The Art of 3D Printing in Film: A Hybrid Approach

In recent years, 3D printing has become an increasingly popular tool in the film industry, offering a unique blend of traditional techniques and modern technology. The process begins with designing and creating the model, which can be done using computer-aided design (CAD) software or other digital tools. In the case of a particular project, the designer opted for a traditional approach, initially envisioning a sleek black finish.

However, when the model was placed on set, it became apparent that this initial idea would not work. The resulting shadow-like appearance necessitated adjustments to achieve a more authentic look. To address this issue, the artist gradually increased the rust and patina effects, eventually settling on a rugged, cast-iron aesthetic. This level of detail required careful consideration, as the designer wanted to replicate the texture of actual metal.

The use of 3D printing in film production has allowed for unprecedented levels of accuracy and realism. For instance, a key element in the model received a digital grain treatment, mimicking the appearance of carbon fiber. The result was a two-part effect, where the artist achieved a cohesive look by combining different textures and gauges. To further enhance this effect, the designer employed black nylons, stretching them over the model to achieve a precise fit.

The process of creating these intricate details requires patience and attention to detail. Sean, a member of the production team, worked closely with the artist to laser-cut specific triangles that would add depth and visual interest to the model. These small components were meticulously applied using a strong adhesive, resulting in a seamless integration into the overall design.

One of the most significant advantages of 3D printing in film production is its ability to facilitate collaboration between traditional and modern techniques. The use of computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) software enables designers to create complex models with precision and accuracy. At the same time, the incorporation of post-machining processes allows for further refinement and customization.

In this particular project, the production team employed a hybrid approach that blended the benefits of both old and new technologies. The use of 3D printing enabled the creation of intricate details and precise textures, while traditional techniques such as casting and molding allowed for the reproduction of complex shapes and forms. This blend of approaches resulted in a richly detailed and visually stunning final product.

The Power of Stop Motion Animation

One of the most significant challenges faced by the production team was the need to create convincing stop-motion effects. To achieve this, the designer opted for a hybrid approach that combined traditional animation techniques with modern 3D printing. The result was a highly realistic representation of motion and fluidity.

In one notable instance, the design required the inclusion of a sloshing brain in a jar. To accomplish this effect, the team employed a two-sided bolt that would allow animators to track motion on the model. This level of precision was essential for creating convincing stop-motion effects, which added an extra layer of complexity to the production.

The Importance of Texture and Lighting

In film production, texture and lighting play crucial roles in setting the mood and atmosphere of each scene. The use of 3D printing has enabled designers to create intricate textures that add depth and visual interest to their work. In this particular project, the metal finish was enhanced by a post-machining process that applied a slitting technique, allowing for precise control over tension.

The resulting texture was both rugged and visually appealing, with a subtle sheen that caught the light in a captivating way. This level of attention to detail was crucial in achieving an authentic look that would enhance the overall film experience.

A Conversation about 3D Printing in Film

In recent years, there has been growing interest in the role of 3D printing in film production. As technology continues to evolve, we can expect to see even more innovative applications of this versatile medium.

For instance, one of the key takeaways from this project was the importance of collaboration between different disciplines. By combining expertise from various fields, designers and producers were able to create something truly remarkable.

Furthermore, 3D printing has enabled filmmakers to achieve precise control over texture and form, allowing for a level of realism that would be difficult or impossible to attain using traditional techniques alone. This is particularly evident in the project discussed here, where the use of computer-aided design software combined with post-machining processes resulted in an exquisite model that added depth and visual interest to the final film.

As the industry continues to evolve, we can expect to see even more exciting developments in the world of 3D printing. Whether through increased collaboration or continued innovation, one thing is clear: this technology has the potential to revolutionize the way we approach filmmaking.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey everybody Adam Savage here in my cave with a really cool new Star Wars origin story I first saw Star Wars when I was 10 years old then I read the magazines about it and learned that people actually built that stuff and 30 years later I found the greatest of life's Pleasures in actually getting to work on Star Wars the fan became the Creator and a lot of my colleagues at ilm uh have that similar experience and that pleasure has been afforded to two great friends of mine Sean Charlesworth and Mark dubo got to design build and animate uh some new Walkers like the ad ads from Empire for the production of the Mandalorian I think when you watch the interview you'll be able to see the pleasure on both of their faces of having been able to contribute to a Star Wars production let's get into it all right can we start with the Walker this is so beautiful talk to me about about the process of making this and how it made it into the show okay well right after Phil made a tweet to John Favreau about how much he loved the show and the fact that it really felt like we were you know kind of seeing something from the past where they were shooting from the hip we we got contacted by Doug Chang who said that they had this junkyard sequence that they they wanted to do an ad at like Walker in amazing and so we took a really fast meeting with them they kind of swung by and they had some ideas about what it could be like this big junker thing or whatnot but you know at the end of the day we were left with this impression that what they really really wanted was if you had taken a probe Droid and an ad at and mashed them together you would get this kind of crazy construction and if you saw them in silhouette against the sky you'd be almost confused as to what it was because I see that feature of the ad at that sort of semi-circle actuator down there and the legs are very much like that but I see yeah your probe Droid those kind of yeah little gravity articulated grabby arms yeah so is this uh is this mostly kit bash or is this drawn and printed and then assembled well it's uh mostly it's actually a partial digital kit bash and a digital model at the same time Sean and I had been working together on another show that was had stuff to do with Mars so we actually had like a lot of like Martian you know Tech kit bash kind of stuff so little greeblies is used as decoration and yeah we could both be pointing at different parts of this thing right now and he you know like I know that Sean made this thing because it came from something else right right and so uh I just quickly bashed something together using all the parts that we had gotten and digitally digitally okay and then made a presentation of three of these guys to uh Doug three different options three different options Doug liked the legs and he liked different parts of it but he he actually selected a bunch of stuff and put it all together so this is actually like all three mashed into one so it's an olive cart model it's a la carte and he's the one that actually was like we want to have a big turret on the top because this initially had this big opening in the top and the arm would actually lift stuff up and then it would grind it and stuff would fall out of the bottom oh that's neat and but he was like it's actually better to have a big turret on it and so uh Sean and I just kind of got together after he approved that and then just started planning putting the model together okay we had a very short turnaround yeah you have a digital model and this was animated on set very similar to the original Walkers am I right yes yeah so given that it's animated did you also have a machine do you have machined Armature in there or you did it with the print uh so first Mark and I had worked on stuff before like 3D printing for tippet stuff I had never built a puppet um so they like a stop-motion no okay I mean I went to film school I did some animation so I academically know like how it oh it should probably be like this uh but this is like very early in the pandemic okay um and um so Gibby was going to animated who's done a lot of stop-motion stuff here and I and I was trying to like how should I build this how do you want it and like it just with the chaos of everybody doing a remote and everything like we just we're not getting in touch like we needed to and so a lot of it was kind of guesswork and uh I was super thrilled to be working on Star Wars sure like the Euro Mead was very excited but also that I was super stressed out because I'm like I don't know what I'm doing but not only that is Phil stepped in yeah and very quickly turned around and gave the proclamation that he's like we don't have the time or budget for an actual Armature inside of this thing right so it needs to actually really stand on its own without putting any metal in there oh wow so it is completely 3D printed and we uh we use have been using the form Labs printers for a lot and they just come out with some of their engineering resins yeah so I picked one that I thought seemed like the good choice but I had never used it before and it seemed because I had a little give to it it it it was good so we got it all together there's there are metal rods in the legs I was going to say that I was seeing some uh some aftermarket threads yeah also so it's there's rods in the legs for stiffness but these big discs the big add at disk the knees there's no way to get a metal support in there yeah and so we build it and it was the animators like this is this is okay and big big washers in there yeah and I'm sure um then it got we had a heat wave and we came in and all the legs had buckled like between two frames look I don't think they're in the middle of anime before that but they were better there was the first name noticed that something was up is usually when you're animating something they'll leave the lights on they'll leave the setup on and everything like that and then they go to lunch and then somebody came back from lunch and we used this thing called Dragon which allows you to go back and forth to make sure this Frame matches the last itself yeah and they're and he's just looking at it like like what what is going on he went from like up here to like down here you know and they basically just went from the heat wave yes so at that point you know he tried he tried to get it back up to where it was and he kind of got it there and the pro then the Proclamation was if you start a shot you gotta finish the shot yeah you can't just leave the thing