Making Props – A tricorn hat
Clearly I am going to need a lot of costume items for both the smugglers and for the excisemen. While I will try to find as many as possible in among the iClone marketplace freebies, I will also have to construct some.
I figure one way of helping to differentiate the smugglers from the excise men could be head gear. I don’t think a smuggler would need to wear a hat, but an exciseman should. What sort of hats did excisemen in England wear in the early 1700s? I searched for pictures in Google, but didn’t come up with much. Based on the little I did find and from watching old smuggling movies, it seems possible they may have worn tricorn hats.
Time to make one.
Although not strictly necessary, I decided to make the hat hollow like a real hat, although I could have just made a solid hat, since iClone would still let me position it on the character’s head.
I realised I would need a couple of shapes that would be difficult if not impossible to construct in iClone.
I made them in Sketchup.
The first one (above) was the base for the hat, which would need to be a kind of triangle with the corners clipped off and a hole for the head to go through.
The second one (above) was a semi-circle. I could have made this in iClone itself, but for reasons which will become apparent I wanted to made a ribbon which exactly matched the outside line of the semi-circle. I wasn’t sure how to do that in iClone, which is why I used Sketchup. Note the line that is slightly inside the outer curved edge of the semi-circle. I saved the whole semi-circle and then deleted the centre and having reduced its thickness also saved the outside ribbon as a sepearate object.
Next I opened iClone and selected Props / 3D Blocks / Container / Bowl_001
I then applied the iClone fur material to the bowl. I scaled the fur material to get it to the look the way I wanted.
Using 3DXchange I imported the shapes I had made earlier in sketchup and applied the same fur material to them, except the ribbon, to which I applied a metalic gold material.
Next I spend a considerable amount of time scaling, moving and rotating all my fur covered objects, until they came together to make my tricorn hat.
I saved that and then added the gold ribbon (which was also no walk in the park). I then saved my second version of the hat.
It seems to me that Anthony Gill who appears to be the leader of the excisemen should get the gold braided hat and his men plain fur ones.
If you look carefully you will see that I even inserted a hatter’s label into the one that is upside down in the picture above. Over the top I know, but I couldn’t resist it.
Tony