Re: Guardians of the Galaxy: Star Lord with lights and sound.
Painting the inner halves of the orb did not go well tonight - the black wash I was using to try and pop details out dried really poorly and potentially ruined the piece. I'm rehabilitating them with oil paints at the moment, watered down with mineral spirits, but oil paints take an age and a half to dry so I'll have a better idea tomorrow if I need to reprint things. I've been working on a lot of different stuff throughout the last few days, but I'll focus on the orb for a quick run-down.
First problem I was dealing with was how to attach the inner halves to the outer halves while still making them easily removable, because I wanted to make sure I could swap a battery or fix a component if ever I needed to. The solution I came up with was installing a screw mount into the orb that would seat the two halves together and lock them closed.
This is simply a machine threaded nut, attached to a washer and a bit of styrene with superglue and JBWeld Steel Stick. I levelled the inside of the sphere flat with a thin layer of Smooth-On 320, which is a fast kicking resin. Then I superglued the thing down...
... and poured some more resin in overtop. The JB Weld keeps the resin from sneaking through any seams in my little threaded assembly, and makes sure the nut stays dry. The inverted cone shape also ensures that the material is being held down properly by the resin. I dropped some lead shot into the resin as it was drying because I wanted the orb to be a bit heavier.
And I let it dry over the next half hour.
On the inner half, I installed a quick little battery compartment so I had an easy way of replacing them when the inevitable happened. I had to dremel out a section of the inner sphere to do it, but nobody ever sees that part anyway, so who cares.
I also drilled three holes for the LEDs mounted in the bottom of the inner half, and the hole in the middle for the machine screw to secure everything together.
Here it is all snugged up! Ignore the tangle of wires, I haven't hooked things up yet.
I also went ahead and installed a power switch on the exterior of the orb so I could toggle the lightshow on and off inside the thing prior to opening it up. This will also ensure it's not running all the time which would kill the LEDs and battery.
As far as the light show is concerned, you've seen the
gif I've posted already, but simply put, this is a purple-tinted translucent rock lit from beneath by three LEDs. I used an Adafruit Trinket arduino, which was like $7 and also crazy small, to power the light show. It's completely random - each LED functions independently and will fade to random intensities at random speeds to try and give a sort of 'stormy' effect inside the crystal.
I tried a bunch of different iterations of the crystal. The first few had LEDs embedded
inside the stones, but I quickly determined that the lighting effects you'd get from that were not as good as I would have liked, because the LEDs I have available to me have a fairly narrow field of illumination - you can see them best only from head-on.
I also played around a bit with different intensities of dye. The rightmost is the original rock I just picked up off the ground outside my shed and cast - the subsequent castings run right to left in that picture.
Having decided, then, that I wasn't sticking LEDs in the stone, but also deciding that I wanted to make sure the interior of the orb was accessible so I could change the battery, I had to figure out how to get the infinity stone to stay put without permanently attaching it. That was... actually pretty easy.
Just drilled a hole and embedded a magnet. It sticks very firmly to the top of the screw head, and has superglue holding it in place. That thing's never going to fall out of the orb, and you have to pull quite hard to get it to detach.
I might have to wait a few days before the inner halves are properly dry from my botched paintjob, but I'll do my best to keep the thread better updated as I go, since I intended on sharing my process more and I've been derelict in doing so!