and come back the next day you get even with even if we turn off the lights there's just we don't want to take any no matter how yeah and so there was a lot of very very hungry people on set sometimes yeah yeah there's a big learning curve uh definitely learned a lot about how to properly build the 3D printed stuff um like the whole platform start the SAG so there's metal rods that we we are literally tied in with just wire to keep it from drooping too much and wow so it held together just long enough to get everything animated well that's the budget they have right and the other thing too you were looking in there that actually lit up I was gonna say it's detailed inside well it's not really detailed what I did was I got a piece of cardboard and I found this great picture of a Russian tank crew inside inside the tank that's what I'm looking at that's what you're seeing it's like and I kind of scaled it and put it in there and did so uh Sean put in these I think it's purple lights yeah it's kind of a little purplish LED yeah there's LEDs that illuminate that inside and when they think when you get close on it and it's moving you'd swear there was like a crew inside we never get even remotely close to it amazing and then uh the the whole claw is articulatable it articulates but we made the decision to shoot that separately uh yeah Christopher Morley he was our VFX supervisor on and he made a decision very early on that I thought was really smart where it's like anytime we see that thing going down we need to have a lot of control over it right so he built a rig with uh Ken Rogerson and some of the other people we've got here where you could animate the the cable going down and picking up and not have to worry about the rest of the animation and we had a little TIE fighter I could maybe show you that later uh that we had made that it grabs and it picks up and you could take Parts off of it so that you could use it in different uh orientations so um you know the the Orange is not a common Star Wars color but this looks like it was a fun paint job it was fun to do I gave like five options to Doug and he chose this one and one of the things that we did this was Sean's idea which was really smart is this is kind of that Star Wars language and it's all of our names of the people who worked on it printed all over this one is Phil oh no it feels right up front right there yeah and I can't remember where mine is but this is it's such a classic Model maker thing on the tedium of doing a long job you've got to sign it and like I I've had my name show up in a hero shot and get yelled up by my supervisor because I didn't know anyone would be looking at that oh yeah but if you look close and you know a lot about Star Wars vehicles you can actually say that this is the tail end of an ad app oh so it is look at that yeah oh that's great I was wondering because I was like oh I'm wondering if I could recognize any of these parts as like digitally kit bashed from well I do a lot of uh digital modeling uh doing replicas and stuff like that and I have like a bunch of kits that I'm kind of you know sometimes I'm working on them sometimes I get them from other people and so I had an ad at that I was kind of working on uh for a little while because I wanted to get something that was a lot more accurate than what was out there and I was just like I just tilted it yeah I love it and that's the that's the clevis pin yeah I'm assuming for the cylinders that you had little bits of kns metal or something like that um on these little uh actuators they're just metal tubes yeah yeah yeah that that's my least the way they connect is my least favorite part of the model I I when I we put them on in uh as like an afterthought and they don't actually really function as Pistons they yeah you know if you see the way they are there they have like this elbow at the base and it's just like there's no strength whatsoever yeah power distribution what we were trying to do was just follow that whole like we want it to be confusing you know um now I love the fact that it's got articulated toasted those also move a little bit Yeah from walking yeah so the it's the main base and then each toe separate and then the Rings separate yeah there is there is a certain order of oh these are all jigsaw puzzles there's an order of operation like in terms of assembly yeah and like because it's it I I would build things and I'd be like there's no way I can actually assemble that right so I'd have to go back and revise it yeah um and then uh there's just giant ABS rods that go through the body that the legs clamp on so the tops of the legs are actually like a clamp that clamp on that and you can tighten and loosen oh neat different friction so so I remember when you guys were working on this you you described it in the most oblique abstract terms you said working on something really cool can't wait for you to see it and I was watching the episode and I saw this and I was like jumped out of my chat what was it like for you guys to see the animation in the episode it was a little surreal you know because I while we were building it I mean it was like it were like kids again putting together like oh we're doing a Star Wars model kit you know kind of thing but it's and it was and it was fun to build too because once we once we had hammered out the basic design and and then started detailing it we would send pictures to Doug and it's just like you've got Doug Chang going yeah keep going yeah looks great keep going like we literally got like no notes from him after that first approval and uh once it got into the shots we were like the my my only my only sore point would be I wish they had done a shot where we got really close yeah they're all kind of in the distance in a little out blurry um yeah but they still look great so did you make one of these for all that stood in for all of them yeah yeah so how many separate animated elements using this did you guys film well sometimes they would actually have two cameras on the thing at once at different angles so they would animate it and it would it would serve for Two Shots we had a very short schedule on it Gibby uh and his team would probably know best about exact exactly the way they did that but yeah they we had to do it was quite the turnaround by the time it got into their hands it was yeah it was it was the most exciting thing and the most stressful thing I've ever done yeah because when it first got on set too Phil was the first guy to grab it and set it down and start like moving it and there's a there's a picture of me and Phil and that's the first time he's kind of locked it down and he was playing with the joints and I was like watch he'll just because it was like well you got to fix that you know still wants something that's going to be rugged you know he's going to put