Lighting Rig v2.0

Since 2001, my gaming group Rogue Cthulhu has used special effect lighting in our game room at Origins. To hold all the lighting equipment overhead, I constructed a custom lighting rig, which consisted of four telescoping upright posts and two 20 foot long sections of an aluminum ladder.

 It has undergone a few modifications to improve its stability over the years, but it has essentially remained unchanged since it was first built. Like any system, it has its drawbacks. The fact that all four posts have to be raised and lowered simultaneously was a big one. Also, those ladders are difficult to store and transport, and they don't provide any adjustability. I've been telling myself for years that I was going to build something better, but cost, portability, weight, and simplicity kept bringing me back to the same design. This year I finally made some progress on improving the RC light rig- starting with getting rid of those damned ladders.

While it's hard to beat aluminum for its strength to weight ratio, the ladders were really overkill in the strength department. They are capable of holding several hundred pounds of load, while we only really needed to use about fifty pounds of cords and lights. I looked at several (many, many) material and design options to replace the ladders. I needed something lightweight, easily portable (probably modular with sections no longer than 8-10ft), durable, cheap to build- requiring no equipment or skills to which I did not have access, and able to span 20+ feet with no center support. That last one was the killer. Lots of things can span 10ft. with no problem, even 15ft. if pressed, but 20 or more feet with no center support and you start to have troubles. In order to have the strength to span that distance and hold any kind of load safely, your truss starts to become huge and heavy, and its own weight becomes an issue. Although I had trouble with using wood as a material for the upright posts (warping, splintering, etc.), it gave me the best strength to weight ratio that I could afford. After looking into several truss designs, I decided to make telescoping sections of square tubing out of 3/8in. plywood.

 The plan was to make several sections of rectangular tubing. Some would be slightly larger and would slide over the others. Each truss would be made from three sections; one outer tube in the middle with one slightly smaller tube coming out each end. The outer tube would have to be completely hollow inside, but the inner tubes could have bulkheads to give them strength and stability without adding much weight. I ripped a sheet of 3/8in. plywood into strips. The strips, when put together, would make a box (tube) roughly 6in by 7in by 8 feet. I also cut 5/8in. MDF into rectangular bulkheads to fit inside the smaller tubes. Though I didn't have an immediate need to, I drilled out the centers of the bulkheads because I would never have the opportunity to again. Also, it cut down a little on weight.

Five bulkheads were equally spaced along the 8ft. length of the tube. They were glued and stapled in place. A prodigious amount of clamping was done to ensure a tight glue bond. The edges of the plywood, where they came together, were also glued and stapled. For maximum strength, I used a LOT of staples. About one every two inches. Hey, staples are cheap!

 Before the last side was glued and stapled into place, I gave the interior a good coating of stain and polyurethane mix. Then, after the last side was in place and the glue dry, I sanded the exterior smooth with a belt sander, making sure to round off the corners to avoid splintering and to give a little clearance at the corners when the sections were fitted together. Since the sections would need to fit together with minimal clearance, and yet slide smoothly, I needed the exterior of the inner tube (and the interior of the outer tube) to be very smooth. After sanding, I gave the exterior two coats of stain and poly mix, sanding between coats. Here are two of the inner tubes finished. One is still waiting to be stained.

Putting together the outer tube was a little trickier. The interior of the outer tube had to be nice and smooth, so the strips had to be sanded before assembly. Since it didn't have interior bulkheads to keep the sides square while gluing and stapling, I used one of the inner tubes as a temporary bulkhead. I put some glue along the edges of the boards, then clamped the walls of the outer tube to the sides of the inner tube, got everything square and even and then stapled the crap out of it. I had to be very careful to send the staples in straight. I couldn't have any staples sticking through on the interior side, and I couldn't have any splintering.

After the staples were in, I removed the inner tube so I could clean up any glue that smooshed out the seam. I didn't want it to end up gluing the two tubed to each other!

This process was repeated for each side, letting them dry before moving on to the next side.

