This is going to be a long one.

You can find some of the backstory explaining this elsewhere on the blog, but to cut a long story short, I made a game. It is called Colour Bind. It’s a physics/puzzle/platform game, and it’s quite challenging. I promised physical trophies would be mailed to people who were the first to achieve various epic feats of brilliance in the game.

This is the story of these trophies.

Now, it’s important to note that I don’t know what I’m doing when it comes to making physical stuff, and I don’t have much of a budget either. What I do have is access to my late father’s workshop (I say without hyperbole that he was a million times better at this kind of thing than I could ever hope to be), and an internet full of advice on how to do things. I was determined to make the trophies like the game – not necessarily perfect, but unique, and made by me according to my own twisted sense of aesthetics. So, off we go.

My first thought? 3D print these suckers. Shapeways lets you print stuff in all manner of crazy materials – I can just make the things in some 3D modelling software and then send them off and we’re all good. Here’s what I came up with:

Pretty ace, right? I thought so too, even if I didn’t get around to attaching Asier’s name to the trophy before I took these screenshots. Anyway, you see what I’m going for. The All Gold and the Coop trophies are the simper ones, but the 15 Platinums (platina?) and the Secret Levels trophies are a bit fancier, because those are the two very difficult ones. I was all set to go. After some wrangling to get them into the right file type (the polygon soup outputted by programs like 3dsmax isn’t what you want – volumetric data is what 3D printers crave), I uploaded them to Shapeways. To my considerable suprise, I had managed to create them all devoid of geometry problems, first time, and they were ready to print!

Unfortunately, there was a bit of a snag. If I wanted them to be of a reasonable size, this was going to set me back quite a bit, even if I just printed them in the cheapest white plastic – certainly getting them in stainless steel or anything fancy like that was going to cost hundreds of dollars at this size. So, I need a better plan.

I got to thinking – printing the cars and stuff makes sense, because I don’t know how I’d go about building one of those cars by hand. But the trophy bases, as well as the curvy bits in the Secret and Platinum trophies, are simple enough shapes – maybe I can make them in some other way.

My new plan is to make the bases out of a slice of wood. I live on a farm, so wood should be reasonably accessible, right? I get a small log, cut a slice of it, and from that slice I shall shave off a face, and that face will give me a place to attach a plaque. Then I can put the model on that. That’ll save quite a bit of 3D printing volume already, and might also make the trophies more interesting.

So, let’s get started. As luck would have it, I had to cut down a couple of almond trees a few months ago (don’t feel bad for them – they were rubbish at actually growing almonds), so I’ll cut myself a slice of that and see how it goes.

There was also some cutting with a regular hand saw in there, but it didn’t make for very interesting photos, so I’m just going to cut to the ‘finished’ product. Don’t act like you’re not jealous of my double glasses set up here, either.

I’ll go into more detail later about whether or not my plan to use totally green almond wood for the base works out well (it doesn’t), but around this time I was distracted because my 3D prints had arrived! Check it out:

These things are so cool! The ability to go from 3D model to 3D object like this is kind of magical. I’m definitely planning on doing some more of this in the future.

From left to right in my left hand, we have – little blue car that I printed for fun and to see what the colour prints were like, gold medal car, secret levels car (note that it’s riding low on its suspension, just like in the game!), the two coop trophy cars, and then another car for a separate thing that I screwed up and didn’t end up using. And of course in my right hand is the medal thing that goes on the platinum trophy. Note the little pegs that most of the models have, to attach them to the various things they need to get attached to. In my next post on the subject, I’ll be talking about taking these prints from white plastic to the colours I need them to be, including the rather onerous problem of getting the goal triangle to be a blend of red, green, and blue.

Before I do that, though, a brief note about the trophy bases. Of all the dumb mistakes I made on this project, the one where I really should have (and on some level, did) know better was cutting a base from undried wood. Woodworkers reading this will know where this is going – when wood dries it will warp and crack, and that’s exactly what happened with this. In the end, the almond wood bases that I made were thrown away, and I did basically the same process to cut some more out of some redgum we have (firewood – nice and dry), as well as some other nice-looking stuff I found downstairs that I think Dad cut from a cherry tree years ago and kept it for some project that never happened. For some reason, I neglected to take any photos of that, so you’ll just have to trust me – the bases show up in later photos, of course, so you’ll see what I’m talking about in the next couple of posts.