DopamineDoc's Life Size Han Solo in Carbonite build

[ALLEY]

OUTSTANDING JOB!

 

[MartinSivertsen]

Fantastic build, with a great attention to detail and superb result!
This brought back a lot of memories from when I built two HIC's ten years ago, I had a lot of the same thought processes and dilemmas back then as well. Makes me want to go back and tweak mine

 

[Eruonen]

Absolutely incredible work, and also props for the pictures and write ups! Really fun to read along!

 

[ALLEY]

The weather was good today and there was work to be done. Prior to this, I had glued down the fiberglass mold to the box using industrial strength Liquid Nails. In my anxiety over getting it right, I didn’t get a chance to take pics. What you missed is me putting down the mold, checking the position multiple times, and then using a pencil to draw a line across the fiberglass to the frame so I could easily realign it after applying glue. Once I put the glue down I was running around trying to make sure it was in a good position before it dried. By this point, the glue had dried and the mold was one with the box.

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When looking at pics of the original prop (primarily from the Star Wars Identities collection and the photos that came from Loanstar/Germany) I had noticed that there were essentially two parts to the carbonite. There was the part that has all the characteristic lines/bumps/swirls etc. that takes up the majority of the front. The other part is the outer edge of carbonite that meets with the frame. This part is smooth and at the same level of the frame. I wanted to do my best to preserve this detail so I first mapped the texture and compared the major landmarks with my own. The mold from Wes Coke is so good that this was an easy task.

Here, you can see where I took a pic of my mold and comparing it with the prop, outlined some areas I wanted to clean up a bit. I did this with the entire perimeter.

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In this picture, you can see where I used pencil to mark off the portion that should be cleaned up a bit for a seamless transition with the frame. You can still see a line I drew from the frame to the mold that I used as a marker/alignment when gluing it down. I used my Dremel and a 120 grit rotary sanding tool to remove portions that I ultimately will fill back in with fiberglass resin. This rotary tool allowed me to contour lines around the fiberglass and maintain good vertical transitions from flat fiberglass to texture.

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Here is a quick pic of some portions of the panel removed/thinned. They just needed to be lower than the frame so I could fill them in/level it later. These are still “work in progress” pics and this gets further cleaned up later.

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Will definitely have to clean this up.

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You are absolutely right regarding this detail related to the smooth transition between the frame and the height of the front panel of the box and the overall layout of the sculpted carbonite.

Great eye.

 

[DopamineDoc]

Thanks Alley. I really like the pic you posted. I need to add a little more darkening to the feet of mine I think.

 

[garchus]

Awesome job DopamineDoc !!!
I'm from Argentina, started with my HiC, less the block, all the pieces and Han printed in 3D (FDM & SLA).
ALLEY why in the pic you posted the block don't seen or don't have the top panel in left side (front view)?
Thanks in advance, regards

 

[DopamineDoc]

Alright, I'm back! I wasn't quite happy with the color of the box. The color is great but wasn't a good match for the silver of the carbonite. I decided to have another go at it so I masked the carbonite region and removed the panels. After looking back through my color files, I decided to go with Dark Steel like SirCharles' build.

Ignore the mess. My garage was clean before this project!!

Pollen is pretty bad around here, and I didn't want to paint in my garage, so I set up a tailgate canopy as a painting tent.

In addition to changing the box color, there were a few other details I wanted to address. The first of which was the contrast of the box/border. Originally on mine this was very monochrome which isn't in line with the prop. It is also much glossier in the movies than what I had. After repainting the box with Dark Steel, I needed to find a way to darken the border of the carbonite.

Adam Savage recently posted a Adam Savage's One Day Builds: Han in Carbonite! and on his HiC you could see the darker border surrounding the carbonite. I wasn't sure of his technique (possibly airbrush vs Streaks n' tips?). As meticulously planned as my other steps were, for this one I winged it without practicing somewhere else. I grabbed Gunmetal Grey and started spraying the masked portion just barely enough so that the edge of the spray would bleed over to the box. I alternated between spraying perpendicular to the plane and spraying nearly directly at it but several inches away from the edge. I did make some mistakes but these were quickly fixed by covering up with Dark Steel.

