Transcript:
[MUSIC] The imperial probe droid or pro bot. As some people like to call it is one of the more memorable droids from The Empire Strikes. Back, I don’t know if it’s the insect-like appearance or the unusual noises it made, But I always liked it. Despite the short amount of time, it actually had on screen so naturally. I was quite interested when I saw that build it and they will come a subscription service for 3d printable. STL files said that they were gonna be making the probe Droid one of their monthly selections. Actually, this one was sort of a bonus file that was split over three months and this is not gonna be a life-sized version. I can’t make everything Life-size. And in fact, I wanted to make this as kind of a small project that I could do between my larger things that I’m working on. Allow me to show you briefly. What the parts consisted of. We have the body here, which is three pieces and then, actually, when you have something like this with a lot of stuff on the bottom first of all, you’re not gonna want to print it that way. You’re gonna want to turn it upside down so that all that stuff is gonna be on the top and you won’t have to use any support material, but with this piece here, you can’t really do that because of the shape of it so instead they decided to just cut this in half, and you can print the two halves and then glue them together. It’s often a good approach to take with complex models like this, and in fact, that’s exactly what they did with the leg models. Each of these legs has been sliced in half. You can print them this way and then go ahead and glue them together. Later on, they also included models for the antennae. I am NOT gonna be using these because I prefer the extended version of the antennae and also long and thin models like these. Really don’t print very well. I printed this on my regular CR 10 so it’s not even the Cr 10s and I think it did a really good job, actually. I used the filament to metallic gray. Pla filament for this. I decided I would print this at the finest layer height that the CR 10 can handle so 0.1 millimeter layer height, because it’s got all these curves in the model here, and even at point one millimetre, you can still sometimes see the layer lines in places, but if you did anything bigger than that, it would be very obvious indeed, and I wanted to reduce the time I had to spend sanding and preparing. In fact, if you had to choose a theme for this build, they would be trying to see the least amount of work. I can get away with and still have a decent looking result. I did use a fair amount of infill for this, but it was actually kind of necessary. Because if you don’t do that, parts will end up trying to print over midair and it just won’t work here. We have all the parts more or less straight off the printer, and I think it came out quite well as I said, the smooth parts look decently smooth, and I think, with the addition of some filler primer to maybe fill in some of those small gaps and a small amount of sanding, we should get a pretty good result from this. These two halves here, of course, fit together like that will be glued together and it looks like we’ll be able to get away without even necessarily having to fill anything in with body filler or anything like that. Maybe be filler primer and glue will be enough. Of course, the head here after you’ve put, it together would fit on top of the body like that. And then you need to attach the legs. Well, you first have to put the two halves of each leg together and then attach them to the body. Of course we need this to look like it’s floating in mid-air. So I got a wooden plaque from Michael’s craft store. I’m gonna drill a hole in it. And then I’m gonna put a metal rod in it that I can use to make the model float. The rod itself is something. I got at a hobby store specializing in model railroads and things like that, and I’m cutting it with a metal cutting disc here on my rotary tool makes a lot of impressive looking sparks when you use it, so that’s always fun. I ended up getting some smaller diameter rods and cutting them in the same way to use for the antennae, which I won’t show you here, but you’ll see later. Finally, I drilled a hole in the bottom of the body of the robot to receive the rod and basically, I just decided to let it spin around that so that I could position it. However, I wanted I didn’t need to. We have the body and head assembled and glued together and this is actually kind of a mistake because I really should have kept these separate until after I had primed and sanded them. But in any case, I ended up putting them together and I used some files just to sort of preemptively sand. The joins here on the lenses. That was the part that I was most concerned about being obvious where there was a drawing, you know next. I primed model with some handy-dandy filler primer, which, of course, is intended to fill in a lot of the smaller gaps and hopefully layer lines that exist on the model. I went relatively heavy here just to try and fill in some of the layer lines and whatnot, but even afterwards, you can see how it actually brings out a lot of the lines and shows you where you need to sand. I used a sanding sponge here to help me sort of conform to the shape