Awalon

January jumpstart

Added 2025-01-19 14:37:39 +0000 UTC

Heyo folks, and 'good continuation' as we say over here! A bit later of a post than I'd hoped, buuuut c'est la vie when you catch one of the seasonal illnesses. Dunno' which one it was, so let's just call it the flu. Otherwise things have been pretty good, with quite a lot of progress despite some hiccups. Let's get into it!

(misc pictures galore on this post~)

Suit news

Got the full printer array upgraded and running. With a bit of speed optimization it feels flat-out ridiculous. Full list of stuff:

Went from 0.4mm nozzles to 0.6mm'ers, a 50% increase. Apparently most slicers are a bit less picky about the actual nozzle size relative to printing width nowadays, but here we are anyway. Roughly a 50% print speed increase since I'll be doing mostly solid prints.
Upped the layer thickness from .2 to .3, so another 50% speed increase. It's a noticeable quality reduction on curved parts, but that doesn't matter for the chamber at least.
Improved the settings and reduced 'print fuckups' by like 90%. Apparently at some ancient point in history I'd started using combing with no z-hopping at all, which basically means the print head moves "within" the printed part instead of outside.
It eliminates stringing (aka loose plastic strands) almost entirely, but it also puts additional stress on the print from the jostling it causes. That was apparently a major factor behind some of my pieces failing. Configured for z-hopping and 'outside movement', got a lot of strings, but almost no direct print failures.

All in all, this means that the output from each printer is up to like 250% of baseline. Two 50% increases for +125%, and a decent bit of reliability on top that I'll call 25%. Then two more printers on top of that... It feels genuinely ridiculous how much output I can crunch from them.
Seems to be around 800g/printer/day (see shot - 580g over 17h == 820g/24h), so ~3kg/day when they're all firing at full blast.

...which has me angsting over the fact that filament costs around €20/kg, so €60/day when they're running. So worth it though. A big 30-40kg mold shell finishes in just under two weeks instead of 2-3 months, and I could scale it further easy enough if ever needed.

Now, to balance out the above - some bad news: figured out that I'd fucked up and misnamed a base model in a file a few years back, so when I started assembling I noticed that the full printed chamber ended up the wrong size. Fuck. Context is that a tiny 3-5% oversize print is needed to accommodate latex shrinking during curing. Too small of a diff to be noticeable by eye when printing smaller pieces, but it's almost 10cm of difference when we're talking human mannequin mold scale.

...but since the upgraded printer array works so well, I ALREADY have a new chamber printed with the correct size! Holy shit y'all, it's so fast. Also took a few lessons learned and started assembling it as it printed, so tadaah. I can still use the 'incorrect' prints later when I do different suit sizes, so it's not a complete waste either. Just a bit of time that got wasted, and a (sizeable) chunk of cash. Eh. YOLO mode right now.

Only actually sad consequence of the re-print: I genuinely lack the power to run the latex oven while all the printers are chugging along, so I haven't been able to do proper hood restocking yet. Right as the print finished and power was available again, flu time. Bleh.

By the time I'm writing this I've mostly recovered after a week of bleh'ness, so I'll be catching up asap.

Other news 1: AI hype?!

Discovered that hyper3d.ai exists, which is perfect for my specific usecases! Genuinely a "holy shit this is so perfect"-moment once I tested it out and it actually worked well enough. Photo->AI->3d modelled face, and it's genuinely good at it compared to most of the 'historical' tools. Will save me a massive chunk of time on the modelling front ahead.

Whipped up a couple of designs to test, see the H1-H6 image. Base face sources to remain ~~SecRreT~~ so there's no legal screwups. I'll say it's semi-famous heads, but not A-listers. I can attest that they are surprisingly recognizable if you've nerded faces enough :)

As you can guess, I'll likely throw out new/upgraded 'base model' hoods to the store during the year based on this. Details tbd, want to make sure I get the designs right and the fit predictable enough for selling. Still likely going to do the misc upgrades, lacing etc, to make that happen.

I'll do a longer writeup on what I believe the whole AI thing means for masks & latex stuff sometime in the near future. Kind of reflected on it while I've played around with the various modern tools. Image generation / editing is definitely changing the media landscape, but I do suspect real physical fetish gear will maybe even get a bit of a boost. Saving that writeup for later though!

Other news 2: mask PoC in the works

Started prototyping a new hood/mask concept, kind of a first step towards more advanced masks. Latex is nice, but doesn't carry volume. For volume you need a filler, which means either foam latex or silicone. Foam latex is great but nontrivial to work with, so starting with trying out silicone as a concept.

You can see the diff from my base and the mask placement. It'll quite clearly be a bit oversized, but I'm thinking that might be worth a try. A bit of kig/doll vibe or something. Tricky bit is that it's nearly 5dL of volume in there, aka quite a lot of silicone money. Will see how things pan out.

Latex cast came out great, silicone cast a bit meh because of Ancient Supplies. They've been sitting for 5-10 years, so the uncured parts weren't exactly liquid. Cured okay though, so it'll do for experiments! Going to try lenses to accommodate the eye placement, and maybe give the nose tubes a shot at last. Details tbd.

Unfortunately I caught the flu right as I was about to start prepping the latter bits, so this is where we're at for now.

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So, what's next? Plenty of stuff long term, but y'know, that's looked mostly the same for a long time. The interesting bit is the short-term stuff, where we're finally close to unblocking the major things:

Suit rig:

Recover from flu (nearly done!)
Fully assemble the chamber and seal it up with backing glue and interior acrylic lining.
Assemble the 'backing' for the chamber, aka filler-foam and wooden support structure.
Get a fill-test done on it
Finish up the mannequin mold surface polishing
Cast, at last, and have a blast!

Hoods: