Project: Savage

[jreffy]

This will be my first mod. I already bought a practice case and worked on painting and cutting it for practice.

The theme is based on the sequel to a small game produced by a small company, S2Games. They original game is called Savage: Battle for Newerth. It was the first game to combine RTS and FPS into a new genre. I highly suggest you guys check it out if you haven't, especially since you can download and play the game for free, no CD key required any more.

With the Beta soon to start for the sequel I wanted to get this gaming beast up and running. I want to put the game's main logo on the side of my case, first seperating the text and the skull image seen here; Savage 2 Logo

I am going to have the text created into a vinyl logo I will stick to a frosted piece of acrylic mounted on the side window. On a seperate side window, I am going to have the skull and it's mounting laser etched into another piece of acrylic. I have a bunch of other ideas, but I'll save those until it's time to construct them.

The case I have is a Lian Li PC-70, and MAN this thing is HUGE!! I can fit my current PC tower completely inside it!! Going to start the sanding and painting tomorrow. Hopefully I can get my hands on a digital camera (mine seems to be broken) and take pictures from time to time. The paint scheme will be mostly black with a red core, similar to the type of backround on the logo.

[Ta10n]

Pretty cool looking game, but it does have a weird mix of things in it. I mean a bow and a railgun? The're stretching the believability a bit . Anyway good luck on the mod!

[simon275]

Yeah good luck sounds like a bit of work I hope you can get good prices for the laser etching. It can be expensive.

[jreffy]

Pretty cool looking game, but it does have a weird mix of things in it. I mean a bow and a railgun? The're stretching the believability a bit . Anyway good luck on the mod!

yeah, and opening interdimensional gates to hell, and letting various creatures come through a gate is much more easily accepted Games aren't supposed to be believable, they're supposed to be fun!


Got my digital camera up and working, I'll take pics of everything before I start dissassembling and sanding/painting this weekend.

[jreffy]

Allright, I spent a lot of the weekend dissasembling and priming the PC-70 case. I can't believe how many parts there were to it! I'll link some pictures for what it's worth.


The beast of a case;

Everything taken apart;

Priming done;

For the rear video/sound card bezels, I wanted to paint them red so they show up against the black case. I thought they were a bit reflective, so I just sanded them before priming.
Before;

After;

The project is on hold for a week. Due to the fact that I'm in Costa Rica right now, haha. To be continued later. I started painting some of the interior pieces with a gloss red, and also gloss black. I also cut a window into the side panel. I'll do the wet-sanding when I get back, and start laying down the first color coats for the outside parts of the case when I get back to the states.

[jreffy]

Allright, got back from Costa Rica, did my wet sanding all day sunday. I was a bit dissappointed because my front panel had a lot of uneven spots. I have to go and reprime the whole thing. I'll probably wet-sand it by hand to make sure none of the primer comes off this time. I also reprimed the edges of the side panels, again, resand by hand. I'm not sure how many front bezels I'll actually need, so I'm holding off painting them.

Pics;

I also was able to cut out the S2Games logo from a thin piece of acrylic. this was more for a practice run. Eventually I'm going to get a thicker piece, do the same cut and "frost" effect, then sandwich that logo between to bigger pieces of acrylic, seal the whole thing up and run water through it. Basically the logo will be surrounded by my water-cooling fluid. I then am going to mount this in the front of my PC, taking the place of roughly 3 of my 6 front 5 1/2" bezels.

Step 1; used adhesive spray to mount the printed logo to the acrylic (kept the acrylic coating sheets on)

Step 2; used a razor to cut out the dark areas of the log and peeled them away, including the protective coating

Step 3; Sanded the exposed acrylic area with a dremel as best I could, peeled off the remaining logo and protective coat, came out better than I had anticipated.
[IMG]http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v381/jreffy/Project%20Savage/20060821_010.jpg[/IMG


That's it for now. Plans this week include more assembling of the case. Constructing the watercooling acrylic logo case, and figuring out how to mount it in the front of the computer.