of the model, And this is where I was talking about were. Having these pieces be separate would have been a big help trying to get the parts sort of underneath the head and between the head and the body in particular. But it worked out, okay. I used some just plain sand paper as well in places. Now as I mentioned, I wanted to get away with doing as little work as possible and frankly, sanding is my least favorite part of this kind of process, So I didn’t do the most sanding I could do. I left a few areas not entirely smooth, but I did want to go in and make sure that the lens is here. We’re nice and smooth, and I think I did a fairly decent job on that part, at least after doing a little bit more sanding on the body with the sanding sponge. And I think it, you know, I probably put in about 45 minutes of work or something like that. I decided to move on to the next stage. Which is painting the body black. I’m not planning on leaving this black, But having a black undercoat will help a lot with the colors that I’m planning on adding aside from the under coats, I used brushes to paint the entire model and the base as you will see in just a moment, but first let’s look at the base and when I drilled the hole for this metal rod, I went too far. Went all the way through. And then when I glued the rod in there, I ended up having it. Stick out just a tiny bit, so it’s a little wobbly so, and you know, this is probably a good idea anyway, but I decided I would put this felt bottom on there and that really helped a lot with the wobble and would presumably protect any surface that I put it on. I just hot glued that on later. So the idea here is to make this into a bit of a snow base on the top. I have got some rocks that I found just walking around outside, and I hot glued those on to the base After that, the plan was to take some of this fine grain sand and mix it with some glue and then cover the top well leaving some of the rocks poking out as if it was poking out of a layer of snow. I have used this technique a number of times in the past, but this time I misjudged the amount of glue to add to the sand, and I made it a little too runny. So in the end, it kind of overflowed the base a little bit and I had to clean it up, but it turned out, alright? After a little bit of cleanup. You do want to let this dry for probably a couple of days to get really let it dry. Cuz It’s quite a thick layer of glue and sand here in terms of the painting. I first painted the rocks gray and then did some dry, brushing with lighter, gray and for the snow. I used white with a little bit of blue. I don’t know if you can tell, but this is a very light blue, And then I went over that with pure white, and I think it gives a really good kind of snow effect. I find it difficult to paint and fill myself at the same time, so I don’t have a lot of footage of this, but I basically used a few layers of dark grey gradually getting lighter. I then added some silver. I hadn’t intended to use this much silver in the first place, but when I started putting it on, it actually looked really good. I thought it gave it kind of a gunmetal effect. So I went with it. I will say that it’s a bit more subtle in real life when it’s not under some bright lights. I added a few finishing touches such as the gloss coat over the lenses, which really helps the look. I think this hole in the middle here should have some sort of a lamp in it. I think actually, but there’s not one included in the model. I also went back and added some of the red markings. I put down a coat of white paint first, because otherwise the red won’t pop very much against the black. I just sort of based it on what I saw from the sideshow figure, but it doesn’t match up exactly with this model, so I just had to kind of wing it in places and here. We have the finished model. I think the base turned out well. It looks like it could be incredibly snow and doesn’t take very much time at all to do this effect and the body itself also turned out really well, especially if you look at it from a reasonable distance, a foot or two away. If you’re looking well, this clothes, for example, you might see in a few places, some flaws or ley lines. Or you know, the paint job also. I think looks better from a little bit of a distance away, but I’m really happy with it. Overall here, the antenna that I added with some metal rods as I mentioned earlier. Sometimes these are shown as being two different heights. I made them the same height because I kind of feel like when we see them being two different heights. It’s actually just a matter of perspective, and they should be more or less. The same. The legs here. I really didn’t do much of anything on the legs, just some dry brushing, essentially as I mentioned. I left the Droid free to spin around the rod. So you can position him, however you like. I hope you enjoyed this. Look at my probe droid build if you want to learn more about build it and they will come. I have a link in the description below, although I’m not affiliated with them in any way, except as a subscriber. I do think they’re a good choice, though. If you’re a 3d printer enthusiast and Star Wars fan, I’ve been enjoying getting these models every month. Thanks very much for watching [Music] [Music].