it through his Pace yes and he was like okay it's working it's good now you said it was required to be able to stand on its own but I noticed a stand here with a port did you have an external support for most animation we did yeah yeah just since the legs ended up being a little problematic and uh so I had I had provided a mount in the body in case of that so it was there when we needed it but uh yeah there's I've definitely learned a lot from this first one but you know to be fair every time we do stop motion animation there's we always try to have some sort of amount that's that even if it's like a you know bipedal character or whatever it is it's just you know we want to make sure that it's always kind of stuck in the right position right so even you know even for the Bomar Monk and some of the stuff that we're working on right now we always try to factor in these Mount points all right well so let's move and pivot we're going from Mandalorian to book a Boba Fett yep tell me about this guy how did this what was the first what was your first intersection with the project you got some drawings uh usually it's like through a call like they they say that they have a sequence and it would work really well for stop motion yeah and somebody somebody said something about you know a Bomar Monk and I had no idea what it was and I think I think you did but I knew what it was Brett Foxwell knew what it was oh my God the bull Armand the Bomar monk shows up in Return of the Jedi yeah and when C-3PO and R2 come in the giant gate the palace you see it for all of three seconds as a full-scale like in a distance shot yeah and it's very it was cobbled together it's barely animated and you you see it for like four seconds like this yeah and it has a a brain and a jar here which was added digitally after on ours but so it was a very obscure thing which was very exciting to be able to like yeah do this did you have good reference material or does the original model exist there's a digital model that exists of this that was built off of I think reference of the initial one okay there are a lot of work had been done and and this model came to us initially from ilm they had already built a yes A version of it all of their detail all this detail is ilm oh yeah the the trick for us was then we we had to engineer how the heck to fit an Armature in there and make it work and still look like the original well I mean I'm touching these legs these are all solid so well the problem you run into with the 3D printing in resin is when you get something this long and spindly it warps so we had I had messed around with can we put rods in them and it was I mean it's such a tight fit I was even looking at like hot carbon fiber rods this is like some Jack Skellington Armature yeah so then I suggest is like we could get these 3D printed in metal however they're not the 3D printed metal is not unless you're going to pay like NASA money that's not super super precise it's kind of rough okay so I'm I got samples printed and gave them to Brett our machinist and he tried turning them and millions like we can do this I can I can deal with oh yeah so with Machining yeah so this was an interesting process because we had a bigger group this time because we had Mark me Brett and and Gibby was animating again and so the process was I'd have to figure out where the pivot Points would be in in the an actual puppet then I had to give those measurements to Brett and Brett then started making a center block and the all these have ball joints on them right right and then he sort of manifolds yeah and then he'd give that to me and then I would digitally replicate what he did and stick it inside the model and then I had to design all these body panels to attach to it yeah so this it's deceptively it's way more complicated than it actually looks on the outside but I mean but that also is calling back to the beginning of special effects where there was always this tension and collaboration between the Machining department for the insides of puppets and the Practical outsides the stretch skins and all of them yeah so so basically bet Brett designed a core that's in this that is a aluminum a steel block there's little ball joints on each thing and then he even did the butt oh that that's on a swivel and then the arm is on another one down here yeah um strength of that swivel is real yeah so the 3D printed metal legs the rest is Is We I printed on my form Labs at home out of better material than we used on the Walker and it everything really held up well and then there's little magnetic pieces like this that you have to remove so that gibby he had a flying rig that this was suspended on oh and then that gave him access yeah and then Brett put these little tiny tiny eyelets in the tips of the legs so that you could tie down the legs to the terrain so you could drill a hole in the terrain and wire it through yeah and you had to do that every time a foot hit the ground so that it wouldn't move the train itself was a feat you know I mean like building this thing was like it was like two-thirds of the job the other third was we had that 20 foot long run it had to go on that had to like the ground you see him on is not digital whatsoever it's not practical and it needed to look like sand but couldn't get Disturbed or whatnot and it was like a 20 foot long piece of sandpaper like it was not fun if you tripped and fell on that thing it was very very uncomfortable um go ahead I had to point out the thing that I'm most proud of that you never ever ever ever see sure but the original monk has these Pistons right and these there is no way that these can physically like actually work on a real mechanical thing but they had to be there and they had to look real this took me the longest out of any engineering thing is this is actually surgical tubing this the Piston itself is elastic cord that is knotted tied through here runs the whole way through and so it lets it let so if you do it too far you can see it it does Bend like rubber but it gave the illusion of Pistons working um when it's actually not doing anything at all you don't see it at all there's a lot of weird things that we had to do for this guy like the Finish uh initially Doug wanted it like black but when we had it on set it was just looking like a shadow so I just gradually had to make it more and more look like cast iron with like a rusty paint job but doing the butt end of this thing was really interesting because we just got like a piece of Geo for it and some key art as to what it's yeah I'm curious about the texture here it's really lovely it's actually a it's kind of like a two-part thing I'm I digitally modeled a grain on the model itself okay which looks a bit like uh like a like a carbon fiber and then we had different uh you know kind of gauges of that that we sent to