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erictom333 In reply to squeakscience [2022-11-24 09:49:00 +0000 UTC]

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squeakscience In reply to FangRoseTheHedgehog [2015-03-14 17:19:39 +0000 UTC]

Fortunately that's a path well trodden by the furry fandom, custom vinyl inflatables are a thing. Downside is, as with most things furry, it's rather expensive.

The known manufacturers available are:
- Jet Creations: They are the current manufacturer of choice for custom vinyl inflatables. Puffypaws, G&G, DerG, etc all have their toys made by this company. The common spec used by furries is 0.4mm thickness, lapped seams. That makes a highly durable but rather stiff toy. They're very good at matching references, you just send them drawings or renders of what you want and they make it accurately. I hear they have occasional lapses in quality but that seems to be only in batches, not for one-offs which get enough testing before shipping. Then there's the price... for a single toy you're looking at maybe 1500 dollars, give or take depending on complexity and random chance (they're known to be a bit erratic with that). The common approach for negating that is to group together and order batches, at run sizes of 50 units or so (which only the most popular designers reach) you reach prices in the 300-400$ range. I don't think that'll be an option for you here. For one-offs they're very fast, when I had them make Barge ( www.furaffinity.net/view/13500… ) it took like 2 weeks for the prototype to be done.

- Hongyi: I don't know too much about Hongyi itself, they're mostly seen offering designs on Ali Baba, often stolen from others. They also made headlines when they started offering their weird looking My Little Pony sex dolls so you might have seen their nonsense. Despite all that Merek of G&G is investigating their quality and reliability because of the price that Jet charges (which have been going up as the custom toy scene got bigger). I don't know what it would cost to have something made by Hongyi or how accurately they can work off a reference sheet, they mostly clone existing toys and even then sometimes mess it up with weird proportions and such. Also they don't take PayPal.

- Latex Catfish: As the name says they do latex, not vinyl. They're the manufacturer used by Scaleworx who I used to make Eve. Accuracy is low (the first version of Eve looked like this: www.furaffinity.net/view/15353… but Scaleworx made them redo her properly at no extra cost to me), their material is a bit unpredictable and they can't do every color, only the ones they have in stock. Wait times are lengthy, 8-10 weeks normally. Scaleworx seems to have a separate queue now that's only 6-8 weeks. They tend to sideline smaller orders during the final quarter of a year to work on big client orders so I was stuck waiting for three additional months. Upside is the price, Eve was 400$, the plantalloon 350$ and Clarity is something like 550$. You can choose the thickness (I went with 0.4mm) and the seams are stable.

(There's also Inflatable World who accept toy pitches and do regular very large runs, they don't build toys to as sturdy a spec as Jet but the number and cheaper production means their toys are like 50-100$. They're not an option for you here because they won't touch copyrighted characters but if you want a big cute dragon to go along with your Ikaros that would be where to look.)

All of these ship via DHL Express, whether that's good probably depends on where you live. For me it means stuff ships within like 2-3 days to my home and they handle moving it through customs.

I would not make the material choice depend on the valves, the ones in the render are probably larger than what you'd get IRL. Only #3 valves are roughly that size and for smaller chambers like a doll would have they would prefer to install #2s which are much smaller. Six chambers in a vinyl toy would be very stiff because the softness of an inflatable depends on the air volume. With latex the base softness is so much that you need to use lots of chambers to get some decent resistance but with vinyl even a single chamber design can be very stiff for a low-volume toy like a doll. Of course you could probably have them stick dummy valves on there just for the looks.

This concept here is primarily meant for latex, it could be built in vinyl but you'd ideally design it differently then. Vinyl tends to wrinkle a lot when it's just hanging like the hair, skirt or wings, you would put a lot of little air-filled spikes on the head to form the hair instead of having it just droop down like this. Also you can do more angular shapes, perhaps a more accurate head form since I deliberately went with a sphere there to account for the expansion of latex. Vinyl in general gets more of those little wrinkles along the seams of the inflated parts, the flexibility of latex greatly reduces those on smoother curves. Also I don't think fingered hands would be a good idea with vinyl, the concaves between the fingers would be weak points. I don't know how latex handles inflated hands but I'll find out with Clarity.

If all this doesn't scare you off I can render out some orthographic views and stuff in a way that could be taken to a manufacturer.

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FangRoseTheHedgehog In reply to squeakscience [2015-03-21 03:48:43 +0000 UTC]

I would very much like to see those orthographic views. After seeing the ones for Eureka, I can only imagine what the ones for Ikaros would look like

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squeakscience In reply to FangRoseTheHedgehog [2015-03-21 17:13:07 +0000 UTC]

K, they're uploaded. Let's hope they don't confuse people too much.

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FangRoseTheHedgehog In reply to squeakscience [2015-03-14 17:56:14 +0000 UTC]

Well, given all these facts, I think when I get around to doing it I'll go with latex instead. It appears to have vinyl beaten

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