It’s now week 10, which means there’s only 6 weeks left to go on this semester. Time is quickly running out, so let’s get started.
Tactical Espionage
I want to immediately get started on disguising this Arduino board, since I’m expecting it to be quite a process.
The idea I have right now is to just try and blend the edges of the box with the base of the terrain, so it helps hide the unnatural shape of it. My intention is to make it look like a piece of rubble, possible from the wall of the Piraka stronghold.
While I work on the design for this, I’ll be printing the case again but in a different color that should match the color I’ll paint the foam around it, since the bright blue makes it stick out a bit much. The best color that was available was one just called “Silver”.
With it printing, the first thing I need to do is refine my cutting technique, because, as I said in the last post, I have been unable to get any clean cuts in the foam so far. For this, I just looked it up online. There are a great many guides that suggest using tools that I don’t have access to, such as a hot wire, or jigsaw, but I did find this video on YouTube that shows off how to achieve clean cuts with a utility knife, which I do have access to.
In the video, he suggests using a square to help with getting straight cuts. While I don’t have one as fancy as the one he uses, the DKC did have a smaller one that would get the job done. I followed the technique he used in the video and…
It came out much, much better than any of my other cuts have. It’s not perfectly straight, but that’s fine for my use case. I don’t know any minerals in nature that have perfectly straight edges anyway.
I continued cutting bits of the foam, going nice and slow. It’s a tedious process, but I don’t have any other choice than to put up with it for the sake of quality. I kept at it until I had a bunch of rocky-looking chunks.
I’m quite happy with how these turned out. My process for creating them was to literally just cut the foam down into an appropriately rock-sized chunk, and then just keep cutting in all different directions until I had an appropriately rock-looking rock.
They’ll start really coming together once I paint them, but there’s something to do before that. Something I’ve been especially excited for. To really sell the rocky look, I can put some texture on the foam.
Now, depending on the material that is being created, the texture process will vary quite a bit. But the best way to get a rocky texture?
A bunch of actual rocks! I quite literally went outside with a baggy to the nearest gravel path, and just picked out a few samples (that I will return once I am done).
Now comes the fun part. I put all of the foam rocks into a separate baggy, placed them in a small bin, and then dumped the rocks into the bin with them. Then, I closed the bin and just gave it a good shake. And then after the shake, I took out each of the bigger pieces and patted them down with some of the rocks for some extra texture.
Try as I might, I can’t get the texture to show up on camera, unfortunately, so I won’t bother uploading a photo of the result. I will, however, get a proper photo once I paint the rocks, which is up next.
Edgeification
To paint the rocks, I first coated them with the classic paint and ‘podge primer combo. I went over each rock once or twice with a thin layer, which really helps them look more like rocks.
We’re not done with them though. To help them blend in more with the new silver case, I’ll give a couple of layers of grey paint to each rock once they’ve dried.
While waiting for them to dry, I started work on the platform raiser design I had in mind. It took a bit of work and was a slight hassle, but I came up with this in Blender:
My idea for it is to be a clamp of sorts. The top section has enough room for the foam to slide into (give or take; the thickness of the foam varied by about 2 millimeters), where a bolt will fit through, and then be tightened with a nut. The bottom section gives 15 millimeters of lift, and also has an extra hole so that I can tighten another bolt into the plexiglass that I plan for this to sit on top of.
To make sure it worked properly before going all in on it, I printed a test design of it, which gave me time to focus on the rocks again.
I gave them a coat of grey paint, making sure it wasn’t too dark or bright by mixing the two grey colors I had. While I didn’t intentionally leave the layers very thin, I think doing so helped make them look much better.
I think they could use a bit of extra wear along their edges, but I’m not certain how to go about doing that without exposing the pink foam underneath. So, at least for now, these will do nicely.
While the rocks are done though, I still want to toy around with painting the base board. I mentioned last week that it was looking a little bland for my tastes, and the first idea I’ve had to fix that is by carving some tiles into it. My thought process is that, because I want the Toa Inika to be storming the Piraka stronghold, it’s not unreasonable to assume there would be some sort of tiled floor.
