Davlin
Well-Known Member
Hello to the RPF forum users,
Well, it's almost a year since I became a member of the RPF community, but it's my first post here to talk about one of my humble projects.
I wanted to create a model kit of the famous Lightcycle from Tron 1. Toys were too pricy and / or not accurate enough ( when you were lucky enough to found them ), some garage kits were really good but went out of production long before I found the articles about them on the Web, and the challenge to make it myself all pushed me to try to create mine, up to the best I could. I'm not a prop genius but it's worth a try.
The whole idea was to model an accurate as possible Lightcycle in 3D parts, have those printed in hard plastic, sandpaper them, mold them, make copies in resin with clear parts and paint / glue them together with a cool base and light jetwall.
I tried to design the parts in 3DS MAX in a way that assembling, gluing and painting would be as easy as possible. It took me a long time, lots of hours, to figure out the parts because all of the details that popped here and there and the way the pieces have to be assembled, plus I had to take into account the printing process and material limitations.
Here are some renders :
A beauty render of the whole model. As you can see, I've added a plus I've never see before, which is the pilot. I can tell you, this was a pain in the *tweet* because there was a lot of tweaking to do to have a correct-sized pilot into the bike, in a believeable way. But, I think it was worth the effort.
An exploded view of the various parts, on one half, with the assembled other half. I decided to cut apart the pieces by color, so they can be painted in a group, without masking or such. The green areas are where the glue will be.
A detailled view of the pilot. Most of the details are still here on the 3.5 centimeter long real model. For practical reasons, I had to cut out the hands...
I know it's not accurate to have clear parts on the lightcycle, since general views of the lightcycles are always with black, opaque glass material ( while the closeup are with clear glass, but that was the limits of the technology back then ). Because of this, I had to design the interior of the cockpit and that gave me a hard time since I'm no Syd Mead, but I hope you'll still find this to be a good idea.
Have them printed out also took me a few trials and errors, mostly because of the thin parts. There was a 1 millimeter limit that I have to respect, and MAX is not designed to check that kind of stuff on every vertex of a model.
Here are the final parts, gathered for printing :
And... here's all the parts I received once printed out :
Here is a rough, dry-assembly of the two halves.
A detail shot of the pilot, since the translucent material make the details hard to see.
Sorry for the crappy pictures ! It's a really precise printing, the parts fit themselves almost perfectly. Once put together, the lightcycle is approximatively 16.5 centimeters long and 7 centimeters high, I thought it was a fair size.
So, that the point where I'm at right now.
Now, I'm ready to move onto the molding process and I could use some advice from you guys. The glass parts are to be made into a clear material, and I don't really know which material, whether it would be resin, or acrylic, or something else, to use to achieve that. The molds will be made with some thin silicone, of course, but would you have some tips or advice about the molded material ? That would help me a lot, 'cause I'm stuck at this.
Thanks for reading, and please don't hesitate to post any comments or questions, I'll do my best to answer !
Well, it's almost a year since I became a member of the RPF community, but it's my first post here to talk about one of my humble projects.
I wanted to create a model kit of the famous Lightcycle from Tron 1. Toys were too pricy and / or not accurate enough ( when you were lucky enough to found them ), some garage kits were really good but went out of production long before I found the articles about them on the Web, and the challenge to make it myself all pushed me to try to create mine, up to the best I could. I'm not a prop genius but it's worth a try.
The whole idea was to model an accurate as possible Lightcycle in 3D parts, have those printed in hard plastic, sandpaper them, mold them, make copies in resin with clear parts and paint / glue them together with a cool base and light jetwall.
I tried to design the parts in 3DS MAX in a way that assembling, gluing and painting would be as easy as possible. It took me a long time, lots of hours, to figure out the parts because all of the details that popped here and there and the way the pieces have to be assembled, plus I had to take into account the printing process and material limitations.
Here are some renders :
A beauty render of the whole model. As you can see, I've added a plus I've never see before, which is the pilot. I can tell you, this was a pain in the *tweet* because there was a lot of tweaking to do to have a correct-sized pilot into the bike, in a believeable way. But, I think it was worth the effort.
An exploded view of the various parts, on one half, with the assembled other half. I decided to cut apart the pieces by color, so they can be painted in a group, without masking or such. The green areas are where the glue will be.
A detailled view of the pilot. Most of the details are still here on the 3.5 centimeter long real model. For practical reasons, I had to cut out the hands...
I know it's not accurate to have clear parts on the lightcycle, since general views of the lightcycles are always with black, opaque glass material ( while the closeup are with clear glass, but that was the limits of the technology back then ). Because of this, I had to design the interior of the cockpit and that gave me a hard time since I'm no Syd Mead, but I hope you'll still find this to be a good idea.
Have them printed out also took me a few trials and errors, mostly because of the thin parts. There was a 1 millimeter limit that I have to respect, and MAX is not designed to check that kind of stuff on every vertex of a model.
Here are the final parts, gathered for printing :
And... here's all the parts I received once printed out :
Here is a rough, dry-assembly of the two halves.
A detail shot of the pilot, since the translucent material make the details hard to see.
Sorry for the crappy pictures ! It's a really precise printing, the parts fit themselves almost perfectly. Once put together, the lightcycle is approximatively 16.5 centimeters long and 7 centimeters high, I thought it was a fair size.
So, that the point where I'm at right now.
Now, I'm ready to move onto the molding process and I could use some advice from you guys. The glass parts are to be made into a clear material, and I don't really know which material, whether it would be resin, or acrylic, or something else, to use to achieve that. The molds will be made with some thin silicone, of course, but would you have some tips or advice about the molded material ? That would help me a lot, 'cause I'm stuck at this.
Thanks for reading, and please don't hesitate to post any comments or questions, I'll do my best to answer !
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