirmed it all seals up correctly, so hooray!

• Cleaned up the interior. Undramatic AF, but yeahhh took annoying amounts of effort. The PU foam is quite persistent and really doesn't want to budge if it get traction somewhere. Gotta' seal up the cracks between printed pieces quite carefully also, hot glue does like to glob up.

• Applied the mold liner. Big step, takes ~72h for the acrylic resin to cure fully. Obviously I'm happy to have that happening over a work week. Besides the somewhat trivial sealing up of the foot slots (later, after the first water-test is done!) this means the core chamber is DONE!

So what's left!? Glad you asked!

• Plumbing stuff. Going to connect it to the 'raised pouring shelf' and probably do a simple drainage solution for the chamber. Thinking adding a ~40L plastic storage box with the tube through its side should be okay enough. Drains into it, I bail it out manually with a shovel as we go along, and so on. Even if I forget or somesuch it'll fit all the liquid needed. Plus, even if it stalls and the surface level gets stuck and affects the cast, it'll be around the mask level that I'll likely be modding heavily anyway.

• Frontpiece roller system. I REALLY need a support rig with wheels to move it in/out of place towards the backpiece. Weighs like 40kg, is huge and unwieldly and has 15mm tolerances. Not overly complicated though. Some 45mm wood beams, a few wheels and some steel connecting platters. Can carve out slots in the foam support for it to fit into, and then just re-cast foam on top/around it to attach it.

• Foot suspension system. Right now I'm moving the mannequin around by grabbing the waist. That won't be possible later when I've got it prepared with coagulant. Thinking I'll dig up the old roof rack system from storage and just build some sort of fixed-width clamps to hook on to the foot pegs.

• Clean up the mannequin. Glued joints still have zero touch-ups, looks terrible. Also obviously cannot cast without surface prepping, so yeah.

• Water test.

• CAST TIME!

• ...probably a slew of 'post-cast fixes'. I know there's some fit-jank for the mannequin in at least one place, so might have to adjust the chamber with violence (aka Dremel). We'll see.

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Other stuff:

Yeah, webshop restock, mask experiments etc. Flu #2 or whatever it was killed me. Will try to de-ass the thumb and roll some side-progress besides the big-rig.

Main thing I need to de-ass thumb on is the FB posting, establish proof of life and all that. Cannot overstate how much I look forward to being able to post new things again, been way too long!

Other other stuff - AI:

Flu-or-whatever might've knocked me out for physical crafting, but I did poke around a bit more with the AI tooling.

Now, first of all, I'll save speculation on media generation and the impact to 'content creation' for another day. We all know we're living in interesting time with regards to AI-generated porn. As with many other AI scenarios, the interesting question is 'what non-obvious things can you use it for'.

There's something to be said about the old 60s-70s dream of "robots will do the dishes so we can focus on artistry" versus todays reality of computers doing the artistry so we have time for dishes. Crafting, material treatment and actual physical labour isn't really AI'able to any degree, and likely won't be for quite a while. You still need the supplies, the workspace, the dexterity, etc. The thing AI is actually decent at is information crunching. "From X, interpret Y and display as Z".

I already showed one neat application on the last post, i.e. saving A LOT of modelling time by generating the base face from photos with AI. That alone is almost a game-changer, and I reckon that it's not long until 3d printers hit the critical level where molds would be almost direct-printable.

Another case that struck me while I was playing around with interpretative upscaling (i.e. letting the AI fill in and improve details) is design assistance. Working with masks and suits that live adjacent to uncanny valley there's always the question of "whatthefuck is missing". What's the detail that takes a lifeless static mask look and makes it read as real?

All that with the added complexity of not being able to freely reshape the design. Shoulders gonna' shoulder, jawbones stay where they are, and all that. It's not always easy to point and say "here's your problem", so having an AI to lend a hand is surprisingly useful. I look forward to experimenting more with it.

Obviously there's a case for just "AI-photoshopping" the hell out of photos for the addictive "whoa that's hot" factor too, but I'll save that for another round. Have way too many thoughts around specifically suits and AI'd media... plus I ran out of credits on the service I've been poking around at, so need those to refresh so I can wrangle proof-of-concepts and things related to what I'm writing :p

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Enough for now - probably don't have to re-state how excited I am that the chamber's almost good to go!

You know the drill, comment/DMs always welcome, and thank you all for sticking with me on this adventure! Y'all keep me sane (or thereabouts :p)