My Working Stargate Miniature!

MangyDog

Sr Member
RPF PREMIUM MEMBER
Hi all, If any of you follow my videos on YouTube you may remember I announced that my next major project will be a working Stargate miniature model....

First I just want to say if any mods feel this is better in another sub forum by all means move it. I wasnt sure whether to put it here in Studio Scale Models or General or even Prop sub forum... Given that its still fairly large and being scratch built and not from a kit. I felt Studio Model is about right. Sure its not a 6 footer but its still fairly big :p

On and off for the past month and a bit, I've been working on a model of the stargate in fusion 360. This is based on various references I've found online, including the french teams full scale replicas thats been popular here. Focusing on the main visual details trying to make it as accurate as I can with only giving some slight consideration to making it printable and kitable later....

The plan... Make the model in F360 roughly in real world studio measurements (6 meter diameter) then lock down the scale I want to build my model at... Roughly 1.5-2 feet diameter. Once I have the scale locked down I can then start finalising the parts to print, and figure out all the mechanics and functioning parts....

Heres what will happen. The gate will function, the inner ring will move and accurately dial gate addresses. And the 12oclock chevron will do its locking effect in the Sg1 style. That is The 12 I clock chevron takes the symbols and does the locking effect and the dial chevrons just light up.

I decided not to go with the film style of gate dialing as this project is already very complicated as it is, but that may change down the line...

As the gate can be dialed, I need a DHD.... Now im sorry to tell everyone.... I LOVE stargate I'm a huge fan of the show and I love the gate.... I however.... HATE the Goa'uld DHD... The big round thing with horns on the side... Always looked wrong to me. So I have a plan... The Round Symbol pad, im going to keep. But Im doing to design a "as if made by Stargate Command" DHD... This will be a Naquida Generator and DHD all in one design... But that will be one of the last parts to design.

The vast majority of the parts will be printed on my resin printer (photon) so i need to be sure to scale the model so the sections can fit the build area. The main dialing ring gear will be laser cut, likely in 2 halves as my cutter is 40cm x 60m max. The symbols are chiplets that will fit onto the gear.

The electronics and programming will be something I work out much later. But its likely to be arduino or stm32f103 based. And with a single stepper motor... im still unsure if ill use a nema17 or some other smaller driver. Tbh Nema17 seems over kill....

The chevron locking effect is something I still need to figure out. The light and V split in there movement. So i will likely have to make some kind of butterfly/scissor mechanism there. But also not sure if I'm going to be able to fit a mini solenoid or servo in the ring space, or if ill do it using a pneumatic wire.

Anyway heres a couple of renders showing off the modeled parts so far... At this stage each duplicate part will be cloned around the model But at the last stage ill add the intersecting curve lines... Im actually very close to finishing the full scale model... I need to sort out the greeble effect on parts.

Anyway :D Hope you like this start will update as it goes...

gate1.JPG
gate2.JPG
 
Thats a render? That looks good.

Any '20 feet' above shots? so we can see the whole things in scale/scope?
 
Oh the background is just an HDRI, for lighting mostly.... It helps bring out the details and add AO to the model....

Taking a couple days break from designing this to get some more work on the falcon done... Painting now :D

But ive been having a think of how best to build this thing...

As most of it is duplicate sections. Rather than model in the circular effects, ill print off and prep one master of each part... then do resin casts... And maybe score in the circular cracks.

Ive also locked down the size... It IS going to be a foot and a half, 18 inches diameter... So its still going to be fairly large... But its also the limit of the sections i can print on my resin....
 
1579374875524.png


Studio scale enough? outer diameter 54.7 CM... a little over 1 and a half feet... Thats the max size I can go. with the larger parts to print fitting inside my resin printer...
 
Hi all sorry for the lack of updates, but Ive actually been really very busy working on the model design and also doing some work on my falcon, which I also need to make a update post on at some point...

Anyway huge amounts been done to the model since i last posted.
Firstly Ive been figuring out how this is all going to come together... Theres going to be soooooo many parts, I need to make sure theres a sequence thats easy for me to remember for it all to fit together. And its all built on a set of lasercut POM sheet working as a base frame for parts to screw into, but also to hold the dial ring gear in place.
I got pretty far in that frame design, that I then realised i made my gate way way way too chonky. The cut away profile some what matched the drawings of a gate... turned out the reference i was following was from the French teams full size replica. Another friend of my from Scifi meshes showed me some studio blue prints and I realised it was way to fat... Luckily my taper face was about the right angle, so all I needed to do was bring the faces in a little... However that also meant i had to totally redesign the framework as it would no longer fit.

