Category Archives: Master Model

A long time ago…

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In April 2015, Andre and I “published” our first drafts of a blueprint for the Falcon. This got the attention of a few fellow Falconers and our little family was born. Sean Sides, Stu Brown, Doug Maio, Andre Bustanoby, and myself would spend the next six years together chatting about all things Falcon. Identifying new donor parts, trying to figure out the proportions of things, etc.

We did most of this on Slack – and some 50,000 messages (mostly “LOL”) and several gigabytes of photos and files later, Sean has a fully realized Falcon, and Stu (by his own best guess) is three-fourths through his.

Millennium Falcon by Sean Sides premiering next to the restored Dykstraflex motion control camera used to film the original Star Wars miniatures.

Sean taught us a lot. He was our trial run. As he built, he let us know where we were wrong (and right). He reworked as much as he could in real-time, but otherwise plowed through as only Sean can, and we rolled as much knowledge into the next rev of CAD in his wake.

Yearly (or more) snapshots of our iterative process

We have a lot of iterations. Stu mentioned he was using version seventeen. That’s mostly true. That’s version 17 of his Falcon model (which currently sits a v22). I keep a digital twin reference model of every team members’ build in case we need to go back and pull a specific dimension or reference. In aggregate we’ve done hundreds of iterations over the six years. And hundreds more if you factor in the progression of the subassemblies – I think our upper gun platform revisions alone were in the upper-fifties before we were happy with them. And then there’s the quad-cannons, docking arms, jaw boxes, docking rings, and on and on.

I thought it would be fun to superimpose all our key milestones. Fusion 360 keeps internal version numbers – but that is every single save – otherwise, we do our own mile-stoning; duplicate the working file, and dump it into an archive to have more discrete checkpoints. Or in some cases the Sean model, or the Stu model, etc…

The X-Wing project really helped Andre and I refine a workflow to truly nail the proportions of a model and the tracking points for reference. Below shows one of a dozen reference images we used for the X-Wing to track points in 3D space, extract them to CAD, and the use them as reference for final surfacing in Alias.

X-Wing digital model and photo composite as seen in X-Wing Part 1.

We’ve been using a similar process on the Falcon all along, but the X-Wing project really allowed us to tune our process, and verify that process against known fuselage dimensions since Jason had original X-Wing parts in-hand. Being able to make hypotheses, and verify that those hypotheses were correct as a scientific control to prove the fundamental method gave us greater confidence in what we’ve been doing with the Falcon. When we re-render our tracked surface data over our Falcon photoset (we have a little over 130 photos that we use for our Falcon 3D tracking) we have pretty tight alignment – original model’s idiosyncrasies not withstanding.

3D surface data reprojected onto photo and rendered.
photo credit: Andre Bustanoby

Six years later, we are more confident than ever that what we’re divining is dang close to the original. Onward!

The Stu Brown Show

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We’ve been working with Stu (and Andre, and Sean, and Doug!) since 2015 on this project. It has been wonderful to see the birthing of another Falcon into the world. If only they were as easy to build as sitting on an egg… We learned so much from Sean’s build, and they just keep getting better. Great work Stu!

1/12th X-Wing Part 1

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Like any good story, I’ll start in the middle. As the project went chronologically we started modeling donors long before working on the fuselage, but this story probably makes more sense starting with our reconstruction of the major shapes of the iconic ship.

Laser scanning original fuselage castings 2018

Scanning Data

Jason had received a couple original ILM castings and this would be one of our primary starting points. We also had v5 casings from Mike Salzo as well as a mountain of vintage photographs of the original models. Getting digital representations of each of these assets was the first step to resurfacing the fuselage.

hero casting laser scan model
pyro casting laser scan model
v5 photogrammetry model

Unfortunately, the ancient castings had seen better days, and they were very warped and distorted. I was able to “undistort” them to certain extent, but doing this would probably result in some unintended stretching giving us a false reference.

the pyro and hero scans compared showing the warping in the vintage parts

After some digital tweaking, I had a composite of the three different reference files that could be used as surface reference. It wasn’t perfect, but it was a good start.

composite of all our scanned data (orange = hero, blue = pyro, green & purple = v5)

Tracking Points

The scan data was great, but not stellar. So, Andre pulled another trick out of his hat. We had about 90 photos of Red Three that Jason had taken. They we’re roughly shot as a turntable sequence, so Andre ran the sequence through 3D tracking software to produce a series of points-in-space that became another point of reference.