Doug and he chose one but when we were painting it we wanted it to kind of feel like Dusty and a little bit like almost feel like cloth so what I did was I ran out and I got about like nine ten pairs of different types of black nylons oh and then small nylons and then stretched it over stretched it over that's how I can see back here where they gather yeah they gather in the back and they gather over here until it was like fine enough that it had that great kind of like they call it you know like a facing ratio like the way the light fell on it because we didn't want this to read as metallic or anything like that right and it always looked like a Dusty bag on the original one and so yeah it was basically like it's women's nylons over the top of this thing and then uh Sean laser cut the these little triangles the triangles are a fabulous detail yeah they're like that they were like that on the reference they gave us so we did that anyways and it kind of glued them on what I love that both of these models really exemplify it because I get this question a lot is how is 3D printing changing the film industry and this is the answer is it's just one more tool in the Arsenal because you're still using all the oldest tools in the Arsenal as well as the most modern tools this was a good blend I think of the two and and there's definitely times I'm like I am a three-print guys like we should not 3D print this yeah yeah there's there's Parts on here where you know we went and made molds and cast it out of different materials right right you know the piping and the wiring you know like old techniques to kind of like you know when you if you flip it over it's got fun details and stuff like that and we we had to go and put like a little marker on here because there's supposed to be a jar in front with a brain in it sloshing around so that little two-sided bolt that's to help the animators track motion track to the model itself so whenever you see you you see that brain ball in the front and the water's sloshing around I mean that would have been very difficult for us to do stop motion sure sure now I've animated beer before it's no fun yeah so yeah it was a fun it was a fun project we had this one we had plenty of time we had a great crew we had a good time I love the metal 3D printing and the idea of using it as a hybrid well with post Machining process yeah even down to probably the slitting to get the right amount of tension on these joints is just gorgeous yeah no and and it actually had a texture to it I think that lended itself really well to the lighting in there it just it just allowed the light to kind of Ripple across the surface a little bit more instead of just being this polished greasy shiny look you know that's so I you guys must must have both been convening a little bit with the 10 year old versions of yourselves I I went to film school and then did nothing with it and I got my first screen credit at age you know 40 whatever uh and I never thought I'd get to work on Star Wars so I was very honored yeah guys it's just really magnificent work and like I'm so glad you're so you're such fans and you both get to enjoy that from the fan standpoint and the professional standpoint it's well deserved guys yeah it's and it's one of those things that's really fun because I know there's a lot of people out there right now working on the digital side of those shows but they don't have anything physical that they've worked on like sitting in front of them right we get to work on this stuff and then we pass it in the hallway every day we made that it's amazinghey everybody Adam Savage here in my cave with a really cool new Star Wars origin story I first saw Star Wars when I was 10 years old then I read the magazines about it and learned that people actually built that stuff and 30 years later I found the greatest of life's Pleasures in actually getting to work on Star Wars the fan became the Creator and a lot of my colleagues at ilm uh have that similar experience and that pleasure has been afforded to two great friends of mine Sean Charlesworth and Mark dubo got to design build and animate uh some new Walkers like the ad ads from Empire for the production of the Mandalorian I think when you watch the interview you'll be able to see the pleasure on both of their faces of having been able to contribute to a Star Wars production let's get into it all right can we start with the Walker this is so beautiful talk to me about about the process of making this and how it made it into the show okay well right after Phil made a tweet to John Favreau about how much he loved the show and the fact that it really felt like we were you know kind of seeing something from the past where they were shooting from the hip we we got contacted by Doug Chang who said that they had this junkyard sequence that they they wanted to do an ad at like Walker in amazing and so we took a really fast meeting with them they kind of swung by and they had some ideas about what it could be like this big junker thing or whatnot but you know at the end of the day we were left with this impression that what they really really wanted was if you had taken a probe Droid and an ad at and mashed them together you would get this kind of crazy construction and if you saw them in silhouette against the sky you'd be almost confused as to what it was because I see that feature of the ad at that sort of semi-circle actuator down there and the legs are very much like that but I see yeah your probe Droid those kind of yeah little gravity articulated grabby arms yeah so is this uh is this mostly kit bash or is this drawn and printed and then assembled well it's uh mostly it's actually a partial digital kit bash and a digital model at the same time Sean and I had been working together on another show that was had stuff to do with Mars so we actually had like a lot of like Martian you know Tech kit bash kind of stuff so little greeblies is used as decoration and yeah we could both be pointing at different parts of this thing right now and he you know like I know that Sean made this thing because it came from something else right right and so uh I just quickly bashed something together using all the parts that we had gotten and digitally digitally okay and then made a presentation of three of these guys to uh Doug three different options three different options Doug liked the legs and he liked different parts of it but he he actually selected a bunch of stuff and put it all together so this is actually like all three mashed into one so it's an olive cart model it's a la carte and he's the one that actually was like we want to have a big turret on the top because this initially had this big opening in the top and the arm would actually lift stuff up and then it would grind it and stuff would fall out of the bottom oh that's neat and