3D Scratch Build - Battletech Argo

Yeah, that's a widely-held belief that's nevertheless entirely wrong. We use most of our brain most of the time.

How much of our brain do we actually use? Brain facts and myths

Anyway, I love this build! Great work!


I hope this settles the argument

 
Waddya mean "the detailed work":unsure: This, so far, wasn't detailed? You're killing me man:p(y)(y):cool::cool:


I am still awaiting/hoping for the post with poorly assembled legos held together with wood glue and a bent nail driven through them. It will help me feel better about the attention to detail and speed of productivity
 
poorly assembled legos held together with wood glue and a bent nail driven through them

:p

1737137619305.png
 
Here the lighting plan for the Habitat Pods and the wiring plan for the Centrifugal section.

Battletech Argo - Light Plan HabPod.png


Lighting the pods themselves will not be that hard (once (+) and (-) are there), the challenge will be getting the light points that are on the Centrifugal section in the limited amount of space. For this,I pre-printed a couple passageways to route cables through, but I am using my dremmel to channel out little "compartments" to bury the LEDs in and create any channels that are still needed.

This picture from an earlier post shows the pre-printed channels (skin colored) and a very generic wiring plan

Battletech Argo - Centrifugal design.png


That was the general plan... here is the more complete wiring:

Battletech Argo - Curcuit Centrifugal.png

1737320032452.png


The purple lines are a channel from the ATmega in Pod A for the blinking navigation lights, which needs to be in sync with all three pods. The grey lines are 0.5mm fiber optic for the little red and white lights on the centrifugal section. This is to reduce the amount of LEDs needed (and the power consumption). Lastly the LEDs marked as "Illumination" are LEDs that will be placed in a tiny pipe to direct the red light up onto the centrifugal pivoting mechanism like a spotlight illumination. For these I will need to do a few tests to see where the best placement is.
 

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Here the lighting plan for the Habitat Pods and the wiring plan for the Centrifugal section.

View attachment 1897318

Lighting the pods themselves will not be that hard (once (+) and (-) are there), the challenge will be getting the light points that are on the Centrifugal section in the limited amount of space. For this,I pre-printed a couple passageways to route cables through, but I am using my dremmel to channel out little "compartments" to bury the LEDs in and create any channels that are still needed.

This picture from an earlier post shows the pre-printed channels (skin colored) and a very generic wiring plan

View attachment 1897316

That was the general plan... here is the more complete wiring:

View attachment 1897319
The purple lines are a channel from the ATmega in Pod A for the blinking navigation lights, which needs to be in sync with all three pods. The grey lines are 0.5mm fiber optic for the little red and white lights on the centrifugal section. This is to reduce the amount of LEDs needed (and the power consumption). Lastly the LEDs marked as "Illumination" are LEDs that will be placed in a tiny pipe to direct the red light up onto the centrifugal pivoting mechanism like a spot light illumination.
That's what I called DETAILLED!:p:p:cool::cool:(y)(y):love::love::notworthy::notworthy:
 
Nothing worth showing yet, just a little bit of painting and a lot of drilling holes for fiberoptic and chiseling out channels for wiring... A lot of which would have been easier if considered in the 3D design. Too late for this go-around, but I have them on my list of improvements.

Color Identification

While I was painting, there where a couple colors that I needed to find an exact definition of. I thought it might be a good idea to share a method that I have used for quite a long time if you have a picture and are not quite certain what the color is. I discovered this back in my web-designing days, for the times that I needed to seamlessly match the background color with something else. This should work just as well or better with any decent photo editor or vector design software..., but if you do not feel like robbing a bank to be able to afford one of those, this also works great with Microsoft PowerPoint:

1737402775625.png

  1. Copy and paste your picture into PowerPoint. You can also do this with an actual object (see edit below).

  2. On the same slide as your picture, create a simple form. I have an orange square above... the type of shape or its color does not matter at this point, as long as it has a fill color.

  3. Next open the Shape Fill drop-down menu to give your shape a new color

  4. Choose "Eyedropper"

  5. Now you can move your mouse anywhere on your picture. If you leave your mouse on a point for a couple seconds, a small tool-tip with the RGB value of that pixel will appear.

  6. If you need other values like the Hex color code (#123456) or the HSL value you can click with the eyedropper to paint your shape with the selected color. Then go back to the Shape Fill drop-down again, this time click on "More Fill Colors..." and under the Custom tab you can see the other values for the current color. If you are lazy like me, you can mark them with a double-click of your cursor and then copy them out.


A slight downfall of this is that if your picture is shadowed like the one above, it may be difficult to find that one pixel that is not too light (due to being lighted) and not to dark (due to being in the shadow), but still it is a great help to know where to start.

