Counter-Strike: PGL Antwerp Case
In recent years I've enjoyed learning about prop and model making - largely thanks to the contagious enthusiasm Adam Savage shows on his YouTube channel.
I finally found an excuse to get my hands(and flat) dirty - A group of us who regularly played CS:GO together decided to come together from around the world to attend a CS:GO tournament in Antwerp.
One of the guys generously hosted 10 of us for the week and I wanted to thank him for bringing us all together. So I built him a unique commemorative case as a gift to remember the event by.
Valve do not make physical merchandise and there was no PGL case released in-game so this case is unique in it's design - especially as it has the Steam IDs of the guys who attended written on the sides.
Preparation
I found the model in the game files using modding tools, extracted it and bought it into Blender to get measurements and scale.
I worked with what I had and some of the measurements are close to the original but rounded up to the nearest styrene sheet thickness or tube diameter.
The idea being that I was working with material properties instead of against them in the pursuit of exact extreme precision.
The most challenging part of this build was replicating the injection moulded lid with the tools that I had.
My solution was to heat the plastic tubes with a candle and bend them 90° around a pen lid.
The tubes gave the lid both rounded sides and rounded corners but there were a lot of gaps between the tubes and the flat surfaces.
I used multiple passes of model filler and sanding to fill the gaps and bring the lid together to look like a single piece of manufactured plastic.
The primer hides the discolouration of the filler, makes the imperfections more obvious and visually transforms these bits of plastic into a model.
Here you can see the lid is looking like a single piece but there's a couple of and imperfections that needed smoothing out.