I was able to bring the tracking points into my CAD packages (Alias, Fusion 360, and Maya) as additional reference to supplement the laser and photogrammetry data.

This whole process of gathering data and compositing it in 3D space took a good chunk of the first year. All along we were refining our workflow and coming up with new ways of using it to better affect.

Surfacing

As we collected the above reference data, I was concurrently surfacing the fuselage in Alias. By the end of the project we had three generations of surface CAD each with a dozen iterations as we gained a better understanding of the nuance of the fuselage. Honestly, I really underestimated the subtleties of the ship having seen blockier models in the past. The body of the X-Wing is quite shapely, and clearly hand-carved. A beautiful piece of sculpture – until you need to replicate it in CAD.

a second attempt at the main body in Alias with the pyro scan as an underlay

By the time I had gotten to the third generation fuselage model, we had introduced a new step in the modeling process. We had the scan data, and the 3D tracking points, but now we were round-tripping the model back into into the scene we used to track the 3D data points as a way to verify what I was modeling was lining-up to the original reference. This approach let me model, tweak, and test across a dataset of nearly 100 different images to determine how accurate I was being with the surfacing. We got pretty close – asymmetries in the original model not withstanding. Andre and I have started using this same technique to divine the exact curvature of the Falcon’s domes and has improved our solves greatly.

3D model remapped to tracked camera data and overlaid on top of source photography.

While there were other aspects of the X-Wing that were also being worked on simultaneously, the “final” master surfaces took us just over a year nail down; from August 2018 to about December 2019 working an hour or two a night here and there; a near constant back and forth between CAD, scans, and photo-matching to get it just right.

final fuselage surfaces

Of course, along the way, Jason was printing full-sized (i.e. 1/24th scale) models to verify the surface data as we went. First in low resolution FDM prints, then eventually in higher resolution SLA prints… but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

Miss something?

Here are the other parts…

Master Model Update

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Those gun platforms and docking rings will need to attach to something. Our master model is still in flux. More than a year after Andre and I published our version 1.0 draft, we’re still discovering new things. Not ready to start cutting plastic yet, still some details to work out. Thank goodness digital prototyping in Fusion 360 allows us to make all sorts of mistakes for free…

pumpin’ CAD: part II

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Here is the underside of the upper saucer dome. All the pin holes are used to register the parts onto the CNC machine. I’ll also use them to register onto the main decking material.

pumpin’ CAD

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To prep the model for machining, it needs to be broken-up into smaller chunks. Well, my original plan was to make it all one part, but that ended-up being cost prohibitive. So smaller chunks it is.

master model

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This is the base model in 3D. I’ve been using Solidworks to make the CAD data that will eventually be used for machining and for build reference.

Aside from a few unobtainable kit parts, this is as much detail as I’ll be putting into the surface model. All the armor plating and greeblies and other details will be done by hand – probably over the course of many years. Oh my!

I’ll show in a future post how this model has be “parted-out” for machining. It’ll be a mosaic of smaller chunks of ABS plastic.

Initially, I had looked at making all out of one large piece of ABS, but it would have cost a mortgage payment just to make the saucers – way out of my budget. Smaller pieces means I can be more efficient in cutting a dome out of a source material that starts off essentially square.

base model

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My approach will, hopefully, be a bit unique. While I’ve done quite a bit of traditional fine scale modeling – most of my model-making experience come from the product design prototyping arena.

For this type of prototyping we use so pretty cool tolls that I hope to apply to my own Falcon build. I’ll employ some rapid prototyping, CNC machining, casting and probably some laser or ultrasonically cut part as well.

Of course, the ‘kit bashed’ portion of the model is where all the detail comes from. This aspect will be very traditional – except in instances where kit are no longer available, to too expensive to be had – like the Entex 935 RSR Porsche.

Having a somewhat digital workflow inevitably leads to a trail of digital assets. These assets, I’ll make avail able in some form here on the Falconer site.

The first of which is my 2D layout for the 32” Studio Scale model.

I’m using this as reference for placement of detail and overall proportion. It’s my translation of Helder’s documentation but it’s still largely interpretive – and in flux. But this is it as of the beginning of March. I’ll update it as my own model evolves.

The file can be opened into Adobe Illustrator and is dimensionally accurate, so you can grab measurements as needed.