It's 2020 and I've been exposed to more prop and crafting than I ever have been through work and personal projects. DC's Stargirl gave me the chance to wrap my head around helping build a 15' tall robot. Amazon's 'Tales From The Loop' was a foray into mechanical work that had to be much more precise and required the use of machines I hadn't touched since college. It also got me reacquainted with welding - something I hadn't done in years. The Mandalorian came around and I became more familiar with prosthetics, silicone masks, animatronic puppets and weathering suits of armor.
Then it came time to slop all that information and experience into my head and try to make something at home.
The news of Cyberpunk 2077 was amazing. When I first got a glimpse of the world CD Projekt Red was creating, I was instantly engrossed with the style and aesthetic of it all. I wanted to dive in and bring some of it to life. I began to dig around through some of the designs. A jacket with a light up collar? Awesome! Simple but futuristic feeling pistol? Check. Eloquent, colorful, complicated looking Smart SMG? Sign me up.
Instantly I dove in to getting 3d files going on my printer. I'm all for building things from scratch and molding them, but the Kang Tao SMG is just too complicated of a project to make from scratch in a reasonable amount of time.
Body shopping is one of the most important steps to me. I really would like a finished product to be sharp, tight and devoid of print lines. I'm just not a fan of printing something, and throwing paint on it or molding it right away. So I spent weeks toiling away at the SMG. Making sure surfaces were nice and flat, edges were crisp, print lines were gone, and afterwards - making sure the textured surfaces looked the part. Here's one of the foregrip sections sporting its textured look.
Making proper molds is something I'm still trying to get better at. Luckily, my girlfriend has been a special effects mold maker for many years and has plenty of insight, tricks, methods and suggestions. It helped get my seam lines much nicer, and mold orientation much more sensible for long lasting molds that produced great pieces.
A few pieces required more than your simple 'split piece into two equal halves' kind of molds. One of the pieces of the gun is a goofy 4 piece silicone puzzle piece that took 4 days to make. All in the name of good pieces, minimal post casting clean up and not sacrificing detail
I used a couple of different silicones for different purposes. I used a more flexible 1065 by BJB enterprises for parts with slight undercuts or complicated geometry. I used the stiffer Mold Max 30 by Smooth On for the longer parts that I needed the silicone to be stiffer and hold its shape better.
After 19 molds, it was time to start casting pieces. Anyone who has dived into casting pieces with lots of sharp angles, tiny details or texture that is hard to pick up knows just how easy it is for bubbles to form or complicated geometry leading to unfilled spots. To keep post-cast clean up to a minimum I tried to limit the number of sprues and bleeders needed. I leaned more heavily on a brush up layer of resin to capture details. A pressure pot and air gun made getting pristine surfaces a lot easier.
Eventually I got one good set of parts after fiddling with how to pour each mold, how to keep certain pieces hollow and how to grab all the details. Next up was tackling the paint job. First thing was to get a good coat of primer on and to let it sit overnight to fully set up.
For these purposes I just used simple automobile primer black. I usually go back and gently hit everything with some 320 grit sandpaper after the paint has set up to knock down any mountains of primer if it built up anywhere. Plus it just gets everything back to being smooth but not so smooth that paint will lay down funky. Now it was time to experiment with colors.
Working with Special Effects artists can be great. They have such a plethora of information, tips, tricks, resources and leads on products. I'm not saying these things are reserved for effects artists or only known by them but since we make stuff like this for our job often, it's a great place to start when you need to know how to make props look right. A pretty well known airbrush paint that is an amazing shiny base is Alclad's Chrome. Prep is everything for this paint. I made sure surfaces were clean, I set up a clean area to airbrush in my shop and was careful not to let dust or anything else mess with the surface during this process. I hit a reject grip piece with some Alclad gloss black, let it sit for half an hour (you should really wait longer if you're going to do your final paint job but this was just for tests) and then hit it again with some Alclad Chrome. A few passes and there was a very nice, gunmetally sheen to the piece (ignore the grip as I didn't paint that on purpose).
I sealed it with a clear coat afterwards and let it sit for awhile before I started mixing the Alclad chrome with some blue, green, gray, white, black and purple inks to start nailing down colors. My first completed SMG is close in color but not perfect but I know I have the formula down for future ones. My first finished SMG will probably just sit on my wall with some of my other props.
If you've seen the reference images (which I included at the end of this) there are a lot of different colors going on. The blue shifts from a lighter metallic blue (hence backing the paint job with the chrome) to a darker metallic blue on the stock. You run into matte blacks, glossier blacks and some blue/purple on the magwell as well as a sort of turquoise sheen to the textured grip sections. Then you have a lot of random detail gunmetal greys and just to monkey wrench it all - a candy metallic red detail piece that looks like a charging lever. Just using off the shelf colors wasn't going to match the metallic look so I went through a week or so of just testing different ratios of the colors mixed with the alclad chrome to maintain the metallic look.
The other problem with matching colors is just how hard colors actually perform. The reference images provided for the SMG are great but against a black background with a red light shining on the whole thing. To make matters worse, your own paint jobs look different if you're outside, under light, indoors under an even different light at a certain time of day, etc. The main goal for me on the first gun was to be in the ballpark of the colors and adjust accordingly if need be. Also, be sure to let your paints fully set - especially if you're having to do lots of masking work on pieces that have multiple colors.
I had already dry-run assembled the gun before it was painted and it's obviously a little daunting with so many tiny pieces. The other problem is making sure your assembly job holds. I use an epoxy affectionately referred to as 'plasti-weld'. In short, on plastic and even metals, this stuff will not separate easily. But you can't just slap some glue on some pieces and join them. It has to be thought out a little bit. I'm not trying to be patronizing to anyone reading this - simply reminding people who may have not gone through the motions of these oceans that everything requires a little extra attention to be done a little bit better.
I picked mating faces that would be hidden any chance I could, scuffed them up and even drilled a few pilot holes for the epoxy to fill and grab into. Just about every piece has a face that is eventually hidden so it wasn't too much trouble to hide the epoxy job that holds the gun together. For things like the stock pin, all I had to do was glue the pin onto the stock but let it float freely on the stock rail itself. That way the pin stays in place but can still pivot.
Sometimes I get impatient and want to see a thing finished. It was hard assembling the gun and not just jumping into the rest like rigging the top wires or weathering it. But as per usual, stuff like this takes time. After I had glued all the magnets into place and the gun itself together, I began doing some washes on the pieces. For guns, I usually stick to blacks, greys and browns. It covers the most common types of 'wear' like being dirty, dusty or oily. This was also the time to start hitting the foregrip with that turquoise wash that was very prevalent on some of the textured areas. I should mention I clear coated the whole gun with matte before I started doing the washes. I also slapped the decals on before the weathering because those obviously would be dirty too if the gun was.
After a couple of washes with just wet rags, some sponge work and differently timed wipes or removals of the paints, I went in with some silver dry brush weathering. My favorite. Testors silver metallic paint is pretty spot on at looking like scraped metal.
I ended up 'weathering' the wires I chose to use for the detail wires on the top receiver the same way I did the rest of the paint job. I hit them with some greys and browns and drilled holes for the wires to slip into the gun and be glued into place. I checked to make sure the magnets and moving parts still worked and took a few pictures. I was happy with how the first gun came out but know it'll be just a little bit better for future castings/paintings.
Cheers, fellow crafters.