Hope some of you find that useful.

[EDIT]
This is also an excellent method if you need to print your own decals on white decal transfer sheets (i.e. for decals with white in them) and you need to match the surface color perfect so that the part of the decal that is supposed to be transparent has the same color as the model's surface. For this, take a picture of your model in the best lighting possible and then use your picture in the steps above.

Reposted this in "Products that were not intended to be used in model making but work anyway"
 
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Nothing worth showing yet, just a little bit of painting and a lot of drilling holes for fiberoptic and chiseling out channels for wiring... A lot of which would have been easier if considered in the 3D design. Too late for this go-around, but I have them on my list of improvements.

Color Identification

While I was painting, there where a couple colors that I needed to find an exact definition. I thought it might be a good idea to share a method that I have used for quite a long time if you have a picture and are not quite certain what the color is. I discovered this back in my web-designing days, if I needed a background color to match something else. This should work just as well or better with any decent photo editor or vector design software, but if don't have one, this works fine with Microsoft PowerPoint:

View attachment 1897542
  1. Copy and paste your picture into PowerPoint. You can also do this with an actual object if you take a digital picture of it and upload that.

  2. On the same slide as your picture, create a simple form. I have an orange square above... the type of shape or its color does not matter at this point, as long as it has a fill color.

  3. Next open the Shape Fill drop-down to give your shape a new color

  4. choose "Eyedropper"

  5. Now you can move your mouse anywhere on your picture. If you leave your mouse on a point for a couple seconds, a small tool-tip with the RGB value of that pixel will appear.

  6. If you need other values like the Hex color code (#123456) or the HSL value you can click with the eyedropper to paint your shape with the selected color. If you go back to the Shape Fill drop-down, now click on "More Fill Colors..." and under the Custom tab you can see the other values. If you are lazy like me, you can mark them with a double-click of your cursor and then copy them out.


A slight downfall of this is that if your picture is shadowed like the one above, it may be difficult to find that one pixel that is not too light (due to being lighted) and not to dark (due to being in the shadow), but still it is a great help to know where to start.

Hope some of you find that useful.
Great trick to get that RGB value on any prop/model(y)(y)(y)
 
The Centrifugal section now has a maze of channels and opened-up spaces to contain the electric and fiberoptic. I tried drilling all of these out with my dremmel, but in the end it was faster to redesign the piece and print it out again.

1738327784189.png


There was also some surface detail that was needed on this piece as well as some of the command section pieces... Soooo, I decided to upgrade most of the pieces to version 3. Incorporated into that, I changed (yet again) the attachment method to free up some space inside of the model. With the new design, the pieces are solid, allowing me to hollow out the inside automatically in my slicing program before printing. This reduces the wall thickness to 1.7mm and thus makes it easier for drilling holes for FO. I also used the opportunity to tear apart the tinkercad design "block for block" to correct misalignments and delete unneeded building-blocks, in order to reduce the overall complexity. After the corrections I then put everything more efficiently back together again. I did this, because I am slowly reaching the boundaries of what Tinkercad has to offer.

The most detail was needed on the bridge section and the top of the habitat pods. I did not realize it when I first started, but the bridge has sections where the hull is missing and a view into the internal structure and piping is seen (the areas above in red). I indented these deeply so that I can add the internal structure, piping, and greebles later.

Argo Bridge.png
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The top of the Habitat-pod also received a makeover and some relief detailing (again something that had missed my scrutiny in the beginning). I also added some depressions to help with aligning the fiberoptic strands for windows.

Argo Habitatpod top.png
1738339798159.png



While assembling the last printed version, I also had some difficulties where the rings close with the rest of the ship. In that version, I had cut the unseen parts out of the rings themselves. One of my updates was to reverse this so that the rings are continuous and the cut-out is done on the ship's hull pieces instead. This helps a lot with the alignment and actually makes it look more realistic. I also made the docking collars more massive. Now they actually insert into the hull instead of being glued to the surface, makeing them easier to print and allowing the ring to curve into the slot.

Battletech Argo Redesign.png


Regardless of the cleaning-up that I did, this will only prolong the inevitable, Tinkercad is a great tool to get started in, but there are limitations in the amount of polygons (complexity) a model can have, and even if you stay within that by splitting pieces up, it can be a pain to download large STLs. I looked into Blender a couple years ago, but even the experts out there will tell you that the learning curve is really difficult. At any rate, I decided it is time to try a second attempt at blender, especially because I would like to do some things with texturing that are just not possible in Tinkercad. For example, the "space shuttle-like" tiling on the hull, should be possible to apply to the entire surface as a texture.

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