When three of the four sides were together, I gave the interior a nice heavy coat of stain and poly mix. Then the fourth side was glued and stapled into place (without the inner tube).

 I was careful to make the seams as strong as I could, but without interior bulkheads, the outer tube would be too weak to be used the way I wanted. The stress of the inner tubes prying the sides apart at the ends as the load bore down on the center of the truss would be far more than the glue and staples along a 3/8in. edge could safely handle. And since this thing would be holding lighting over the heads of dozens of people, it needed to be reinforced. I accomplished this be using steel strips to bind around the outside of the tube, like the rings of a wooden barrel.

 The steel flat-stock was bent at right angles in a vise, then taken over to the work piece and measured for fit before the next angle was bent. This was repeated until the steel wrapped all the way around the tube, very snugly. The steel was cut so the ends would just meet and then they were welded together while being clamped tightly to the tube.

I wouldn't have been able to do this last part a few years ago. I just learned how to use a MIG welder at my current day job. I'm no professional welder, but I get by.

 I put four steel bindings on the outer tube. One at each end, and one more about two feet from each end. When the inner tubes stick into the ends of the outer tube, they will only go in about two feet. That will put most of the stress from the cantilever action on the seams at this two foot section at the end. With two steel bindings at each end, it should have no trouble holding together under that stress. I did a stress test with a scrap outer tube (I glued the wrong sides together) without any steel bindings. It held up over a hundred pounds of dead weight, but started to crack when I stood on it (300lbs.).

 After the bindings were in place, I gave the exterior two coats of stain and poly mix. I wanted to have every part of the truss stained and polyed not only for looks, but for smoothness and to help prevent warping.

Here is the full length truss being held aloft by two DJ lighting rig stands that I bought off of eBay. The center section is not stained or bound with steel (it was the scrap one that I glued wrong). With two feet of overlap at each section joint, the overall length is 20ft. I can push it to 22ft if I only overlap 12 inches, but that's as far as I think I should go. As you can see in the photo, there is no deflection at full extension without a load.

I made two of these trusses, to replace the two ladder sections. For their implementation at Origins 2013, I put one of them on the old telescoping uprights and one on a pair of new DJ lighting stands I bought on eBay, and then modified (more on them in another post). You can see a slight deflection in the picture below, but that is not due to the weight. That is due to the 1/8in. gap between the large and small tubes. It was hard to cut and fit the pieces together under tight tolerance, and I was afraid to make them fit together any tighter, for fear that future swelling and warping might make them not fit together or slide properly.

Once the pieces were slid together on site, laying on the floor, I drilled through both outer and inner tubes simultaneously and pinned them together with a piece of all-thread and some nuts and washers at each end. I was going to pre-drill a bunch of holes along the length so it would be adjustable but decided it would be easier to just re-drill holes at whatever position I wanted on site. When it gets full of holes and hard to line up properly (in 10-12 years, I can always re-make them.

The lights were held up with mechanic's wire wrapped around the girth of the truss. The electrical cords were taped up with vinyl electrical tape. I did drill out more holes in the old uprights to make them more adjustable for height. Now that Club Carcosa is over, we only use about 25 pounds of lights and cords on each truss. These trusses can hold more than four times that amount, so we have lots of room to expand our effects repertoire, and a stable platform on which to mount it.

The truss sits on top of the uprights without being clamped down. The wide base of the truss allows it to sit flat on the top of the post with no worry of twisting. The truss has a hole drilled in the bottom near the end which rides on a pin made from a 1/2in. bolt, which sticks up from the top of the upright, about 3in. In order for the truss to fall or slide in any direction (other than straight up), it would have to jump straight up more than 3 inches. I figure, if it does that, we've got bigger problems! And I can always put in a strap or something to keep it from moving in that direction.

