Fallout 4 Alien Blaster

[Vrogy]

So I guess this project has begun to creep into meatspace. Good time to start sharing it.

The alien blaster in Fallout 4.
Concept from the artbook.


I remodeled it from renders.




Scaled roughly to a 1911 and printed on a Makerbot 5th gen in PLA at my local hackerspace.


Ended up scaling up a bit.


I'd intended to assemble it with spring pins. Alignment when gluing prints together can be a pain.


But the prints had warped significantly.


So I'm in the process of heat-bending them back flat, using some plywood, a heat gun, and clamps.


I might end up reprinting it at a slightly smaller scale, there was also some deformation around the clamped areas, unfortunately.
Currently the remodeled file is being shelled manually, to reduce the thermal mass of the print. I might try a custom-modeled 'brim' as well, or send it to Shapeways for a higher-resolution print, possibly.

 

[zapwizard]

Great model.

You may get better results by separating the model into individual components and printing those. The end model will look far better, and you can control the quality and color of each part.

If you send it to shapeways you will need to figure out how to shell it down to something more form fitting to save on cost. Since your model has lots of curves, you can shell it to 1.8 or 2mm thick and still get a strong model. A program such as MeshMaker can help you shell the model.

 

[Vrogy]

Great model.

You may get better results by separating the model into individual components and printing those. The end model will look far better, and you can control the quality and color of each part.

If you send it to shapeways you will need to figure out how to shell it down to something more form fitting to save on cost. Since your model has lots of curves, you can shell it to 1.8 or 2mm thick and still get a strong model. A program such as MeshMaker can help you shell the model.

I gave Meshmixer a shot- wow. Great programming, shelling this out took a couple minutes. Thanks for the suggestion!

Kind of resigned to just fixing up a lot of seams, I guess. An attempt at reprinting shelled halves failed pretty comprehensively once it got past an initial base layer- shrinkage pulled up the tail end into the extruder, which is just attached with magnets on the Makerbot 5th gen, and broke connections resulting in errors and a halted print.

It looks like a split at the base of the handle, just behind the sight hood, and the existing nose detachment will do the trick.

 

[Vrogy]

I ended up using a meshmixer-shelled model to reprint the blaster on an old makerbot.




The parts are mostly support and air. Thin walls mean if I need to I can bend them around a bit when I'm gluing sections together.


After some primering
IMG_7937 by Michael Vroegop, on Flickr

IMG_7939 by Michael Vroegop, on Flickr

IMG_7941 by Michael Vroegop, on Flickr

Still quite a lot to do here. I opted to cut off and re-print the sight hood for ease of molding later.

 

[Womble]

Very nice work. What did you use for the initial modelling?

 

[Vrogy]

Very nice work. What did you use for the initial modelling?

Sorry for the late reply - I used Cinema 4D.

 

[CLOTHAR]

Very cool project! Nice work.