I started by scoring some shallow lines using a ruler and knife, keeping the tiles generally wide.
From there, I took a random flathead screwdriver and ran it through the lines a few times to roughen the tiles up a bit. After that, I randomly started recklessly using the head to add some more wear and tear to the tiles, and pounded the handle somewhat randomly to add a bit of texture.
I made sure it especially put some extra wear on the corners were four tiles met up, but also tried to keep the distribution of damage somewhat even. I don’t think it was the best job, but the fact that I wouldn’t have painted the foam yet comforts me a bit. I expect that all of the visible foam in the cracks will be hidden by the black primer layer on the final product.
Borrowing again from Adam’s arsenal, I tried applying a brown wash across the tiles to really help add some grime to it all. To make the wash, I simply just took a bit of brown paint and mixed it with the nearest water-like liquid I had on hand, which was the hydrogen peroxide I’ve been using to dissolve the paint off the brush.
I tried keeping a decent balance between having it super watery and not very watery at all.
While it definitely helped a bit, I absolutely overdid it. I ended up not using enough peroxide in my mixture, and used too much of the mixture overall, causing me to have to spread it out a lot more than I intended.
I don’t think it looks bad at all, but it definitely is a lot grimier than I was thinking. I’ll leave it for a while and come back to it after some time has passed and see how I’m feeling about it. If I still don’t like it, I’ll try adding a bit of a light grey wash along some edges and corners to try and balance it out. If I still don’t like that, then I’ll know to use much less of the brown wash in my final product.
While I simmer on it, this gives me the perfect time to focus again on the platform raisers.
Building the tallest tower…
Looking at the printed result, it came out a bit differently than I expected.
I purposely made it thick for the structural stability, but this is much thicker than I was wanting. I also made the bolt hole too small and had to expand it a little bit to be able to fit the bolt through, and even then…
The bolt is too short to reach the other side, and even if it was, I wouldn’t be able to fit a nut in that tiny little space. I had to modify the design.
A little bit of tweaking later, and I got this much nicer looking support:
I made sure to widen the hole and thin the entire piece up overall. It definitely looks a bit nicer, but even with these adjustments, the bolt doesn’t have enough room for a nut underneath.
For this problem, I’m thinking I’ll just find a differently sized bolt, assuming the rest of my design does work. Since I’m fairly confident in it, I went ahead and printed three more of these designs to try out on the real base.
Printing all of the supports out, they do lift the base up enough as I hoped, but there is one issue that has reared its head. Despite the foam being advertised as the same size when purchased, it actually varies very slightly, so two pieces won’t have the exact same measurements. This normally isn’t a problem, but because I’m relying on it to be symmetrical in all spots, I’m subject to it.
In three of the corners, the designs fit generally well, even if I’m still not able to attach a nut to them. One corner is definitely a lot bigger than the rest, but I can at least squeeze it down. The same cannot be said for the last corner that is much smaller than the rest.
I tried my best to add a nut to an extra-long bolt, but no matter what, it didn’t stop the support from being shaky and loose.
I tried every other idea I could think of, between using washers, different sized nuts, and even creating a clamp design, but none of them worked at all. The only idea I have left for now is to just adjust the design I have so that it fits specifically on that corner, but I really don’t want to do that.
For now, I’ll leave it as is and come back to it when it’s time to install the plexiglass, since I still need to account for that no matter what design I go with.
Time’s Up
Unfortunately, I have to leave it all here as that’s all the time I have left for this week. I made some progress, but not as much as I’d like, especially considering that I still don’t like how the painted tiles look still.
My cables are supposed to be coming in any day now, so my first priority will be to get this paint job finished up so I can apply it to the main base and then get the Toa in place and ready to connect to the Arduino.
After that is all done, it will be time to deal with the Plexiglass. I have a plan created, but I still need to make sure it is within budget. This will definitely take me to the end of next week.
But with all that being said, I need to start cleaning up here.