Looks like love at first sight to me

Recently we finished up our four-episode LARP series, High Frontier: Gods and Monsters, which has been stuck in my consciousness ever since mid-2019. The pandemic delayed the first episode but we've run one episode a year since 2022 and it felt like I always had something for it on my to-do list.

Despite being set in our variant of the Alien/Prometheus universe we had not so far featured any Xenomorphs in the game and that was about to change.

An obvious way to signal this in advance is to feature the iconic visual of a Facehugger in a huge glass tube. I've been meaning to make one of these for years and had an earlier version that never really worked I junked.

Buying a large enough clear tube for the task was something I looked at over time but anything the right size was simply outside our prop budget. Knowing we really wanted this in the game I decided to bend a sheet of 3mm acrylic. How hard could it be?

Turns out it was quite hard.

I picked up a 1800x900mm 3mm acrylic sheet and used this halved as my basis to scale everything else, allowing me to make two tubes.

Not being an RPF level prop maker all my stuff just needs to look "about right". I always prioritise it being repeatably makeable and able to stand transport and handling by random people in the LARP.

You can bend acrylic with heat and last time I need to do larger pieces for ORAC I put them in an oven, which worked fantastically. Short of asking a local bakery nobody has an oven that's going to take square sheets this large. Which meant progressive use of a hot air gun was about the only option open to me.

Having done the calculation on the size of tube this would make it turned out I had a large cardboard tube close so I clamped the acrylic to this and repeatedly formed the sheets over this in a process that ended up taking a couple of days.

Meanwhile I found some reference photos of the original props and started doing a rough replica in CAD for 3D printing. There's a reason I own a large format bed slinger 3D printer, it's slow unfashionable and fairly low quality but it allows me to print larger items like this.

Some time back I had found a 3D poseable printable model of a Facehugger model and had printed all the parts for a couple as I'd planned to make two tubes. These ended up being really quite difficult to assemble even when following the printing instructions. The joints are super tight and even with careful printing on my newer printer and some sanding of the 'knuckles' they were prone to snapping when forced together. In the end I think I printed enough to make three and managed to get two completed ones.

I'd designed the top/bottom sections that hold the tube with a small groove in that should hold the acrylic into its tube shape and make the whole thing kind of seamless so as I got the first pieces off the printer I started to assemble things. Here I realised my mistake, I could see the tube wasn't perfect but 'almost round' and hoped constraining it into the printed pieces would even things out. Getting frustrated I tried to force it in and snapped a large corner chunk off, acrylic is quite brittle.

So we were down to one tube and I spent yet more hours trying to get that acrylic tube properly round.

The two Facehuggers got a rudimentary paint job. I'm a fan of heavy coats of generic DIY emulsion paint and varnish to cover layer lines on organic shapes and it worked out OK. The second Facehugger would still end up getting used laid out on a table.

The top and bottom sections got proper priming and sanding as they needed to look like metal close up.

When I came to fit the remaining tube, despite spending a long time bending it I still struggled to get it to fit, even with constraining it with straps and now realise I should have put a bevel in at least the inside of the slot it's supposed to fit otherwise it's just too hard to do singlehanded. With the LARP only a week away I didn't have time for a second costly mistake so I just taped the tube outside the top/bottom sections and up the back to cover the now large gap. I know it's not right but in the final analysis the players just saw a cool large prop so it did the job.

People with a decent memory of the original will see the control panel piece in the top section never got modelled and printed. I hit "perfect is the enemy of good" quite quickly once we were close to the event so I simply left it out. Now we're past it and I've got an interesting if huge prop to display in my house I think I'll go back and finish it up. I may even try to remove the tape and fit the acrylic properly, perhaps re-printing the round sections with a larger, tapered groove.