Protogens! Work has begun.

Started printing, setting up these guys and thankfully most of the printers are behaving. So this is what I have been up to.

Everything is printed in parts. I really wanted clean looking pieces so I printed them as clean as I could with my machine which is .1 instead of the typical .3 that I print most of my other bases I end up adding fur to. It takes longer but the results are worth it.

Using the Anycubic Vyper, Anycubic Mega X and Artillery Genius for most of these. The puck is being printed on the Artillery X1 since it has a bigger nozzle that does not do detail.

The inner structure that holds the electronics is the only part printed with less detail. I am printing these at .25 and the results are still really nice. Most do not see this part so it does not matter if you see print lines as they will be hidden behind a visor.

The biggest question people ask would probably be the visor. For the first few protogens I am using visors straight from Kaiborg which can be found here:

http://www.kaiborgstudios.com/diy 

Only reason I am currently doing so would be to save on time waiting on my visor set up to be up and ready. I am currently printing my visor puck, need to sand, clear coat and get ready to vacuum form soon. After that I need to set up a day to do visor tinting. All takes a bit of time so for the first few protogens, currently 4 I am doing I am purchasing the visors from Kairborg studios.

Once my visor set up is ready I will move on over to doing my own. Will post the process on doing so once that has begun.

Last night I was able to get my fins printed! Excited to see how good these already look on the head. All the parts are just put on with tape and pressure at the moment. I do plan on creating different looks for fin styles.

So the back of the head is still something I am working on altering. I am wanting to make it as comfortable as possible and definitely want removable padding to make it easy to wash. I have a few ideas for this part to make it comfy to wear over extended periods. More than likely will make that whole padded section easy to velcro on and off.

I want the ear inserts to be fully cut out of acrylic. Since I have a laser cutter I can create really clean cuts/shapes. So I created a pattern for the cut out which I will digitize and use to cut out whatever shape I want. Plan to do it as a 2 part acrylic cut out. The outer area will be black while the cut out will be a frosty white to allow light through. Or the other version would be to allow a solid color through if the person does not want light up cheeks/ear cut outs.

Mmmm electronics. So my friend had made a proto base a while back, sold it to me around a year ago but the base itself was really messy/damaged in a few places I could not fix. I wanted to recycle the electronics which are still good and pass it to one of my bases. Let me tell you the process was a nightmare and a learning experience. Since the parts had been glue on the previous base it took a lot of picking and pulling hot glue from everything. 

I did manage to pull everything off, everything thankfully still works and attempting to glue it fully onto my new base. Ignore the electronic wiring on this one as they were messier being my friends first real attempt at this. The newer ones will be much cleaner. But I am using this one to learn how the in and outs are even for the electronics section of this.

Did a very very quick mock up test fitting it onto my new base and everything seems to work. I need to alter a few cut outs because of the hard glue spots from the previous one I can't seem to fully remove. All in all this project has been interesting and will continue to post progress as I go :).

Want to see more, I am posting a lot of video progress on my TikTok as well:

https://www.tiktok.com/@latinvixenbarks 

We created a twitter just for the Protogens as well:

ttps://twitter.com/MCProtogensh