Building The Death Star - PRODUCTION

By the way, we almost lost the dish entirely yesterday.

My brilliant but not-always-careful 11-year-old son hucked a softball-sized faux football at me (vinyl exterior shell, soft foam interior), missed me, and NAILED the Death Star about 6" to 8" to the left of the dish. Smacked the hull pretty hard...

So at this stage we can safely say that the battle station withstood its first frontal attack.
 
Just reviewing the thread...

Looks like it was early to mid November that I started finessing the grain. So its been about four months. But in that time I was also finishing the line patterns on the upper dome, and doing the dish.

I should be done with the grain in another couple of weeks. Lower dome may be done this week, except that I have a soccer game Saturday, and some crazy party to attend on Sunday!

Anyway, should be moving on to lights by the end of March (how many times have I mentioned moving on to lights?)...
 
I am really liking the way its coming out. It is truly looking more and more like THE Death Star. In person, the darkening, finessing process is really bringing out the correct look. Though it is hard to convey the difference via photos.
 
Well, time to add to the list of those that have actively contributed to this build our very own Art Andrews.

Art and Kristen graciously spent time last night - in the cold misting rain, no less - setting up a full-on professional photo shoot of the model.

His images were specatacular.

Though, they did reveal a critical error on the model. As I have suspected, the detail pieces in my dish are too robust. With much thanks to Art, through photographing the model with professional lighting, I learned this becomes quite apprarent, and contributes to the "amateur model of a model" look.

Again, I have been suspecting this, but Art and Kristen's photos confirm it.

And as such, the images have been a catalyst to make a correction. I have the ability to sand down these too-thick detail pieces, and bring them in much closer to what they should be.

I beleive that this would otherwise been one of those just-subconscious elements that throw it off a bit from the original. Clearly, the devil is in the details, and this is yet one more detail that will congeal with everything else to bring home the right overal appearance.

The most robust detail pieces I have stand about 1.1mm or 1.2mm above the surface of the dish. In scale that would be about 70 to 80 feet high. I am sanding them down to about 0.5mm to 0.7mm. Or in scale 30 to 50 feet.

Here is a crop of Kristen's best shot, showing what I am referring to.
 
Now Rob, You make me laugh. :lol

I was there too, and there are many great shots, and you pick the ONE that shows your DS in a slightly bad light.

I was lucky enough to be looking over Art's shoulder when shooting (although Kristen triggered the shutter on the money shot), and over Rob's shoulder when we reviewed the shots. Rob was flipping back and forth between his DS and shots of the real one from 77 and there were a number of times I guessed wrong on which we were looking at. Gave me goose bumps.

This thing is awesome. Rob release that last pic!!!

BrianM
 
We took quite a few shots but only a few turned out and only one that I actually liked (which Rob already posted). I am sending all we took to Rob to do with as he likes and post as he likes, but we had a number of technical issues, and even on the best shot, I had a bit of crud on the CMOS that left with a dark mark on the far left...

Seeing the Death Star in person was a true joy and once you got the lights on it, it truly is breathtaking and feels like you are reliving your childhood. There is no photo and no words that could truly describe it. I did my best and hopefully it gives it some justice, but seeing the real thing makes any photo pale in comparison.

As always, click to enlarge.

These are scaled to 1920X1080 so they can be used for backgrounds if you like.

View attachment 47354

View attachment 47355
 
I just made the connection. Art used to be Brak's Buddy and he offered up that free photo-shoot for costumers and those were fantastic photos.

I wondered why you had all that high end photo gears.

Great job.
 

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