Spookiness

This is a recap and condensed blog, constructed from several old blogs of my previous blog site.

I have always loved Halloween stuff, even loooooong before it became popular in the EU. Naturally, my Sylvs love it too. I started with a Halloween department in the Grand Department store, but then the idea to create an entire diorama creeped up on me.

I had some terrible fake grass to throw away, but decided to put it to use for a few days in a diorama.

Here is the old blog: grass quest

Wizard of Oz characters were also created. 

The scarecrow received a custom-made prosthetic. A piece of kitchen foil was placed in a double layer over the Labrador. The top of the foil was then coated with acryl, so it would peal off easier after and it dried for 24 hours.

A mix of white silicone for bathrooms was mingled with a color acryl paint which came close to the Labrador's skin color. It was smeared over the head, another piece of foil pressed over it, so it could be gently molded into a way that it looked thin enough and covered the head. 

It dried for 36 hours, the entire prosthetic was removed from the head, the foil got peeled away, and dried for another 24 hours. The face of the Labrador was cut out, eyebrows drawn onto it with a permanent marker, and then the Labrador got dressed.

Here's the result!

I was sad that it had to go. That grass smelled bad and the sand paths were unmanageable. But the idea to make a permanent larger setup started to brood again in my mind. I hoped that one day, one big suitable creepy building would be released, but it didn't.

Choices in Sylvanian buildings to spookify are either meager and too small for my needs. Non Sylvanian houses were not suitable regarding basic looks, the wrong scale, or made from sad materials like MDF, and usually far too expensive. Being disabled, my handywoman days are wayyyyy in the past to make one myself anymore.

But now, I had a 3D printer ... you saw that coming, right? I wanted a dilapidated looking house, yet in a charming, not scary way, since JollyOaksField is a town of happiness.

Haunted houses are usually designed in Second Empire style. Oh, boy, do I love that! Nooks, towers, mansard roofs, porches, bay windows, bracketed eaves, ... gasp!

All free printable models were investigated, I even looked at printable models for sale, but no luck there either. Choices were extremely limited. I finally looked into the fact of converting a 3D non-printable drawing / model into a 3D design to print, and that was often possible apparently, yet a massive task and I could not really find how it was done properly. More choices available this way, yay!

A drawing / model has nothing substantial in it's file which can be printed. I tried converting a simple model first, and it was completely unusable as it was garbled once converted.

Finally, I found a 3D drawing which took my breath away! It came so close to what I had envisioned. It was money well spent! The designer asked to see the result of my project, so I hope he likes it when he sees these blogs. https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/haunted-house-a2afaa12da334f7c8ecfd77fb8518e8a I kept the color scheme too, as it was perfect.

The designer was partially inspired by this DIY wooden dollhouse, a building I also knew, but it costs an arm and a leg, was the wrong scale and made from MDF: the Beacon Hill. 1:12 scale sometimes fits Sylvanians, but this house was too high. Sylvanian scale size is not something you can put a finger on. It's a distorted 1:12 mostly.

Many weeks since I started, I finally had composed the 3D building. I had to start over many times close to the finishing line. No problem, as I improved a few items with each design. It was a steep learning curve.

Since TinkerCad only seems to allow small files to upload currently, the entire description on how I handled the conversion back then, has become obsolete. I will just show you some pics of the process. Now, you would have to clean up a model in Blender, by learning basic Blender skills first. Blender is free, tutorials can be found on YouTube and in their helpfiles.

This was the start: a full closed off block with junk parts inside, which is normal for a 3D drawing not meant to print. The windows were closed, they had to come out.

The backside was closed off as well.

First attempt failed due to filesize in Tinkercad. The second attempt was also almost finished, but froze and stopped being editable. Here is what it looked like when it froze completely.

This was the completely stripped model at third attempt. All junk parts out, all visible errors removed.