 The sits-on-pin design means that the truss doesn't need to be clamped down. Since it can float on the pin to some degree, the two uprights can be raised and lowered independently (or at least they don't have to track perfectly with each other like they did before). Also, one of the modifications I made to the uprights was to put bigger bases on them, so they would be more stable without having to have all four joined together. This allows us to move the two trusses farther apart or put them at odd angles, and allows us to raise and lower them independent of each other. That's a big improvement over the previous design.

 During Origins, we extended the new trusses to 22ft, and they seemed quite stable and safe, and were much easier to work with than the ladders. Sadly, the new DJ stands didn't work as well as I had hoped and the old uprights I had build out of 2x4s ten years ago actually worked better than the new manufactured steel ones. The trusses are a bit lighter than the ladders, but not as light as I wanted. They do, however, transport much easier. Each section, truss and upright, is no more than 8ft. long, so they all neatly fit inside the bed of a full sized pick-up truck.And two of the truss sections can be nested inside one another to conserve space.

Cultists of R'lyeh pt.7 - the Game Pieces, Portals, et Fini

Before we get to the game pieces, like the houses and roads, we have one more board piece to look at. Though not exactly a terrain tile, the island of Catan is surrounded by various ports where one can trade commodities. Likewise, the island of R'lyeh is surrounded by portals where one can transform one commodity into another.

The portals were a challenge in that there are a lot of them, all with the same design, which in my mind instantly said silicone mold and casting resin. I designed the portal to look like a stone ring surrounded by symbols, kind of reminiscent of a Stargate. I sculpted the original out of Sculpey. I rolled a large piece of Sculpey into a long snake, connected the ends into a ring and then flattened the top of the ring with a rolling pin. Then I sliced the flattened ring with a razor blade to make it look like there were a number of carved stones laid out in a circle. I used a screw driver and a bamboo skewer as tools to carve glyphs into the tops of each segment. I made a few random gouges in the clay with a razor to make the stones look cracked and worn. After it was baked, I mounted it to a piece of hardboard and sealed it with spray paint.

Then I used silicon RTV rubber to make a mold of the original. The first casting I made was a solid piece of urethane resin plastic. Once I saw how much resin it took, I started to panic. I had to cast nine of these things, and because they were pretty big (about six inches across) they took a lot of resin. Fortunately, I am a cheap bastard, and I know a lot of tricks to make resin stretch. First, I used a lot of filler. Normally I use powdered talc as a filler. This does weaken the plastic somewhat, but these were not load bearing pieces. Another cost saving measure is to do a slush cast. This builds up the piece in layers and makes the final piece hollow. It took about five or six times longer to finish these pieces than it would have, but I did save a lot of resin by adding a little resin at a time, brushing it around to coat the mold surface, waiting for it to dry, then repeating until I had a sufficient thickness built up to demold the piece. The last cost saving measure I took was to add play sand as an additional filler material on the inner slush castings (but not the initial coat, or it would have shown on the surface of the finished piece). This added a lot of bulk to each coat of resin. The biggest down sides to doing a slush casting, was the amount of extra time it took, and the final piece had no underside (it was a one piece mold) so there was no surface to apply the glue for fastening it down to the wooden base. I had to add a strong glue in a heavy bead along the inside bottom edge of the casting with the expectation that the glue would sag downward and touch the wooden base.

The wooden bases were cut on a band saw from the same MDF as the terrain tiles. I made them a different shape and slightly smaller, to differentiate them. Before gluing the resin rings down to the wooden bases, I painted the base where the inside of the ring would be. Each color represented a different commodity that could be traded at that portal, with white being a generic portal where all commodities could be traded. The colors corresponded with the colors of the terrain tiles.

Each portal was primed with black spray paint, sponge stippled, and dry brushed with grey acrylic paint. The stones were given a florescent red inlay in their glyphs. I was pretty rushed by the time I got to the portals, so my standard of quality began slipping. I only had a day or two left to finish the project. And I still had player pieces and game cards to make.

