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The new mould works! Face, ears and neck are now one piece.The seam isn't perfect due to warping of the mould parts but it's still acceptable.

Making the skin with a harder silicone first and then filling it with a softer silicone is a huge hassle and doesn't deform well. Forms small wrinkles when compressed or sheared. So will test a different silicone hardness that is somewhere in the middle to see if making skin and fill is really necessary.

The 5 part face mould has finally successfully completed printing! The front part of the mould alone took 65 hours... and I started doing some sanding on it with filler spray, sand paper and water to reduce the stepping effect... before I realized I had not yet taken a photo to document the completed mould print. Oh well, what can you do. Not printing another 65 hour front part just for the photo. Hope this sanding work is not messing up the mould either. Guess we'll soon see. Still have to stick the magnets and complete the sanding & surface treatment. Then it's casting time!

The clogged extruder is fixed and the printer is back in working order. Decided to print a smaller part first to test and ... it worked out well! Love the generated tree support structure on it. Looks really alien tech like!

The part itself came out clean. One part left to go... but it's by far the biggest. Will probably take 3 days to print.

2 pieces of the legendary 5 part mould have completed printing alright... then, about half way through the 3 day print for the front piece of the mould... my printer nozzle decided to clog up. When I checked on the print I found the print head floating about a centimeter above the actual print with no filament coming out... quite frustrating. This part needs to be perfect so I am going to have to restart the print from scratch. ​

Luckily youtube has a solution to the clogged nozzle issue as always. Have ordered a hose cutter to be able to make a perfectly straight cut on the filament feeder hose so this won't happen again too soon.... Now I have to wait a day or two before I can reattempt this print.

Ok, the modeling phase of the new face mould is finally complete as far as I can tell. Time to go through the lengthy process of printing all 5 pieces and test how they all fit together.

Ok, last attempt for now. Tried just buying a cheap wig and adjusting the size to fit Aleyshas head. Think this is the closest to a real hair style yet... but the hair itself is really cheap looking. Anyway, enough hair for now. Time to move on.

For this second version the skull cap itself is made from harder silicone. This helps a lot with stability and keeps the hair in place much better. Also instead of punching the hair in, I simply glued the wefts to the silicone cap. The result is already better than the first attempt... But I think I may have to make one more in the end because near the crown this method of attaching the hair just doesn't work all that well. 

Time to move on for now though.

The first attempt at creating a hairstyle for Aleysha has been... semi successful I would say. Nr.1 thing that needs to be improved is the way the hair is attached to the silicone. It does not work very well for a thin skull cap like this one. I used hair punching to punch hair bundles into the silicone and they keep falling out. Applying silicone from the inside of the cap as glue does not make much of a difference in terms of improving their hold either. It just creates a huge mess instead! Also...

• I used too much hair...
• The thin skull cap deforms under the weight of the hair, lifting it off the skull itself.
• The hairline at the front is a liiiitttle bit too high. 

On the plus side - she does now have hair! ​ :)

The scalp mould seems to be working alright. It's not perfect but it will do for this prototyping phase.

The cap fits and the embedded magnets hold it in place quite well.

Time for a little cleanup, then test how to do the hair.

The printing  process for the 3 part scalp mould is complete. It took 3 days on my ender 3. The results aren't perfect but I think it will do for now. At some point I really want to get a resign printer for these moulds.

Magnets are glued into the mould and I have also encapsulated a bunch of them so the casting process can begin. This time I was a little smarter and built a little hole into the side of the mould to give me something to hold on to when trying to open it as that has been really difficult before with other moulds.

The new one piece silicone face, ears and neck part is nearly done. It's complex and making a mould for it is going to be a mind bender.

The mould for the scalp is done. 

Producing this mould on my ender 3 will take at least 3 days... maybe 4. Time to fire up the printer!

The new design of Aleyshas back of the skull has finished printing. Magnets are glued in and it's spray painted. Super happy it actually fits to the skull face perfectly and screws into place with M5 screws just as planned.