but he was like it's actually better to have a big turret on it and so uh Sean and I just kind of got together after he approved that and then just started planning putting the model together okay we had a very short turnaround yeah you have a digital model and this was animated on set very similar to the original Walkers am I right yes yeah so given that it's animated did you also have a machine do you have machined Armature in there or you did it with the print uh so first Mark and I had worked on stuff before like 3D printing for tippet stuff I had never built a puppet um so they like a stop-motion no okay I mean I went to film school I did some animation so I academically know like how it oh it should probably be like this uh but this is like very early in the pandemic okay um and um so Gibby was going to animated who's done a lot of stop-motion stuff here and I and I was trying to like how should I build this how do you want it and like it just with the chaos of everybody doing a remote and everything like we just we're not getting in touch like we needed to and so a lot of it was kind of guesswork and uh I was super thrilled to be working on Star Wars sure like the Euro Mead was very excited but also that I was super stressed out because I'm like I don't know what I'm doing but not only that is Phil stepped in yeah and very quickly turned around and gave the proclamation that he's like we don't have the time or budget for an actual Armature inside of this thing right so it needs to actually really stand on its own without putting any metal in there oh wow so it is completely 3D printed and we uh we use have been using the form Labs printers for a lot and they just come out with some of their engineering resins yeah so I picked one that I thought seemed like the good choice but I had never used it before and it seemed because I had a little give to it it it it was good so we got it all together there's there are metal rods in the legs I was going to say that I was seeing some uh some aftermarket threads yeah also so it's there's rods in the legs for stiffness but these big discs the big add at disk the knees there's no way to get a metal support in there yeah and so we build it and it was the animators like this is this is okay and big big washers in there yeah and I'm sure um then it got we had a heat wave and we came in and all the legs had buckled like between two frames look I don't think they're in the middle of anime before that but they were better there was the first name noticed that something was up is usually when you're animating something they'll leave the lights on they'll leave the setup on and everything like that and then they go to lunch and then somebody came back from lunch and we used this thing called Dragon which allows you to go back and forth to make sure this Frame matches the last itself yeah and they're and he's just looking at it like like what what is going on he went from like up here to like down here you know and they basically just went from the heat wave yes so at that point you know he tried he tried to get it back up to where it was and he kind of got it there and the pro then the Proclamation was if you start a shot you gotta finish the shot yeah you can't just leave the thing and come back the next day you get even with even if we turn off the lights there's just we don't want to take any no matter how yeah and so there was a lot of very very hungry people on set sometimes yeah yeah there's a big learning curve uh definitely learned a lot about how to properly build the 3D printed stuff um like the whole platform start the SAG so there's metal rods that we we are literally tied in with just wire to keep it from drooping too much and wow so it held together just long enough to get everything animated well that's the budget they have right and the other thing too you were looking in there that actually lit up I was gonna say it's detailed inside well it's not really detailed what I did was I got a piece of cardboard and I found this great picture of a Russian tank crew inside inside the tank that's what I'm looking at that's what you're seeing it's like and I kind of scaled it and put it in there and did so uh Sean put in these I think it's purple lights yeah it's kind of a little purplish LED yeah there's LEDs that illuminate that inside and when they think when you get close on it and it's moving you'd swear there was like a crew inside we never get even remotely close to it amazing and then uh the the whole claw is articulatable it articulates but we made the decision to shoot that separately uh yeah Christopher Morley he was our VFX supervisor on and he made a decision very early on that I thought was really smart where it's like anytime we see that thing going down we need to have a lot of control over it right so he built a rig with uh Ken Rogerson and some of the other people we've got here where you could animate the the cable going down and picking up and not have to worry about the rest of the animation and we had a little TIE fighter I could maybe show you that later uh that we had made that it grabs and it picks up and you could take Parts off of it so that you could use it in different uh orientations so um you know the the Orange is not a common Star Wars color but this looks like it was a fun paint job it was fun to do I gave like five options to Doug and he chose this one and one of the things that we did this was Sean's idea which was really smart is this is kind of that Star Wars language and it's all of our names of the people who worked on it printed all over this one is Phil oh no it feels right up front right there yeah and I can't remember where mine is but this is it's such a classic Model maker thing on the tedium of doing a long job you've got to sign it and like I I've had my name show up in a hero shot and get yelled up by my supervisor because I didn't know anyone would be looking at that oh yeah but if you look close and you know a lot about Star Wars vehicles you can actually say that this is the tail end of an ad app oh so it is look at that yeah oh that's great I was wondering because I was like oh I'm wondering if I could recognize any of these parts as like digitally kit bashed from well I do a lot of uh digital modeling uh doing replicas and stuff like that and I have like a bunch of kits that I'm kind of you know sometimes I'm working on them sometimes I get them from other people and so I had an ad at that I was kind of working on uh for a little while because I wanted to get something that was a lot more accurate than what was out there and I was just like I just tilted it yeah I love it and that's the that's the clevis pin yeah I'm assuming for the cylinders that you had little bits of kns metal or something like that um on these little uh actuators they're just metal tubes yeah yeah