 The player pieces were problematic on a number of fronts. Again, I had to make a lot of them fairly quickly, so they had to be simple and cheap. I went through several design ideas before settling on one that would fit all my needs as well as my budgetary and time constraints. I had it in my head that I wanted to use the little plastic Cthulhu idols in the "Bag of Cthulhu" that I love so much. But scale was a concern. I needed to somehow make the small ones bigger, or the big ones smaller. I decided to put the smaller ones on a pedestal made from sliced pvc pipe to create "shrines" that would serve to replace the cities of Catan. I Also used pvc pipe slices to make the "altars" that would be analogous to the settlements in Catan.

Since pvc pipe is hollow, I needed to make it have a solid flat surface, so I poured a little plastic resin into each of the slices. I made sure to do this on a piece of hardboard covered with vinyl contact paper, as vinyl seems to be the one thing plastic resin won't stick to. Once dry, I just flipped them over, trimmed off any flash, and had a nice neat little altar top, ready for paint.

For the bases of the plastic Cthulhus I used a slightly smaller diameter pvc pipe and made thinner slices.

 Then I glued the small plastic idols on top of their bases, and they too were ready for paint.

For simplicity and time concerns, I used straight cut slices of MDF to serve as roads (or rather "tunnels" in my game variant vernacular").

Painting the pieces was also problematic. The raw MDF wanted to soak up the paint like a sponge. It was hard to get a finish that didn't look like spray painted MDF. If I had more time, I could have employed some sort of sealer, I suppose. The color scheme was a challenge as well. I needed to use colors that differed from those of the color coded terrain tiles. I had already used most of the useful primary colors for those, so I decided to go with metallic colors for the game pieces. Only one problem. There are four player sets and only three easily differentiated metallic colors- silver, gold and copper. For the third one, I chose a metallic cobalt blue (largely because I hadn't used blue yet, and I happened to have some metallic blue spray paint). Even still, since the player pieces didn't have any florescence to them, it would be hard to see them in the odd lighting of our game room. The gold and the copper ended up looking too much alike, so I had to change to a darker color of copper. I also added some verdigris patina to the edges of the copper to further differentiate it. The blue was rather dark, and I was afraid it would be lost entirely in the predominantly red lighting of our room, so I dry brushed the blue pieces with a little white, which would glow purple in the black lights.

I got the pieces to be easily differentiated from one another in normal lighting, though I didn't like the way they looked. They were blocky and poorly painted, at least compared to the terrain tiles. Once I got them into the red and UV lighting of the Rogue Cthulhu game room, they were a complete mess. They were hard to see, and difficult to tell apart. I had to put up a small white light above the game board just to make it playable. I didn't even take any final pics of the completed pieces, as they frankly didn't look worth the time to photograph. The pic above of them on the painting table is pretty much how they look, at least the gold ones. Clearly, the game pieces need to be overhauled before next year.


So, since you have all been so patient following along on this rather lengthy build, I decided to put the final wrap-up pics here instead of making them another post. Here are the game terrain tiles, sans portals, all laid out on the floor.

And here they are with portals. The portals are not properly arranged in these pics, as I was in a hurry, and didn't really know how to arrange them yet (I had only played the game twice by this point and in Catan, the ports are pre-fixed in position and do not need to be placed).

And here are a few pics of the game being played for the first time at Origins 2013.

 Thanks for following along. This was a fun and ambitious build for me. More than once I thought I had bitten off more than I could chew, but I'm glad that I pushed myself to finish it. It was a very rewarding experience and I am very proud of the final product.

See also:
Cultists of R'lyeh pt.1- the Desolate Waste
Cultists of R'lyeh pt.2- the Pits of Despair
Cultists of R'lyeh pt.3- the Ravenous Cavern
Cultists of R'lyeh pt.4- the Cyclopean Ruins
Cultists of R'lyeh pt.5- the Sanguine Gorge
Cultists of R'lyeh pt.6- the Mountains of Madness
Cultists of R'lyeh pt.7- the Game Pieces, Portals, et Fini
Cultists of R'lyeh - After four years of wear and tear

Cultists of R'lyeh pt.6 - the Mountains of Madness

So, to reiterate; my first attempt at sculpting mountains did not go so well. I was using cold porcelain, a home made air dry clay that is very cheap and easy to work with, over a wooden armature. The results looked, well... breast-like. Not at all what I was going for. I needed a new technique for sculpting mountains. I searched around on YouTube for some instructional videos and found some that used a hot wire knife to carve polystyrene foam. I had to improvise a hot wire tool of my own by taking the soldering tip out of my old soldering gun and replacing it with some stiff, but flexible, crafting wire.