Here is another view with the face detached.

Next will be the silicone scalp. For that I'll need to make another mould.

First of all I am going to attempt to cast the face, ears and neck as one piece for the next iteration... which means making a massive, complex mould... this will be a challenge.

Second I have decided to remove the borders between silicone parts. The seams will be visible, but the overall surface won't be interrupted by hard plastic.

Third the neck vertebra were trickier than anticipated! After 2 failed designs I believe I have arrived at a design that will be able to support the weight of Aleysha's head and at the same time allow for smooth deformation of the neck instead of just... folding over. Only a full scale test will tell. I'll also need a strong core to thread through it. Going to try steel wire. The aluminum was too soft.

On a side note the cyberdoll.co domain seems to have stopped forwarding to this one... but I don't have time right now to look into it so I'll just continue with mattslog.com for now.

Think I arrived at a design that could work. Whether or not the magnet placement works well remains to be seen. The idea is to have a hard border between the silicone patch of the face (which will need to be redesigned to include the ears and neck) and the scalp. 

Time for a test print to see if this piece attaches well to the skull face.

Starting to think about the back of the skull and how it's all going to be put together...

Since the next version of Aleysha has slightly bigger teeth, new teeth moulds are needed. These turned out much cleaner than the first batch and they only have 2 parts instead of 3. So less seams! :)

Magnets are glued and the new skull is primed for spray painting. Just gotta wait for the color to arrive. 

The design and print of the new skull is now complete.

This skull will keep the skin in place around the eyes when the mouth is open and allow for thicker skin.

Since the face mould needs to be redone as it is, might as well take this opportunity to change a few other things that were bothering me. One was that the "toon" look was getting lost and I attribute that to the level of fidelity of the facial features... especially the nose! Luckily I came across a toon nose I really liked by Dmytro Bajda. Shout out to him for his amazing work! I remodeled Aleysha's nose in a similar style. I think it looks much cuter and is getting back to being more stylized which is what the plan was initially.

The first version of the face cast was both a success and a failure. The face actually does fit onto the skull and the magnets hold it in place, but the casting method and the mould are very crude and the edges are dirty. Thin silicone walls caused air bubbles to get trapped in unfortunate places and when the mouth opens the skin is pulled away from the eyes so there will need to be more magnets under the eyes to prevent this from happening... there is a lot to be learned from this. The skin needs to have a certain thickness to look and feel right and not stretch too thin and let the skull shine through (even if it's not realistic). The next iteration will reduce a few parts on the skull and make the wire attachment mechanism for the jaw simpler as well. The best part is no part.

Overall I can see though that with a little better execution this might actually work. 

After sanding and grounding and spray painting the skull a little it was time for a complete assembly. Everything fits well into place and the jaw articulates well. 

For the assembly I got some 2mm diameter aluminum crafting wire (2x 4cm long pieces) and M3 stainless steel screws. The ends of the aluminum crafting wire are wrapped with black duct tape as I originally planned for 3mm diameter wire. But that turned out to be too tough to bend. 

Here is a back view of the skull and the screws. The back of the skull is really rough as that's where all the print support structures were and I did not bother cleaning it up properly as this will be hidden in the joint between the skull face and the cranium part of the skull

Magnets have been glued into the back piece of the face mould. Magnet capsules have been inserted and the excess silicone trimmed off with nail scissors so no capsule silicone will stick out the front of the face. 

Ready for casting!

Decided to not make the face mould pretty on the outside and just focus on the inside. After all that's what counts when you make a cast. The rest just needs to work. 

Next up some magnets need to be glued into that alien looking back part of the mould so they can hold the encapsulated magnets prepared earlier in place inside the mould.

These magnet capsules will then fuse with with the face silicone when it's curing and hold the face in place on the skull understructure later on. ... At least that's the plan. We'll see how it works out.

The printing of the skull face parts is complete. Magnets are glued in. Time to put a little surface finish on and fit it together.