Super-detailed and lit Leopard-class Dropship

[kjev]

I do have the Hunter. And all the Gear Krieg/Heavy Gear buildings. Before my old system melted, I had actually managed to get around the password protection and resize the buildings for Battletech. I was hoping for more gears, like the Jager, Mammoth, and so on. Actually, I'd like to learn more about the HG universe in general.

K'Jev

[Millenniumfalsehood]

Even if you were a caveman, you can't screw this up:

Go into Meta.

Click "Primitives" in the left-hand menu.

Select the Sphere.

A simple sphere will appear as a wireframe.

There will be a small menu near the wireframe.

Click "Segments"

The small yellow cube in the center will change from one with arrows to one with balls.

Click and hold the balls till the number of divisions satisfies the level of detail you wish.

Click "Create" right above the small menu.

A 3D sphere now resides in the window, resembling thus:



Save it under whatever file you want.

Open up Pepakura Designer.

Open the sphere file.

Find and click "Join Adjacent 3D Edges".

Click "Unfold"

Maneuver the pieces around in the field until the layout approaches what you would consider final.

You now have a paper model sphere which is ready to detail in Adobe. :D

[kjev]

Now THAT is a tutorial! Short, sweet, and to the point. I'll give it a shot. In the meantime (and no attempt to hijack this thread at all) this is the plastic one I started a while back. How long? The boy in the picture is 3 now.

K'Jev

[Millenniumfalsehood]

Thanks. Actually, that should read "Click and drag" the balls, but you probably knew that.

I forgot to mention, Pepakura will try to unfold the sphere in *one* piece, like an orange peel. You'll have to divide the single piece into several, by cutting pieces off and rejoining them. You can choose at this point whether you're sphere will be a petal-type or concentric-ring-type, based on how you divide the ring up. Fructose has an excellent tutorial on his site on how to navigate around Pepakura.

[kjev]

Petal type, I think. If I recall, the petals will have to be cut in half, as well (because if it ain't 1:285, I don't want it!)

I was using a model of the death star I found to base it all off of. But it never got very far. It'll be a while before I get to this one.

K'Jev

[TLHarrell]

I love the idea of lighting this craft with LEDs, and it looks like you've gotten a pretty good start on it.

I may make a suggestion for your formation lights though... the rectangular red LEDs like you used don't produce much in the way of side illumination, maybe 5% of their overall output. Whether you make these adjustments or not is up to you, but I figured I'd toss it in for others to reference should they want to do something similar.

Options:

1. Drill into the plastic part of the rectangular LED, just forward of the "cup" that you can see inside the part. This will cause more light to refract to the side. Work slow as the plastic is extremely tough on these. Don't drill too close to the electronics though as the microscopic wiring between the arms and the tiny chip inside will go POOF if they are subjected to any abuse. I've had decent success with chucking the round T-1 and T-1 3/4 packages into a drill and shaving the clear casing down with a knife and sandpaper for custom sized formation lights on plastic models.

2. Instead of rectangular type LEDs for these smaller marker lights, check into surface mount LED packages as they are generally designed for side illumination and are far smaller. For wiring of this type of LED, next time you have a dead Compact Fluorescent bulb, open that sucker up and unwind the coil. That magnet wire has a super thin coating for insulation. Just scrape it at the ends and solder normally. You can easily hide that wire inside any laminated part as it is so thin you just put it in place and glue your other half of a wing/fin/part over it.

[Millenniumfalsehood]

Thanks. I just happened to have those lying around and couldn't find any 3mm red/green LEDs (my first choice).

I'm not stalled on this guys, I'm just working on Thunderchild's Gunstar and my TLS miniatures ATM. :o

[pelipan]

Hi!! Great job with the leds. Im waiting your final model photo. Im a Battletech fan, from Spain.

[kjev]

Pelipan,

This is a shot in the dark, but you never met another player by the handle "Vampire" did you?

K'Jev