The results were not quite as good as I would expect from a commercially produced tool, but they would certainly serve for my purposes. I broke some pieces of white polystyrene foam into chunks and glued them together in a stack, with a wide base, and getting slightly smaller as I went. Most were three layers of 2" foam. I only needed to put a dollop of glue in the center between each layer. Since I wouldn't be carving through the center, the glue would not interfere with the sculpt. As the hot wire cuts, it seals the edge so the outer skin will become fused anyway.

I started by basically carving downward from the peak and getting the very rough stack of blocks into a more conical, or pyramidal, shape. I knew I would need some practice to get the look I wanted, so I made about three times the number of block stacks that I would eventually need. Hey, styrofoam is cheap, and this was recycled packing material. I wanted crazy looking twisted angular crags, so I let the wire cut deep crevices and sharp chunks out of the blocks. After making about six or eight of them, I started getting ones I really liked. When it came time to glue them to the hexagonal bases, I just picked the ones that looked best together, and through the rest away.

Before gluing them down, however, I needed to seal them first. As with the Sanguine Gorge, I gave each mountain a coat of watered down white glue as a sealer. In the pic you can see them drying. I stuck steak knives through the bases to hold them while I was brushing on the glue. The ones that are shown wedged together have been specially carved to fit close to one another. I glued them together, and also pinned them together by running a bamboo skewer through them, near the base.

Then I glued them in place on the wooden hexagonal bases, and gave them two more coats of watered down glue as a sealer. As with the Sanguine Gorge, I found out that this was insufficient. I must have missed some spots, because when I gave them a shot of spray primer, they started to melt in small spots. So, I mixed up some full strength glue with some black tempura paint and gave them a couple heavy coats of that. That did the trick- once I caught all the pin holes.

I had a little trouble deciding what color to paint the mountains. At first I wanted them to be blue, but then I decided on purple instead. I used the same sea sponge stippling technique that I used on all the other tiles, for a consistent look. I used four shades of purple acrylic paint in layers, applying the paint heavier on the edges of the tile, and lighter towards the center. I also used a little bit of brown and grey, mostly on the mountains themselves, to convey the look of stone and dirt. Although they are a cartoonish color, I wanted them to look somewhat realistic. I let a lot of the black primer show through on the mountains themselves, and used more dry brushing than stippling on them. Again, the top shade of purple was UV reactive, so that it would "pop" in our room lighting.

The finishing touch on the mountains was a dry brush of some white along the tops of the peaks to simulate snow.

These are my favorite tiles in the game. I love the way they turned out, and I enjoyed making them. I hated to throw away the unused foam sculpts. Some of them looked pretty good. But I knew I was not going to use them for anything, at least not in the foreseeable future.

So there are the five basic terrain types, and the "dessert". There is one more tile-like piece left to make. The ports. But I will include them in part 7, along with the player pieces.

See also:
Cultists of R'lyeh pt.1- the Desolate Waste
Cultists of R'lyeh pt.2- the Pits of Despair
Cultists of R'lyeh pt.3- the Ravenous Cavern
Cultists of R'lyeh pt.4- the Cyclopean Ruins
Cultists of R'lyeh pt.5- the Sanguine Gorge
Cultists of R'lyeh pt.6- the Mountains of Madness
Cultists of R'lyeh pt.7- the Game Pieces, Portals, et Fini
Cultists of R'lyeh - After four years of wear and tear

Cultists of R'lyeh pt.5 - the Sanguine Gorge

So, when the Mountains of Madness cold porcelain sculpt didn't go as planned, I decided I needed a new sculpting technique. I watched several YouTube videos on sculpting mountains and came across several that used a hot wire knife for carving polystyrene foam. Of course, I did not have a hot wire knife, but I did have some polystyrene foam. And, I'm pretty good at improvising tools.

