Who is a better at carving a pumpkin, man or machine? At Designworks we pitched the CNC mill against our pro sculptor. Who do you think is the winner?

Design Team

Designworks

We love Halloween at Designworks—it's a time when our boundless creativity can be unleashed upon the world in the form of costumes, decorations and of course, pumpkin carving. However, we couldn't help but feel that pumpkin carving has been left a little behind the times. Over a couple of lunch times we created 2 pumpkins; one was sculpted by hand, and one machined on a CNC mill.

One of our highly skilled model makers Alex Gibbons took the reins for the workshop's effort and set about creating the necessary 3D data using CAD software called Pixologic ZBrush. The pumpkin was modeled after an awesome figurine of the devil from Dr.Who. Alex then programmed the digital model into the CNC mill, attached the pumpkin to the machine and crossed his fingers! Obviously there was some 'clean up' to be done once the machine was finished, but we were all pleasantly surprised with the detail and finish which Alex managed to achieve. Check out the video!

Andrew Teal stepped up to the plate from our character sculpting team and began by fashioning some custom pumpkin sculpting tools (you don't get much more artisan than that!). Our sculpting department is equipped with haptic digital sculpting arms originally developed to train keyhole surgeons; this means that almost all sculpting is now done digitally, so Andrew really didn't mind giving up a couple of lunchtimes to do a bit of traditional physical sculpting. After watching it the night before, Andrew chose to sculpt Daniel Craig in a skeleton mask from the brilliant new 'Spectre' film. To nobody's surprise, the finished pumpkin was scarily good. Check out the video!

Obviously Alex's and Andrew's skill and experience played a huge part in making these pumpkins as amazing as they are, and we do not recommend trying this at home. Having said that, if you have a CNC mill at home, we're very impressed!

We love both of these pumpkins, and really cannot pick a favorite. Can you?

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