Rebelscum
Sr Member
Good things take time. Given that, this better be awesome. On seeing the film, I really liked the robots, which were clearly different than all the robots that have come before. My friend Devin, who was running Blue Realm Studios at the time, was also taken in by them. Always on the lookout for a good project, we set out to see if we could make replicas. Just like any good prop chase, we started first by finding everything written about them, and grabbed every photo we could find.
We didn't just want good replicas, we wanted them to be built just like the props in every way possible. Early on we decided they would never puppet as they do in the film, but they would be poseable.
Once we had the fundamental dimensions sorted out, Devin started in on a drawing using SolidWorks. We poured over the reference, what seemed like endlessly, until we had satisfied ourselves we had as good a replica as we could find. No detail was too small. We made some basic rules. The outside had to match the prop in every way possible. The functional build had to be the same, but we weren't going to put a screw in every location on the back side that we could see they had. IE, I'm not a fan of replicating a paint run on a prop, unless you see it in the film.
The next step was to test making the name plate TARS with the braille dots. Unfortunately, we couldn't find reference photos showing how the letters were done. It looked to us like the letters might have been glued in, but we wanted them to be made with no gap at the joint. This ended up being quite difficult to achieve. Working with my sheet metal fabricator, we went through countless tests until we did get it done. We are quite happy with the result.
We made three of them. Though I'm planning to show how we built them, here is the end result:
