In early 2022 I was contacted by a fellow Tolkien cosplayer looking to have me reproduce a metal hair accessory worn by Kili in The Hobbit films. He had photos of one for me to reference, but I don’t know where they originally came from so I won’t post them here. He also sent me a 3D model, so this seemed like a no-brainer. I’d print the model, mold and cast it, and we’d be all set. Except that upon printing the model, neither of us was happy with how it looked. I rebuilt the model from scratch, first by drawing it flat in Illustrator, then bringing it into Blender as an SVG. From there I extruded it, and tried to distort it around a bezier curve. That was not as straightforward as I’d hoped. Up until this point, any 3D modeling work that I needed to do, I’d done in Fusion 360. They have a free version for hobbyists, and a paid version if you do any commercial work with it. So now that I was accepting money, I forced myself to learn the completely free Blender software instead. One thing that is frustrating about Blender is that the geometry it creates when you extrude an SVG is not ideal. Since then I’ve learned ways to achieve better geometry, but at that time the best I could do was “remesh” the model and THEN distort it around the curve. This results in a very dense mesh, but it got me the results I wanted.
After printing this new model, sanding it to clean up the print lines, and molding it in Mold Max 60, I cast a beautiful pewter hair accessory. The original example he found had used a barrette, but he didn’t like that solution. I used JB Weld to adhere two alligator clips to the inside, so Kili could clip this to a hair tie.
Later that spring, he reached out again to see if I would also make Kili’s belt buckle, buckles for his bracers and boots, and various other pieces for the costume. I was up for a challenge, and apparently not busy enough making Théodred, so I accepted. This forced me to learn more about modeling in Blender, and pushed the limits of my mold-making abilities. One of the challenges here was that there were conflicting reference photos of unknown provenance for the main buckle, and only blurry photos of the smaller buckles. It’s likely we were looking at a fan recreation and got thrown off-track. Either way, we decided on a version to use and carried on. The smaller buckles were apparently a portion of the large buckle, with a floating additional portion attached to the “keeper”. I don’t understand it, but I made them. Finally, I also made two octagon rings and bunch of small tiles using the same method of modeling in Blender, 3D printing, molding, and casting.
