Death Star Build (The ultimate in mood lighting)

MrV

MrV

Sr Member
I know. A big ball.
I wanted to do this years ago until i got a price for a perspex sphere. It was going to cost $350. Too much. Goodbye idea.

Back streets of Carlingford (Sydney). There it is on the side of the road. A big perspex sphere (looks like it was an old pool light).

I Will probably sneak it into the lounge once complete as it is 400mm wide, so perfect for a corner lamp.

This space station will be the ultimate in ambient mood lighting.

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Maths was never my strong point but now that i can apply it to a Star Wars project....
Trying to scale measurements form a sphere is really hard. I imported some screen shots and book images into photoshop and overlaid a circle.. I was surprised how many of the images were distorted. This also made me realize why so many Vader helmets in images can vary so much. I wonder if an actual Vader helmet (From the films) actually looks quite different in the flesh? Anyways....made a jig to mark some lines.

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Cut the sections.

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The super laser was a bit of work with tweezers and a steady hand. It was pretty hard trying to get detailed images of this area. Im pretty certain the Original one now in private hands was missing the laser and the new owner had it remade.

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A base coat of grey (Actually looking a shade too dark) and 2 hrs of masking. And that is only half of the sphere!. The super laser looks out of scale but that is the iphone camera lens. Thats my excuse anyway.

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Speckle time. Black and whites. Just like the original.
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Anyway. I got the base colour totally wrong. It was way too dark. With a whole lot more detailing to do on top of the base colour it would just eat away at me having the wrong base colour. Start again.

Take 2. Had to re mask the entire thing but i did find some much finer pin striping tape (Tamiya) so i could get much better detail.
For R1 they mapped the entire ANH Death Star surface so they could CGI it. So i could be reasonably accurate down to a certain level of scale.

Learned things:
1) The original model was not perfectly round (Thought i was going mad when Photoshopping Death Star images with an accurate circle). I have read stories that the lights got very hot in some of the ILM models. To the extent one Star destroyer totally melted when a technician lost track of time. Maybe the Death Star model warped from heat??

2) Many of the images in old ANH publications are flipped. I have no idea why.

Any here it is.

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This is great - nice work! Looking forward to seeing it all finished off.

MrV said:
Learned things:
1) The original model was not perfectly round (Thought i was going mad when Photoshopping Death Star images with an accurate circle). I have read stories that the lights got very hot in some of the ILM models. To the extent one Star destroyer totally melted when a technician lost track of time. Maybe the Death Star model warped from heat??
Click to expand...

The answer is down at the bottom of this post:

http://community.foundry.com/discuss/post/1044127

from my digital Death Star model thread over on the modo forum:

http://community.foundry.com/discuss/topic/125625/the-death-star

Dan
 
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Looking good so far. Although this should be in the model section really.
So have you seen Rob's perfectly made replica?

https://www.therpf.com/showthread.php?t=52108


As for the flipped pics, depends. In the movie, the filmed image was flipped compared to the model built. So if the pics you have look like the movie, then they flipped them to look like the movie, but if not, then there not actually flipped at all.
 
Sure have! It was his Youtube Video that got me off my backside.
JediMichael said:
Looking good so far. Although this should be in the model section really.
So have you seen Rob's perfectly made replica?

https://www.therpf.com/showthread.php?t=52108


As for the flipped pics, depends. In the movie, the filmed image was flipped compared to the model built. So if the pics you have look like the movie, then they flipped them to look like the movie, but if not, then there not actually flipped at all.
Click to expand...
 
Images get flipped because people don't know what they are doing, or don't care. On one occasion I found something I was looking for when putting trash in a dumpster. Another time next to sidewalk. So weird and random. Cool find and great start.
 
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