yeah that that's my least the way they connect is my least favorite part of the model I I when I we put them on in uh as like an afterthought and they don't actually really function as Pistons they yeah you know if you see the way they are there they have like this elbow at the base and it's just like there's no strength whatsoever yeah power distribution what we were trying to do was just follow that whole like we want it to be confusing you know um now I love the fact that it's got articulated toasted those also move a little bit Yeah from walking yeah so the it's the main base and then each toe separate and then the Rings separate yeah there is there is a certain order of oh these are all jigsaw puzzles there's an order of operation like in terms of assembly yeah and like because it's it I I would build things and I'd be like there's no way I can actually assemble that right so I'd have to go back and revise it yeah um and then uh there's just giant ABS rods that go through the body that the legs clamp on so the tops of the legs are actually like a clamp that clamp on that and you can tighten and loosen oh neat different friction so so I remember when you guys were working on this you you described it in the most oblique abstract terms you said working on something really cool can't wait for you to see it and I was watching the episode and I saw this and I was like jumped out of my chat what was it like for you guys to see the animation in the episode it was a little surreal you know because I while we were building it I mean it was like it were like kids again putting together like oh we're doing a Star Wars model kit you know kind of thing but it's and it was and it was fun to build too because once we once we had hammered out the basic design and and then started detailing it we would send pictures to Doug and it's just like you've got Doug Chang going yeah keep going yeah looks great keep going like we literally got like no notes from him after that first approval and uh once it got into the shots we were like the my my only my only sore point would be I wish they had done a shot where we got really close yeah they're all kind of in the distance in a little out blurry um yeah but they still look great so did you make one of these for all that stood in for all of them yeah yeah so how many separate animated elements using this did you guys film well sometimes they would actually have two cameras on the thing at once at different angles so they would animate it and it would it would serve for Two Shots we had a very short schedule on it Gibby uh and his team would probably know best about exact exactly the way they did that but yeah they we had to do it was quite the turnaround by the time it got into their hands it was yeah it was it was the most exciting thing and the most stressful thing I've ever done yeah because when it first got on set too Phil was the first guy to grab it and set it down and start like moving it and there's a there's a picture of me and Phil and that's the first time he's kind of locked it down and he was playing with the joints and I was like watch he'll just because it was like well you got to fix that you know still wants something that's going to be rugged you know he's going to put it through his Pace yes and he was like okay it's working it's good now you said it was required to be able to stand on its own but I noticed a stand here with a port did you have an external support for most animation we did yeah yeah just since the legs ended up being a little problematic and uh so I had I had provided a mount in the body in case of that so it was there when we needed it but uh yeah there's I've definitely learned a lot from this first one but you know to be fair every time we do stop motion animation there's we always try to have some sort of amount that's that even if it's like a you know bipedal character or whatever it is it's just you know we want to make sure that it's always kind of stuck in the right position right so even you know even for the Bomar Monk and some of the stuff that we're working on right now we always try to factor in these Mount points all right well so let's move and pivot we're going from Mandalorian to book a Boba Fett yep tell me about this guy how did this what was the first what was your first intersection with the project you got some drawings uh usually it's like through a call like they they say that they have a sequence and it would work really well for stop motion yeah and somebody somebody said something about you know a Bomar Monk and I had no idea what it was and I think I think you did but I knew what it was Brett Foxwell knew what it was oh my God the bull Armand the Bomar monk shows up in Return of the Jedi yeah and when C-3PO and R2 come in the giant gate the palace you see it for all of three seconds as a full-scale like in a distance shot yeah and it's very it was cobbled together it's barely animated and you you see it for like four seconds like this yeah and it has a a brain and a jar here which was added digitally after on ours but so it was a very obscure thing which was very exciting to be able to like yeah do this did you have good reference material or does the original model exist there's a digital model that exists of this that was built off of I think reference of the initial one okay there are a lot of work had been done and and this model came to us initially from ilm they had already built a yes A version of it all of their detail all this detail is ilm oh yeah the the trick for us was then we we had to engineer how the heck to fit an Armature in there and make it work and still look like the original well I mean I'm touching these legs these are all solid so well the problem you run into with the 3D printing in resin is when you get something this long and spindly it warps so we had I had messed around with can we put rods in them and it was I mean it's such a tight fit I was even looking at like hot carbon fiber rods this is like some Jack Skellington Armature yeah so then I suggest is like we could get these 3D printed in metal however they're not the 3D printed metal is not unless you're going to pay like NASA money that's not super super precise it's kind of rough okay so I'm I got samples printed and gave them to Brett our machinist and he tried turning them and millions like we can do this I can I can deal with oh yeah so with Machining yeah so this was an interesting process because we had a bigger group this time because we had Mark me Brett and and Gibby was animating again and so the process was I'd have to figure out where the pivot Points would be in in the an actual puppet then I had to give those measurements to Brett and Brett then started making a center block and the all these have ball joints on them right right and then he sort of manifolds yeah and then