I dug out my old electric soldering gun and some craft wire. I removed the soldering tip and cut a length of craft wire (about 10 inches or so) and fixed the ends of the wire into the sockets where the soldering tip screws in. Then I did a few tests to see if it was going to work.

It did work. Maybe not as good as the commercially available ones, but well enough for my purposes. It didn't seem like it got quite hot enough to cut cleanly, but it wasn't too bad. Before tackling the mountains though, I decided I needed a little practice with the tool, so I decided to work on another tile, the Sanguine Gorge. The Sanguine Gorge actually started off as a mesa, or plateau (as in, the Plateau of Leng).

It wasn't until I saw one of the foam wire cutter video tutorials on carving foam terrain that I thought of making a canyon that ran down the middle of it. It just looked so easy in the video. I bent the wire to an irregular shape and ran it in an organic path down the middle of the mesa, almost touching the tile beneath at the deepest point.

Then just remove the center section, and voila.

It really was as easy as the video made it look! Actually, the whole foam carving process was pretty darn easy. And clean too! No messy white balls everywhere, no tiny chunks of foam. Well, maybe a few tiny chinks of foam, but not the really tiny chunks, like you get by sanding or carving with a knife or rasp. And it really was easy to get nice organic shapes and lines. This is quickly becoming my favorite technique for carving terrain features. I'm sure it's not the best suited technique for every type of sculpture, but for things like this, it's tits.

 Polystyrene foam, however, is hard to paint. Water based paints, like acrylic tend to bead up on its surface, and spray paints will dissolve the foam.  It needs to be sealed first. I still had my cheap PVA glue that I used for my cold porcelain sitting out, so I thinned it down a little with some water and gave it a brush coat with that to act as a sealer. Actually, I gave it three brush coats of thinned PVA to act as a sealer. Here they are sitting on my dirty stove top, drying. I also used the PVA to glue the foam to the MDF tile.

 And wouldn't you know it, that wasn't enough! The first piece I tried to paint with a spray primer, the foam started to dissolve in tiny spots. I was sure I didn't miss any spots. Well, pretty sure. It is hard to see white glue on white foam, but three coats? Before spray priming any more of them, I decided to give them all one more good coat of PVA sealer. This time I didn't thin it with water, and I did add some black tempura paint to the PVA. That made it a lot easier to see if I missed any spots, and the tempura paint would act as its own primer base coat (but I sprayed them with primer afterwards anyway).

After flat black primer, the cavern was sponge stippled and dry brushed with four shades of red acrylic paint. The top layer was a florescent red that would react in the UV of the Rogue Cthulhu room. In these pictures, it looks like just one shade of red painted over black. It person, there is more depth to the color than the pictures show. I don't think I mentioned it on the other tile posts, but all of the tiles also got a top coat of matte sealer after they were painted.

These tiles, and the mountains, were super easy to make. The clay was fun, but these were a real pleasure. And super fast too. It seemed like it was over before it started. Had I done these in clay, I never would have been able to get such great organic shapes with my manual sculpting abilities.

See also:
Cultists of R'lyeh pt.1- the Desolate Waste
Cultists of R'lyeh pt.2- the Pits of Despair
Cultists of R'lyeh pt.3- the Ravenous Cavern
Cultists of R'lyeh pt.4- the Cyclopean Ruins
Cultists of R'lyeh pt.5- the Sanguine Gorge
Cultists of R'lyeh pt.6- the Mountains of Madness
Cultists of R'lyeh pt.7- the Game Pieces, Portals, et Fini
Cultists of R'lyeh - After four years of wear and tear