CONCEPT
My neighbor's son does Martial Arts including using nunchucks. He's also a big Call of Duty fan. He asked if I could recreate this pair of Nunchucks from Call of Duty: Ghosts.
The in-game model of the nunchucks my neighbor's son wanted.
PROCESS
I didn't have a way to get the model for the nunchucks and so I resorted to making my own. I first tried roughly sculpting the dragon in clay and using Autodesk ReMake to turn it into a mesh I could edit in Autodesk Meshmixer. When that didn't work, I started with one of Meshmixer's default animal heads and eventually got to my final model.
I printed it and tried smoothing it with sanded Bondo. When that worked well, I printed attached the dragon to a cylinder and added the dragon scale texture wrapping around the sides in Meshmixer. Bondo, sandpaper, spray-paint, masking tape, spray-paint, clear coat and they were almost done.
I had a chain from an old clock that looked like it'd fit the model well. I heated up some nails with a lighter and pressed the nail through the PLA, locking the chain into their hilts.
One sanded nunchuck next to a Bondo-ed and sanded one.
Detail view on the head.
Nunchucks after gold spraypaint.
Peeling off the masking tape.
Nunchucks painted with black acrylic paint.
After dry-brushing.
OUTCOME
I'm really happy with how they turned out. Meshmixer is definitely not the best way to do digital sculpting, but worked well enough to get the dragon head defined. It was also a great test of smoothing and post-processing 3D-prints! Though he doesn't actually use them to practice, my neighbor's son still has them hanging on his wall.
Close up on the dragon heads.
Close up on the dragon heads.