Anyway once thinned out I started modeling in connection points and grooves for parts to interlock and be glued to. And then it was time for the greebles.

Ive attached a render of the greeble ring. This segment is designed in F360 but I then exported an stl of this and imported into max. There i selected the faced where I wanted the greebles, UV mapped a height map of my greeble pattern and then mesh smoothed the hell out of those faces... In the end i had a 64 million poly mesh.... My Ryzen 7 (first gen) and 32gb of ram was crying so much. I had a few crashes, and some changes to modifier settings could take up to 30 minutes to process......... But in the end I managed to run the displace modifier and get a good relief map of the greeble effect on the ring. The reason it had to be so high poly was so there was enough polygons to hide any aliasing bellow the 3d printer voxel resolution. (0.047mm cube) That way it would limit any strange stepping. Obviously I couldnt work with a 64 million poly mesh all the time. So I started looking into some optimiser and remesher tools to bring the poly count down while keeping the vast majority of detail. Now in my screenshots, it states 32 million polys, but after collapsing the mesh it showed me 64... Not really sure what happened there. Dont know if it was quads being turned to tri's.... Anyway it was A LOT.

Luckily prooptimiser bring the mesh down to a reasonable 1.2 million polys. But strangely it left a dense set of vertexes around the edge, the base optimiser modifier cleaned them up and removed some more unneeded vertexes across flat surfaces.

Just to get the right relief effect has taken about 2 or 3 days worth of tweaking and crashing for this part.

Given that this part along has taken so much time to make. And its going to take 22 hours to print... Im not going to make individual segments, so each one will be identical... Though TBH thats not a real big issue for me...

Now I have an idea how the chevron locking mechanism is going to work... ive drawn up something in F360 that might work but I need to do a test laser but of the part and try it out... Though truth be told im not 100% certain if its right for this job and i might have to go back to the drawing board on it

Anyway again sorry for the slow update... Ill be making a part 1 video very soon... I just want to lock down a few more parts on this model before I make it...

1581903654956.png

1581903677093.png


1581902662910.png

1581902760231.png
 
Ive spent the last few days trying to figure out how to make the chevron locking mechanism to work... This is about the third or forth revision of ideas... Currently i have springs to pull the slider closed, but neglected to figure out how exsactly it will be opened. I was envisioning mayby using fishing line to pull them open. While there was space for that to work on the botton half. the top half there just isnt.
for scale ref, those springs are 3mm diameter. This mechanism is rather small and will be made of a mixture of reisn printed parts and layer cut POM. Those laser cut POM sheets will be 2mm thick.

I think im going to have to come up with another revision....
1582401836239.png

1582401847345.png

1582401858679.png
 
This particular nightmare of a part is FINALLY DONE! only took over a week and several iterations (lost count)

1582639767950.png

1582639779527.png
 
Im happy to say that the model of the gate itself IS FINISHED! (design wise)
I still need to sort out DHD and the pedestal but thats for the coming weeks.... Right now i want to get a few proper renders of the design sorted and make a part 1 video for my youtube channel.... As I really need to get an update out there...

Once the videos up I have a couple of other things I need to sort out (othe rproject stuff) and but Ill start modeling the pedistall and DHD and start electronic design then....

Anyway For now... heres a couple of renders of the final bits in place.... The greebled front and back faces behind the chevrons. :D

1582904056121.png

1582904091067.png

1582904118152.png

1582904137893.png
 
Beautiful work.
I will watch this with great interest.
I went on a set tour once and got some great gate reference. It’s a beautiful prop. And you are doing it justice with this piece!
 
:eek: you must share references! :D

So im prepping for my video now and ive taken my gate model into max for some renders...
Thought id show them here.... 4k images....
 

Attachments

  • Stargate1.png
    Stargate1.png
    10.2 MB · Views: 322
  • Stargate2.png
    Stargate2.png
    13.5 MB · Views: 302
  • Stargate3.png
    Stargate3.png
    10.6 MB · Views: 335
  • Stargate4.png
    Stargate4.png
    8.1 MB · Views: 317
Nice work so far.

My question is: Why are you limited in print size? If you did print all 39 inner ring segments separately or in groups it would give you the freedom to arrange alternate gate styles as well as improve the rate of print speed. You could also maintain quality of the print without worrying about minor flaws in one large print.
 
im using my resin printer to print the master parts, a FDM just cant do the level of detail i need in this case.... The build area on the resin printer is really restrictive. Its basically a 5 inch phone display. SO I have to make my segments at a scale that fit that build area... From there i can make the master and then resin cast the duplicates for each segment....

From there I can add minor details like the circular cracks, Likely hand etch them in...

Ill use my fdm machine to make the base and pedestal...
 
Back
Top