This year I made the head of Nefertiti out of an STL file from thingiverse. I made it a little bigger than the original, sliced it into 4.5 cm pieces and milled them out of high density styrofoam. Glued them together using polyurethane sprayfoam. I started to paint it, but then our musical got delayed caused by covid. Work in progress…
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Awesome! It’s huge! What a great idea, making sculptures from sliced STLs
Now i need to get some painting skills 
@kockie-nl - I sympathize! I’m fine with some artistic construction, but the artistry of our (even community-level) theater set painters always blows me away!
We used to prime foam carvings for sets with watered down white glue before painting
Don’t get too fixated on perfect painting for sets. Remember they audience is usually pretty far away.
Once in college we were told by the master carpenter to fit 1/4 inch quarter-round molding into a bunch of rectangular recessed on a white set wall and miter all the corners. When the professional scenic painter in residence saw how long this was taking, they mixed 1 drop of black paint in a pint of white and proceeded to add shadow lines in all 40 of the alcoves in about two minutes. Once this greenhouse/conservatory set was filled with plants I guarantee the audience couldn’t tell the difference.
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That is great! Would you mind sharing details of your workflow?
What do you want to know?
I used fusion 360 to do all the slicing work (by hand)
OK, thanks. Was wondering what your software workflow was, and that pretty much answers it. I see that there is (or was) an add-in for Fusion 360 that will slice models. I’ll look into that to see if I can avoid doing it by hand!
I tried “slicerforfusion360”, but couldn’t get it to do what I wanted. When i had to do it again i would try 2-sided milling, but what @ttraband said: details will not be seen by the audience…
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When I first saw this I shrugged… had no idea of the scale… nice job!
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“What’s the set?”
“All we have budget for is some pallets”
“Can we add anything to make it look like we tried harder?”
“IDK, Let me ask @kockie-nl”
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It is awesome. Star of the show.
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We did a show in college where the setting was a construction site so that planks, scaffolding, etc. could be rearranged to create the different settings. It was going to be a majorly cheap set, until the actors tried moving cinder blocks around without steel-toed footwear. The props team ended up developing molds, then casting and painting several dozen from 2-part rigid urethane foam. That put a dent in the budget.
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This is exactly the kind of work that I would like to do… seeing what you were able to accomplish inspires confidence in me
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