I've always thought of gelatinous cubes as having smooth, regular surfaces like Jell-o cubes, as opposed to the partially-melted appearance that they are given with most manufactured and homemade miniatures.
At one time, I created a model that I was going to cast in clear resin, but I never got around to getting new casting materials after my last batch went bad.
One of these days I'll have enough sculpts built up to make it worth my while to create molds again, but in the mean time, I found a nice proxy for gelatinous cube miniatures: clear acrylic ice cubes.
These cubes are not an exact match for what I had in mind for gelatinous cubes, but I like them because they are optically clear.
The 4cm x 4cm cubes are roughly equivalent to 10' x 10' gelatinous cubes. The 2cm x 2 cm and 1cm x 1cm cubes represent gelatinous cubes that have been broken into smaller pieces.
These acrylic ice cubes are readily available on eBay, and are pretty inexpensive. The large cubes work out to be about US$1.75 each (though the problem is that I had to buy 16 of them), the medium ones about 53¢ each, and the small ones about 17¢ each.
One issue with the cubes, is that there is always one corner that is rough and unfinished. It looks like that corner is where the pour for the acrylic ended during the manufacturing process.
I tried to polish the corner with a flame, but it created a ripple effect on the surface. I also tried filing the corner down and coating it with Future floor wax, but some of the gouges were too deep to fill.
Still, the cubes are serviceable without having to do anything if you are not obsessive about perfection.
These look great! I was considering these when looking for cheap gcubes. I'm glad to see they work so well.
ReplyDeleteI turned them down because you couldn't actually engulf minis inside. My half-finished gcube is a repurposed golf ball display case: I just need to figure out how to make it look less geometrical and more gelatinous.
1Mac,
ReplyDeleteSince I have so many extra large cubes, I was thinking about drilling a couple out so that they could engulf minis.
For your display case, I might suggest using a heatgun to round out the edges, but it may mess up how the case opens up depending on how it is configured.
I'd like to see that! Everyone likes to see a mini eating another mini.
ReplyDeleteI appreciate the heatgun suggestion, but the little case wouldn't work if I tried to warp it in any way. Picture a sort of C-shaped construction that's three faces of a cube. The case is two of these constructions that interlock, so they have to be pretty straight. I'm thinking of just covering it with some sort of clear caulk or modeling compound.