Crash Team Racing – Power Crystal

June 13, 2014

I’ve always been a fan of the PS1 Crash Bandicoot games. They were some of the first games I got for my Playstation, and I still play them every now and then today. Especially Crash Team Racing (CTR) stands out as an all time favorite for me.

In fact, I’ve had an on again, off again feud going with a friend about who’s the best at CTR. We’ve finally decided to settle the score once and for all, but in order to do so, we’d need to be playing for something.

As we’re both broke students, I decided against a pricey generic sports trophy and landed on something more related to Crash Bandicoot.

While it’s not CTR specific, I felt that the Power Crystal would make a more striking, and more fun to make item than the actual trophies used in CTR.

To skip the build and to go straight to the finished pictures of the thing —-> Click Here <—-

In order to do it right, I knew that getting the right look of the crystal would be hard if not impossible with paints. So I had to learn how to handle clear casting resin.

Before I get to casting, I needed a model to make a mold of first though. My first thought was to cut a rough shape from styrofoam and skin that in resin.

After my first attempt at that, I quickly found out that the tools I had weren’t really precise enough for this type of thing and I’d end up using far too much pricy resin to build the shape back up.

Instead of strarting from scratch again, I decided to slim down my styrofoam crystal and coated it in air drying clay. I knew from when I made the master sculpt for my Majora’s Mask that I’d be able to let that dry and then sand it to the shape I wanted. Which, for a guy who hasn’t really done much sculpting work, seemed like a better alternative.

I also put the entire thing on an 8 mm aluminum rod. That both helped me keep it upright while working on it, and also served as a pour spout for when the crystal got molded.

This solution came with its own share of problems though.

A thin layer of dry, brittle clay on top of a core of soft styrofoam meant that this thing had to be worked very carefully in order to keep the clay from cracking and flaking.

In the end this meant a lot of filling and sanding to get each facet of the crystal to be as smooth as possible.

After sanding and priming for what seemed like a week, I was finally happy with the state of the crystal, and got ready to mold it.

I decided to go for a glove mold with a single cut line.as that would allow me to hide the seamline on the back of the trophy in case it got messed up somehow.

In order to not get any airbubbles caught on the surface of the crystal I dabbed on a thin beautycoat of silicone on with a brush.

I then spread on a couple of layers of thickened silicone on to build up the thickness of the mold.

For this mold I used Mouldlife’s Supersil 25, which was all I had at the time. On reflection, I’d probably have used Supersil 15 instead, as that cures to a softer rubber that is more suitable for mold that are to be turned inside out.

When the silicone cured I made a two part mother mold with plaster.

Then came the time for actually using the mold.

Having done some research online, I found out that in order to get bubblefree resin castings, you need to cast your resin in a pressure tank. A nice guide on how to turn a pressure paint tank into a pressure chamber can be found HERE.

But seeing as the stuff needed is a little harder or more expensive to come by in Denmark, I had to hope for the best, and do my casting without a pressure chamber.

I used Mouldlife’s Poly-Optic 1411 for my clear casting needs.

Again, as I was working on a budget, I knew I’d have 3 tries at the most to get it right or I’d run out of clear casting resin.

Having recently seen Volpin Prop’s Halo 4 Needler build on Tested, I knew what to use to tint my resin with: Smooth-On’s IGNITE Flourescent Purple dye.

For an entire crystal weighing about 500 g I only used 5 drops of dye.

My first pull looked fantastic at first, until I saw the seam line.

Apparently one side of the mold had fallen inside the mold at some point and caused this on the back of the crystal.

This was beyond salvaging, so I just viewed it as a testpiece.

On a more positive side, it looked like the trapped airbubbles problem wasn’t as bad as I had imagined. It was mostly a problem at the bottom of the crystal, as that was at the top of the mold when I poured it.

Second attempt turned out better.

With a still not perfect, but good enough seamline, I went with it.

I drilled a hole in the bottom of the crystal and glued in an 8 mm threaded rod in the hole.

Blurry photo, but you can still definitely make out the bubbles trapped in the bottom.

Quick test of the crystal mounting. A nut on either side of this piece of MDF keeps it in place.

I wanted to hide as much of the mounting rod as possible, and I figured making the base look like a sandy beach would be the best way to do that.

So I sculpted a quick sandy looking base on top of the 20 x 20 cm piece of MDF, then molded and cast it in EasyFlow 120.

I then made a box for the base to sit inside, as I was planning on adding LEDs to the base, so I’d need some room underneath the thing to hide the wires and batteries.

I hotglued the base to the sides of the box at the right height, and made sure the gaps between the base and the sides were sealed.

Another test. Here I realised that I had forgotten to put the one nut inbetween the resin sculpt and the MDF baseplate. I later fixed this.

Also note that the crystal has been sanded slightly on some sides.

Clear cast pieces can be sanded, but they will become more opaque. You bring back the transparency by spraying a shiny clearcoat after cleaning the sanded area.

Thanks to Kamui Cosplay for that tip!

I brushed on a thin layer of watered down woodglue on the surface of the sand base and then poured actual beach sand on top of that.

I experimented with different kinds of sand from playgrounds and parks, but beach sand just had so much more variety to it.

When the glue had set, the excess sand was tapped off.

While waiting for the glue to set, I moved on to the details on the stand. As it was, it was looking a little bare, so I decided on making some crates and wumpa fruits to stick with the Crash theme.

For the crate, I first found the textures used ingame.

Seeing as every side of the crate was textured the same, I figured that making a single side of a crate and molding it would be easier than trying to make the entire six-sided crate and making everything symmetrical.

I cut a piece of 4×4 cm piece of 4mm MDF and sketched out how I wanted everything to go on it.

The raised areas were then made with small pieces of 2 mm MDF, carefully sanded to shape with a Dremel.

Using a dull X-acto blade, I cut a bit of woodgrain and a few nicks here and there, which would come in handy when painting and weathering. Then primed and did a quick block mold.

After pulling six copies from the mold, I used my Dremel to bevel the edges on the back of the crate sides in order to get them fit together.

A bit of super glue and some filler later and I had a crate ready to prime and paint.

While waiting for the primer to dry, I gave the sides of the base a couple of coats of black paint and a matte clearcoat.

I gave the crate a couple coats of orangey brown and then went at it with a darker brown for the boards. The weathering was done with the same shade of brown, putting in it a lot of the crevices and cuts and then wiping off the excess paint.

I felt like the entire thing was missing a bit of color, so I made some quick wumpa fruits by letting balls of air-drying clay dry, painting them and gluing some leaves made of Fimo clay to finish them off.

That left me with finishing the base of the trophy.

Compared to the golden beach sand used in the game, real life sand looks very dull and grey.

So I busted out my airbrush and used a couple varieties of beige, yellow and brown to bring it closer to its ingame counterpart.

In order to bring the power part to the power crystal, I decided on lighting it with some LEDs.

After seeing how well Volpin’s Halo 4 Needler spikes turned out I figured I could use the same idea. Instead of embedding the LEDs inside the crystal, I’d hide them in the base of the trophy.

So I drilled four 5mm holes that all point towards the crystal and then made a small circuit with a pink LED inserted into each of the holes.

I figured I’d hide the holes as much as possible behind the other items on the base, so I did a quick setup and marked out spots with green tape.