Backside:

This stripped model needs to be cleared of errors next. Best free program to do so is MeshMixer. Not fixing errors makes them breed or form huge gaps, lol. This is how +600 errors look like in the program. Not fixing these one by one manually made them multiply tenfold. Automated fix did not work, so one by one was the only option left.

You need save copies during the process, as you will run into various issues and try and find solutions for it. Don't forget to rescale to fit Sylvanians.

The info of the issues I had with cutting parts up, adding floor levels, adding skirting, are also obsolete now, because of the fact that current printers print faster, and therefore can easily print bigger parts in shorter timespans.

I was asked how much PLA filament I used per house, because I printed 2, not including the extras. The dark pearl purple: 2 rolls of 1000g. The silver which represented zinc: 1 roll of 750g. The floor bases: 500g of grey. The floor tops and wall paneling / skirting: 1.5 rolls of 1000g of ash grey. The extras ... not so much per color, really, except for grey, as1kg was used for cobblestones, the courtyard, etc.

I also decided on a lot of extras to embellish the project, like furniture, skirting, a courtyard, stained glass windows, fences, and a street, for example. I spotted a picture of an awesome bed online, and decided to design it into a printable file. This was that bed I saw, and the result is fab, you will see soon! I want a bed for myself like that, lol! Now, AI can turn that picture into a 3D model, but back then, it took a lot of work to do it manually.

The house assembly was done with Pattex Special for plastic on wider surfaces and a superglue pen on small rims.

Here's a sneak preview of a bay window. It could have been printed in finer detail, but it had to look old and scruffy, so that was not a necessity in this case. I was ever so pleased that even in this rougher print, all the scruffiness was shown nicely detailed, exactly as on the model I saw in 3D viewer. For example, this bay window took 3 days to print, about 13 hours per part, it's in 3 parts glued together. Now, this can easily be printed in a few hours with more recent printers, all in one go.

The roof tiles were painted with a thin layer of mat anthracite grey acrylic, so they would look like slate, in contrast with the zinc looking filament it was printed with. The bay roofs were also colored in the same grey. The door frames, windows and shutters were also painted with acrylic burgundy model paint. The chimney bricks got colored in an olive grey model paint.

The grapes were not printed, as store-bought grapes looked a lot more realistic, in resin and silicone. The resin grapes were easy to glue on. Since silicone is notoriously hard to glue, a needle with yarn solved that issue. The thread was woven through the vines after.

The printed indoor wall skirting was designed in a way that it would hold the electricity cables for miniature LED lights at the backside. All were left unattached, so the lights could be replaced in case it was necessary. They are 1:12 scale and can be used perfectly.

I had to think about where to place them, as they had limited wire length and I did not want to extend the wires in a visible spot. Also, they have tiny connectors, extenders and plugs, just like human sized electricity, so I had to think about how and where to hide the connectors, and using a minimal setup, so it would not turn into a cable hell.

I printed some cable lanes for the electricity wires, to hide them when they went from one floor level to the next. The lanes were glued in place using a tiny bit of non-permanent glue, so they could be easily removed if a light or wire needed to come out in future.

The lights are a bit of a miss, they don't work properly, due to the fact that they are way too delicate. The lights were all adjusted by hand right before I took pictures and I actually photoshopped pics together to have a 100% working lights.

I needed additional light fixtures, so I had hub fiddling with ultrathin cables, tiny LED bulbs and plugs, and a soldering tool, so the homemade LEDS were put in 3D printed items. That was a cheap and easy way to provide for several extra lights. There was no way I was going to buy complete lights anymore after that previous disappointment.

Tiny holes were drilled with a Dremel, to stick the LED's and wires through the walls next to the doors.

As for the courtyard, as printing it in an old moss color failed miserably, the cracks are filled up with miniature moss. Love this idea a lot better even. Glue was put between the cracks and the moss just tucked into it. Easy as pie.

This project was printed on 2 printers, which both died after power outages, although they shouldn't have. 8 months of fiddling and finally, here is my storyline vid! Enjoy!

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x8ch050