I’m going to be at Wellington Armageddon and one of my goals is to make enough different pride dice that people can pick and mix their own set! I’ll put any leftovers up for sale online!
(So many stripes! My poor stirring wrists )
*Numbers Not Painted, feel free to suggest a colour
Making snowglobe dice is very fun and they are very beautiful, but I have always been bothered by the unbalanced aesthetic of round beads in square cases (especially with my rectangular d4).
ALT
An additional challenge is that the beads I use for cores have teeeeeny tiny openings because they’re designed for jewelry, so I could only use very fine glitters and not anything else cool.
So, how to solve this problem? Obviously I needed to find something that fits better than round glass beads, and I also needed to have a larger opening to fit a broader variety of filler. Alas, for months of searching I couldn’t find anything that existed that checked all my boxes. Things that worked for the d20 didn’t work for the d4, and not being able to make a full set was just not on.
The solution: Blender, endless tedium of teeny tiny measurements, and loading up clear resin in the printer.
I took my dice models, unextruded all the numbers, deleted the top face, and then solidified it with a 1mm wall, making a hollow die exactly as much smaller than my regular dice as the depth of the number wells so they’d center automatically. I also modeled that deleted face on its own as a cap with beveled edges so I could seal everything up nice and tight with UV resin in a syringe.
I can’t polish the insides to make the inserts crystal clear, but polishing the outsides to high gloss kept the prints transparent enough to see perfectly inside, and the slight matte ended up making my finished product even more amazing:
GELATINOUS CUBES
AN ENTIRE SET OF MOVING SKULL AND BONES GELATINOUS CUBES
EASILY the most amazing things I have ever made. I love them so much.
First off…this seems like an unnecessary extra step….why not just modify the *actual* die model to detach a face….and fill *that*?
Second…investigate “vapor polishing” (uses Acetone with a fan and timer to do a controlled “melt” of the outer surface.)
@judygrrl Good points! Conveniently, my eons of experimentation have answers for you as to why I did it this way (and it’s too wordy for a reply-reply, HA HA WHEE):
1) Vapor polishing is time consuming, uses equipment I don’t have access to, and still leaves a semipitted surface in printed resin just by nature of the beast. I did try this in my course of testing theories to build these, and I might as well have just used the acetone to set my $100 on fire.
2) Using the actual die as the hollow shell didn’t work for me for two reasons! First, having the numbers offset from the moving core increases legibility and just generally makes everything look super cool, and it’s also a little bit of wiggle room to make sure that the cap alignment is good and can’t get accidentally popped off.
I can’t use solid epoxy resin to cure the lid on since everything will leak out in the 24 hours it takes to cure, and something like gorilla glue would etch the surface where it’s sealed and isn’t polishable. So: UV resin to seal the cap in two minutes, then covered with a layer of epoxy so it will never, ever come loose.
Second, and this is the big one: it is absolutely not possible to make a solid mold of a hollow d20. It doesn’t matter how stretchy or firm the shore hardness of your silicone is, you cannot get the d20-inside-plug out of the teeny triangular d20 face, and I have approximately half a gallon worth of various flavors of used Smooth-On to prove it. I could have printed the d20 in two halves and sealed it on the axis, but that would leave a much larger line to have to smooth out and is generally harder to fill; it wouldn’t have been nearly so pretty.
The usual method of resin art is to sculpt a master and mold it, but since that doesn’t work in this case every hollow shell needed to be printed as used and printing a numbered die takes approximately 482847481028 times longer than a non-extruded shape.
So yes, technically extra steps, but for me a better and more worthwhile result. In cases like this I’d rather do a few extra things that I know are foolproof than waste time having to throw out a bunch of failures. :D
Making snowglobe dice is very fun and they are very beautiful, but I have always been bothered by the unbalanced aesthetic of round beads in square cases (especially with my rectangular d4).
ALT
An additional challenge is that the beads I use for cores have teeeeeny tiny openings because they’re designed for jewelry, so I could only use very fine glitters and not anything else cool.
So, how to solve this problem? Obviously I needed to find something that fits better than round glass beads, and I also needed to have a larger opening to fit a broader variety of filler. Alas, for months of searching I couldn’t find anything that existed that checked all my boxes. Things that worked for the d20 didn’t work for the d4, and not being able to make a full set was just not on.
The solution: Blender, endless tedium of teeny tiny measurements, and loading up clear resin in the printer.
I took my dice models, unextruded all the numbers, deleted the top face, and then solidified it with a 1mm wall, making a hollow die exactly as much smaller than my regular dice as the depth of the number wells so they’d center automatically. I also modeled that deleted face on its own as a cap with beveled edges so I could seal everything up nice and tight with UV resin in a syringe.
I can’t polish the insides to make the inserts crystal clear, but polishing the outsides to high gloss kept the prints transparent enough to see perfectly inside, and the slight matte ended up making my finished product even more amazing:
GELATINOUS CUBES
AN ENTIRE SET OF MOVING SKULL AND BONES GELATINOUS CUBES
EASILY the most amazing things I have ever made. I love them so much.
ALT
