OVERLOADED Pewter belt buckle
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Modeling a cast pewter belt buckle from original art © from the band
OVERLOADED
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Some work of this type benefits from using raster to vector conversion
software, in this case all that was usable was the text and that still needed
much clean up. So used the art as a background in Rhino3D and traced the main
lines. Usually far faster and easier than fixing a conversion even if at the
begining it seems a rather daunting task. Modify these lines to get some of the
desired depth and build surfaces. The new UDT tools in Rhino3D ver 4 proved
very useful for adjusting the final
shapes, especially fitting the star flowing from under to over the skull. In
many places the
definition of features depends mainly on depth and I only had a few millimetres
to work with.
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Once I was reasonably happy with the results I added vertical walls. They
aren't needed for milling but a render of dis-jointed surfaces floating in
space is difficult to
understand. An emailed render and a bit of back and forth and the design was
finalised
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Final Render
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There were not too many changes required, mainly just the consideration of a
couple of finishing options and a distortion to better fit a belt buckle format
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Finished Buckle
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I did not cast the final pewter. Silver, gold, and pewter do not belong in the
same workshop, a speck of pewter will cause much grief when hard soldering gold
or silver. I milled it in a high temperature plastic resin, and hand finished
the model. Another client who specialises in pewter casting made
the molds, casted and finished the buckles. Here is a sample of the final result.
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