he'd give that to me and then I would digitally replicate what he did and stick it inside the model and then I had to design all these body panels to attach to it yeah so this it's deceptively it's way more complicated than it actually looks on the outside but I mean but that also is calling back to the beginning of special effects where there was always this tension and collaboration between the Machining department for the insides of puppets and the Practical outsides the stretch skins and all of them yeah so so basically bet Brett designed a core that's in this that is a aluminum a steel block there's little ball joints on each thing and then he even did the butt oh that that's on a swivel and then the arm is on another one down here yeah um strength of that swivel is real yeah so the 3D printed metal legs the rest is Is We I printed on my form Labs at home out of better material than we used on the Walker and it everything really held up well and then there's little magnetic pieces like this that you have to remove so that gibby he had a flying rig that this was suspended on oh and then that gave him access yeah and then Brett put these little tiny tiny eyelets in the tips of the legs so that you could tie down the legs to the terrain so you could drill a hole in the terrain and wire it through yeah and you had to do that every time a foot hit the ground so that it wouldn't move the train itself was a feat you know I mean like building this thing was like it was like two-thirds of the job the other third was we had that 20 foot long run it had to go on that had to like the ground you see him on is not digital whatsoever it's not practical and it needed to look like sand but couldn't get Disturbed or whatnot and it was like a 20 foot long piece of sandpaper like it was not fun if you tripped and fell on that thing it was very very uncomfortable um go ahead I had to point out the thing that I'm most proud of that you never ever ever ever see sure but the original monk has these Pistons right and these there is no way that these can physically like actually work on a real mechanical thing but they had to be there and they had to look real this took me the longest out of any engineering thing is this is actually surgical tubing this the Piston itself is elastic cord that is knotted tied through here runs the whole way through and so it lets it let so if you do it too far you can see it it does Bend like rubber but it gave the illusion of Pistons working um when it's actually not doing anything at all you don't see it at all there's a lot of weird things that we had to do for this guy like the Finish uh initially Doug wanted it like black but when we had it on set it was just looking like a shadow so I just gradually had to make it more and more look like cast iron with like a rusty paint job but doing the butt end of this thing was really interesting because we just got like a piece of Geo for it and some key art as to what it's yeah I'm curious about the texture here it's really lovely it's actually a it's kind of like a two-part thing I'm I digitally modeled a grain on the model itself okay which looks a bit like uh like a like a carbon fiber and then we had different uh you know kind of gauges of that that we sent to Doug and he chose one but when we were painting it we wanted it to kind of feel like Dusty and a little bit like almost feel like cloth so what I did was I ran out and I got about like nine ten pairs of different types of black nylons oh and then small nylons and then stretched it over stretched it over that's how I can see back here where they gather yeah they gather in the back and they gather over here until it was like fine enough that it had that great kind of like they call it you know like a facing ratio like the way the light fell on it because we didn't want this to read as metallic or anything like that right and it always looked like a Dusty bag on the original one and so yeah it was basically like it's women's nylons over the top of this thing and then uh Sean laser cut the these little triangles the triangles are a fabulous detail yeah they're like that they were like that on the reference they gave us so we did that anyways and it kind of glued them on what I love that both of these models really exemplify it because I get this question a lot is how is 3D printing changing the film industry and this is the answer is it's just one more tool in the Arsenal because you're still using all the oldest tools in the Arsenal as well as the most modern tools this was a good blend I think of the two and and there's definitely times I'm like I am a three-print guys like we should not 3D print this yeah yeah there's there's Parts on here where you know we went and made molds and cast it out of different materials right right you know the piping and the wiring you know like old techniques to kind of like you know when you if you flip it over it's got fun details and stuff like that and we we had to go and put like a little marker on here because there's supposed to be a jar in front with a brain in it sloshing around so that little two-sided bolt that's to help the animators track motion track to the model itself so whenever you see you you see that brain ball in the front and the water's sloshing around I mean that would have been very difficult for us to do stop motion sure sure now I've animated beer before it's no fun yeah so yeah it was a fun it was a fun project we had this one we had plenty of time we had a great crew we had a good time I love the metal 3D printing and the idea of using it as a hybrid well with post Machining process yeah even down to probably the slitting to get the right amount of tension on these joints is just gorgeous yeah no and and it actually had a texture to it I think that lended itself really well to the lighting in there it just it just allowed the light to kind of Ripple across the surface a little bit more instead of just being this polished greasy shiny look you know that's so I you guys must must have both been convening a little bit with the 10 year old versions of yourselves I I went to film school and then did nothing with it and I got my first screen credit at age you know 40 whatever uh and I never thought I'd get to work on Star Wars so I was very honored yeah guys it's just really magnificent work and like I'm so glad you're so you're such fans and you both get to enjoy that from the fan standpoint and the professional standpoint it's well deserved guys yeah it's and it's one of those things that's really fun because I know there's a lot of people out there right now working on the digital side of those shows but they don't have anything physical that they've worked on like sitting in front of them right we get to work on this stuff and then we pass it in the hallway every day we made that it's amazing\n"