How to make a district 9 Weapon

Step 5 The Handle

The handle is one of the most complicated shapes on the weapon. This is made from pink foam which is quite carveable by hand. I split the shape into a further three parts, the handle, the trigger (easy) and the guard. I started to cut them out by hand and my skills deserted me so at this point I resorted to my CNC. This allowed me to carve the handle and the guard from the same piece of foam. The trigger was cut from the gap between the two (although with a bit more effort it could have been joined as well)

First thing was to create a pattern for my CNC to cut around. In my 3D modeling package I loaded the image as texture on a simple polygon. I scaled the polygon to the appropriate size and then started to use it to draw some splines. (Splines are special lines that my router will follow to cut out an object). The splines are converted to GCode through the program CamBam, and then run on my router with the program Mach 3. I'm sure if you have access to some kind of CAD machine this will already make sense to you, if you don't then you can come round and borrow mine (genuinely) or you're stuck doing it by hand.