Oh, and my C2D E6600 arrived today. I'll be buying the powersupply and radiator this weekend so I can mount them in the PC as well. Probably cut a blow-hole for the power supply in the top of the case as well.

[Lunchbox]

I Love playing Savage hope your mod goes well, but I've been hearing bad things about Savage 2 from some people hopefuly it turns out ok.

[simon275]

Yeah Ive alyways considered fliping my psu up the other way so the big internal fan that blows into the case is instead blowing out the top.

Can't wait to see your final work of art. BTW nice etching effect.

[dgrmkrp]

wait!
1.) the case was anodized, so that's why the primer won't stick to it.. i'm sorry, but i have to give you the bad news.. if u want to paint it this way, you have to sand the anodized layer off.. otherwise, it might look good..but.. who knows when the paint will peel off..
2.) @simon: PSU's draw air in to them and exhaust it out of the case, conforming to the ATX specification.. because there are obstructions(radiators, caps..) inside the psu's case, u can feel some air beeing bounced back.. u can by all means make the psu work flipped, but then it will get cool air and the upper part of the mobo, without additional fans, wont get any airflow.. that's worse than having a warm PSU..

an inverted atx design, or a psu located somewhere else still follow the same principle.. in the case of inverted lian-li's,with lower positioned psu, its drawing air over the hdds helps them stay cooler..

edit: oh, very good idea with the watery logo really slick

[jreffy]

wait!
1.) the case was anodized, so that's why the primer won't stick to it.. i'm sorry, but i have to give you the bad news.. if u want to paint it this way, you have to sand the anodized layer off.. otherwise, it might look good..but.. who knows when the paint will peel off..
2.) @simon: PSU's draw air in to them and exhaust it out of the case, conforming to the ATX specification.. because there are obstructions(radiators, caps..) inside the psu's case, u can feel some air beeing bounced back.. u can by all means make the psu work flipped, but then it will get cool air and the upper part of the mobo, without additional fans, wont get any airflow.. that's worse than having a warm PSU..

an inverted atx design, or a psu located somewhere else still follow the same principle.. in the case of inverted lian-li's,with lower positioned psu, its drawing air over the hdds helps them stay cooler..

edit: oh, very good idea with the watery logo really slick

I gave the entire exterior of the case a good sanding before I put on the primer coat, more to help get everything flat than to get the anodized surface off. The primer sticks, it's just coming off because I didn't sand the front of the case well enough and a lot of parts are uneven. As for the interior parts, I wasn't sure if they would need to be sanded, but I figured I could deal with a less than spectacular paint job for the interior, simply because it won't be as visible, and it'd be way too hard to thoroughly sand everything

Are you saying there is there going to be a problem mounting my PSU? I simply flipped that back grate. So the PSU will still be oriented the same way, it will just be on the top of the case instead of having the gap between the
top and PSU fan.

As for the water-cooling logo. I figured out I'd have a problem with the acrylic logo case acting like a reservoir (which I did not want) if I mounted it in the top of the case like I originally had planned. I'd run into the problem of the custom logo box not being full of fluid and acting like my system's reservoir. To solve this I figured "hey, I'm not gonna be using all SIX front 5 1/2" drives" so I'm going to mount it in the front of the PC now. Not only will it solve my problem but it will look better too. Hopefully this week while waiting for my PSU to arrive, I'll finish putting together the rest of the case, and then work on constructing and mounting this acrylic logo box.

My only concern with the box's construction is how to ensure a good seal between the logo I made, and the top and bottom surfaces of the box. I don't want fluid creeping between the logo and the front or back of the box. Sealing the edges will be easier, I can simply use a caulk-type seal, but that would be much trickier to do with the logo. We'll see when I start making the box for real. I'm going to use thicker acrylic, so that might make things easier to get at.