You can see a bit of it here before I pulled off the masking.

 

[DopamineDoc]

Here is how it turned out before the gloss. It looks pretty nice! I was happy about this because during the last step, I had Dark Steel in the left hand, Gunmetal Gray in the right, and I was just spraying and fixing mistakes, then spraying and fixing mistakes.

A few days later, I took it back to the "spray tent". I used Spraymax 2K glamour gloss.

 

[DopamineDoc]

Here it is after it dried/hardened. I'm super happy with this!

Here it is with the panels added back:

 

[DopamineDoc]

I'm not sure if this link will work, but here is a video of the glossy finish.

Video

This thing looks amazing in person. I'm super happy with the Volvo Mystic Silver. Part of me believes it may have been what was used on the actual prop. Either way it is close enough for me!

 

[DopamineDoc]

I also wanted to have a good display stand and toyed with a few ideas. I debated trying to set up a stand that made it look like the HiC was floating (sort of like the Sideshow version) but it wasn't really cost effective. I loved the look of the stand from custom3dstuff.com so I decided to go with that.

I decided to paint it a darker color - Soft Flat Iron. But first, I used Kilz shellac primer, let it dry, then sanded it a bit to smooth it out.

I skipped a bunch of parts, but essentially I went through and attached the pieces of 2x4 that were included with the kit as per the diagram on the website. I then went through and added the lighting. The kit comes with a lighting kit, but I had one lying around already that I had already set up on my phone so I used it instead.

and here it is assembled and lit. It looks great!

 

[DopamineDoc]

Awesome job DopamineDoc !!!
I'm from Argentina, started with my HiC, less the block, all the pieces and Han printed in 3D (FDM & SLA).
ALLEY why in the pic you posted the block don't seen or don't have the top panel in left side (front view)?
Thanks in advance, regards

I don't know for sure, but I would assume someone just got a picture when that panel happened to be off. In ESB, you can see that this is a hero panel (like on the top right). However, somewhere along the way it switched to a normal/non-hero panel. Maybe this picture was taken during the change?

 

[ALLEY]

I don't know for sure, but I would assume someone just got a picture when that panel happened to be off. In ESB, you can see that this is a hero panel (like on the top right). However, somewhere along the way it switched to a normal/non-hero panel. Maybe this picture was taken during the change?

The picture is taken from the famous Best of the Lucasfilm Archives book, from the late 1990’s.

The lack of the upper left-hand (facing the block) panel could be due to the panel being removed, or from poor photographic cropping.

 

[13doctorwho]

I think they moved the hero panel to the left side for the corridor scene to add some interest for the close up. In all the other shots the full hero is on the right side (Han's left).

 

[DopamineDoc]

In addition to the pedestal, I wanted to potentially add some greeblies/decor to enhance the visuals. I went through the scenes from the carbonite chamber looking for items in the background.

I noticed two props that I thought I could potentially recreate. The first one looked like a stack of dog food bowls with a thermos cap on top (beside the ugnaught):

The other was a metal post with hose/light on top:

Copying the stack of bowls would be too expensive (based on similar items I found). I liked the metal pier with hoses but I couldn't discern many details.

I kept looking and came across this item from a Sideshow Luke on Bespin sixth scale figure:

This, I think I can more or less do. I bought a bunch of PVC pipe, some hose, and other assorted items. I really liked that the round portion with the small domes on the circumference looked like the part from hero panel 2:

 

[DopamineDoc]

Using a few items I found, I made these:

I'll spare the details on the rest, but I ended up with this. I purposely made it somewhat "sloppy". I've made one for now. The acrylic region at the top has lights for it to glow white like in the movie. I'll probably add a base to it like the rest of the pedestal.

It is not attached to the pedestal - it is here just for pics/show.

Looks okay, not great. I may repaint in the future!