OldGeezerArtist
Active member
The movie is called "The Mad Magician" and stars Vincent Price. Filmed in 1954, Vincent portrays a magician driven to insanity as a man who created magic illusion devices for magicians to perform on stage. The illusions were always something with an element of danger/death for the magicians' assistant. One of those devices was a variation of what's called a pendulum saw where the "assistant" is secured to a table for a swinging buzzsaw is guided toward their neck to decapitate them. That device proved to be very challenging to try and replicate as a 3D model. I tried using AI to convert a still image to a 3D model which wasn't easy at the results were "unacceptable" by my own personal standards. To make things even more complicated the object doesn't appear in the movie in its entirety very often and in the few frames where it does there are always people in close proximity which AI has a problem with when trying to figure out what part of the image it's supposed to create a model of. I had to use another AI app (a free one called EZ-Maker) to first remove the human characters from the scene. Eventually, I used the background image as the background in the Daz Studio render. I then began to piece the saw contraption together using primitives and other props I've amassed over the years. Here is the result of weeks worth of work:
