The Circuit: A Showcase of LED Technology and Animation

In our current project, we're focusing on the cargo haul as well as the ideal lighting for the cockpit. The cool white light is a great option, providing a nice brightness that's perfect for this application. It's surprising how much brighter LEDs are compared to traditional lighting methods. Our team is excited about the possibilities of LED technology and its potential to enhance our projects.

In addition to the cargo haul, we're also working on the thrusters. These are equipped with LEDs that can be controlled manually or by a robot arm. The manual triggers allow us to adjust the brightness and pattern of the lights, creating a unique animation effect. The LEDs are powered by leads that take on 24 volts for the robot controller, making it easy to integrate them into our system.

To showcase the capabilities of the LED technology, we've created a Blinky program that controls the animation of these lights. This program allows us to slow down or speed up the animation to our liking, creating a dynamic effect. The team is excited about the possibilities of this technology and its potential to enhance our projects.

One of the challenges we're facing is controlling the brightness and pattern of the lights. To overcome this, we've developed a custom circuit board that can handle the high amperage required by the LEDs. This allows us to power the lights externally without draining the microcontroller's battery. The circuit board also includes MOSFET switches that control the flow of electricity to the LEDs.

As we continue working on the project, we're experimenting with different smoke effects for the thrusters. We've found that traditional smoking methods can be tricky to achieve, but our LED lights provide a more reliable and consistent effect. By adjusting the brightness and pattern of the lights, we can create a range of smoke effects that enhance the overall appearance of the model.

The team is also exploring ways to add auxiliary lighting to the model. We've prepared micro LEDs and other components that can be easily attached to the side panels or other areas of the model. This allows us to add additional lighting effects without compromising the overall design of the project.

The connectors used in our project are a game-changer for prototyping and testing. They're easy to use, versatile, and provide a secure connection between components. The team is impressed by their quality and has already changed the way they approach their projects.

As we continue working on this project, we'll be sharing updates and insights into the development process. We're grateful for the partnership with Bethesda Game Studios and the opportunity to work on this exciting new universe, Starfield. Launching on Xbox Series X/S, PC, and Game Pass on September 6, 2023, Starfield promises to be an immersive gaming experience that combines stunning visuals with engaging gameplay.

The testing team is hard at work, ensuring that our models meet the highest standards of quality and accuracy. From scratch-building lighting to painting and detailing, every aspect of the project requires attention to detail and a commitment to excellence. We're excited to share our progress and insights with you in the coming weeks, and we invite you to follow along on this journey into the world of Starfield.

Finally, we'd like to thank Bethesda Game Studios for their partnership and support. Their enthusiasm and dedication to creating an immersive gaming experience are inspiring, and we're honored to be a part of it. For more information about Starfield, including launch details and game features, visit www.starfieldgame.com.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enforeign we've partnered with Bethesda game studios to build a filming model of the frontier ship from their upcoming game Star field I couldn't be more excited for this project it's a celebration of the exact kind of practical effects filmmaking I'm obsessed with and that we all love follow along over the coming weeks as the tested team and I embark on a scale miniature build that combines the latest fabrication Technologies with my favorite old school model making techniques let's Dive In I got in the garbage can so uh I've got all 360 degrees of an enclosed cockpit to build but if I build you won't be able to see inside of it so I'm doing it as a cutaway which is one of my favorite model forms and right now I am cutting some of the floor here so that I may continue to floor forward I like a cutaway but I also like a cutaway to draw me into a space and half of the floor isn't enough so I'm completing the floor bringing it out this way and when I get the front part there I'll complete that and that should give me a nice surround and let you feel like it's a real environment this is some thick pieces of resin I'm cutting into though thank you in a model like this to me uh the front detail is really important it can't be wonky so I may Chuck this into my Mill and just do some cleanup on this yeah I think that's exactly what I'm going to do thank you foreign that's great well I'm cutting it out I'm I'm cutting the shreds yeah okay right right right great that's fine because you're you won't be together once I'm done with you so this comes we'll cut this we'll do this foreign thank you well uh I am almost this is there's my cutaway I have initially Drew this beam too thick it hides too much I've brought it much thinner I'm really pleased with that you'll be able to see through this whole thing it feels like an environment I gotta fix that transition just a little bit but not too much when this model is fully painted the outside will be a neutral dark array the cut line will be bright red like any given cutaway and then the inside will be fully detailed um I now need but this thing is heavy uh 15 pounds 12 pounds it's real yeah I think it's actually probably 10 or 12 pounds I need to mount it on something so I can hold it up about here okay lovely see that okay parts parts dude cockpit Parts yes okay but we're not talking about Parts we're talking about lighting Parts Mel where are we at with electronics okay so um I was looking into uh at the interior video walkthrough and it looks like we have like a bunch of different segments of the Interior cockpit that we can use for lighting so I'd match them up with the cad file and worked with Daryl on like sort of setting placement holds on the different areas so here you can see where we've decided to sort of predeterminedly place the lights so you've pre-modeled so that you can slip in LEDs in here and get diffused light instruments out of that yeah this is the holy dream so that is super cool um I love that you have been thinking about it since before this was even fully modeled yes and so we're hoping to use micro LEDs for this oh my God these are like the three volt ones right yes so I just I just ordered a complete set in every color I could find here is the three volt yellows and the blues and these guys are coming from Amazon with proper resistors for every voltage three five six nine twelve twenty four nice um I love these things yeah they're they're great they seem very portable we can put them everywhere like all all over the cockpit so they're excited about that and there oh man okay and so these are we're going to have multiple Power Systems in there or multiple distros of some voltages yeah so like we're running off of basically 12 volts coming in and then it'll be tapered down to being around say like nine-ish and so uh then and that is just so we can actually control the brightness so we'll have abilities to like lower the brightness or raise it depending for the interior there's an entirely separate idea for the circuit for the exterior just because we have thrusters and we want to do some cool Thruster animation and stuff like that and so um building like pulsing light animation into this exactly exactly because you know it's this it's a spaceship we should have some cool animations for it totally so um yeah these are the side thrusters I was thinking about using these sort of high-powered um one Watts these little spotlights um they're great because they have like this nice Dome on the top that gives it a sort of a wider spread so I've got here a smoke machine oh sick so you can see how the columnar light out of that looks in Smoke because I think that's how we might get some engine carrier like some carried engine look in the in this on set oh that'd be amazing so you can borrowed that yes okay yes um smokes uh what other lights have you are you guys working on here yeah so we have the various colors so the warm light would be for the side thrifters and so for them to shoot down we also have like this sort of kind of almost yellowish orange which is I'm going to be using a more yellow tone LED and then the hole itself is got this nice like red and so we're gonna have like some ambient glowing red lights for it yeah this is awesome um do you have any plans for lighting the screens are we going to put like a diffusion of diffusion behind there I believe that's the plan so they ideally it could be something like these guys if we can fit them these are like tiny teeth actual screens it would be really cool it would be really cool I'm hoping we can we have to sort of determine if the screens are large enough to make this work but we have two of them and they're they would be ideal for like possibly the side there's like two side monitors and they're kind of cute because you just turn them on and I already have like it works a little tiny display now yeah it'd be cute holy cow this is like what I dreamed about when I was 11 12 years old making models uh one thing I'm curious about is have you have you actually written out a wiring diagram oh yes I'm starting to like compile it's going to be a ton of LEDs and different sub like sections of it and so I've been sort of categorizing and like starting to design the actual circuit for both of these so this will be a little bit more simplified seeing that we don't we don't need exactly we don't need like say a microcontroller for this it'll be just standard lights this will have like a microcontroller and a whole elaborate switching system um heard from the value that we're doing some cool stuff with motion control and so it'd be really awesome to have the robot potentially trigger the the thrusters oh wow and so I'm going to try to incorporate both a manual option as well as something for uh the robot to control for our shoot so are you have you done your experimentation with the columnar light and engine looks and stuff like that yet yes I've done a little bit I'm just playing around with I've basically Sean has given me some of the 3D prints for me to like just see how it would shine I think adding the smoke would be really useful the smoke is useful for it's carried profile I would play around two with some weird diffusers like I may have some uh uh I may have some mottled acrylic for like shower glass of different kinds in there uh it's worth it to play with that because sometimes when you get those like even like crumpled up uh uh cellophane can sometimes give you some random artifacts that make these look less regular to each other oh that's awesome right okay um that's something I would consider playing with uh one of my favorite things is writing out a wiring diagram and then when it's time to wire I stop thinking and I just follow the diagram and then when that works it's awesome oh yeah that's like your Zen payoff moment right because you're just like a to B B to C C to D and then you and it works it only happens about half the time for me yes sir I kind of in the same same percentage um what part here are you most excited about honestly I just love how elaborate the system is I really love the idea of playing with animations for the thrusters like that's going to just be fun to code you're psyched about the complexity a little bit I love that yeah all right uh so you uh we need a couple more parts of the cockpit to determine whether or not we're going to be able to use those screens I think that's the next thing I'd like to play around with yes um and then uh once we get this mounted up we can start to route or figure you have you done uh routing figuring out about where the lights go in here where the wiring goes not entirely I've figured out that we can basically just wear their place and I think it's sort of how we're going to creatively either snake them through and out oh so we might actually see the wiring as a practical thing yes oh fabulous okay cool yeah certainly this is big enough scale that this 30 gauge wire is going to look totally real yeah for the Cutaway cockpit the wiring routing is pretty straightforward because I can I can hide a lot of crimes but for the big the big ship how are you planning on the uh hiding the electronics oh I see so yeah so the circuit would ideally fit in this this sort of cavernous space that we have for the ship um I think we can we can get away with a good amount of the circuit being here and then I think it's the rest of it will be just cabling that we were snaking through to this Central so this will be the brain of the chef all the wiring will come back to here the circuits that power the engines and their animations and all that exactly ideally that would be the case this is lovely to have such a big Hollow I know we might actually have a good amount of room that is fabulous foreign we're into the scratch building part yes I I it's just to be clear for the audience there's so much being digitally printed here but there's still some elements that are going to make more sense for us to scratch build and that in this case is this ramp with all this fine railing oh yes but actually one of the great things about having the Digital model is that we can then use that to our advantage for the scratch build so we can take that and get the parts we need from it so these are one to one elevations of the various pieces on the side okay so there's a couple of elements going on here there's some laser cut pieces of acrylic or styrene there's a debate about what the hell this is and then I there's some wire bending yes yes basically all of the handrails that are happening up there we have a side view here to Showcase some of the shapes that's the actual size yeah and that's one to one oh it's little so the thing I had here we were talking earlier a couple weeks ago when we were talking about this we're talking about doing it in um brass uh which I I have this styrene which I really like this is styrene with wire in it so you can bend it and also glue yeah I can't believe you didn't know about this stuff this is a game changer for me um however I'm looking at this and I'm thinking we need two of these right I'm thinking brass might still make more sense specifically because I need it to be structural to itself right um so uh uh I was going to start on that and we also have some really fine scale stuff going on here with masks yes so you can see a little bit of the tread pattern on the ramp itself this was that Vector file Cricut cut out with vinyl and then this was me weeding it so that we have our positive there's debate do we do a stencil and paint on there or do we let this be the positive this should be the positive that's easier yeah oh so you're going to use transfer paper on this yes great got the Crickets resolution is isn't it it's kind of amazing I love it I um I forget how good it is at making resist um so do you want to so then that requires priming this right basically I'm I think this should go on after the painting has happened on this bottom one I'll add this and then we can do a weather pass okay and then if we're doing there's some plastic parts that stick onto this probably put those on before we put this on two probably although there's great they're a different color right they're yellow so I could just get this one painted up scrape and glue it and then paint the transition yeah that probably makes more sense okay do you want to start doing that well I'll I'll use these one-to-ones to make a pair of these railings and it's all coming out of there that yeah I keep thinking that's the bottom it's not so it's that that's what we're talking about here oh dude this is going to be gorgeous it is and we have these uh kind of struts that are going to come down here and be supports but we'll wait until it's in place so we can cut it directly to length because there will be uh metal going in between the pieces terrific I've got plenty of metal to make those piston piston piston Pistons you know what I mean right should I just go ahead and Prime all of these parts absolutely okay this is great all right okay so I'm gonna do a Bend there to oh this is going to be so much fun I love this kind of miniature work all right um okay I think a little bit more so when people wonder what actual model making is like as a living it's this it's two people working side by side super quietly on Tiny and every now and then you'll share crazy stories from your past is that about right 100 the really nice thing about it is you're in a room with other people so when you really when you really bone something you've got a lot of people to commiserate with like because no one's going to give you a lot of like it's not a model making isn't a profession where everyone's like you idiot it's more like oh dude I've been there thank God I'm not you today yep so because I've got here a main railing piece this uh this part that goes slant across and then right angle down I want to make that the main strut and I want to do it out of this Square stock that I have uh and I can't just make an angled cut and then butt weld it that's not gonna work so what I've done is I've made slices strategic slices that'll allow me to make these bends but I'm not cutting all the way through the material I'm still using its own material cohesion then I'm going to solder into those joints and that should give me some nice structure on these making something this small your odds of harming it are high even as you're building it so I'm just trying to make it kind of structurally sound but now I've I've made my little slot and so now I'm going to make this Bend and I hope I can make a right angle Bend here there we go oh it did it oh my God theory and practice that is great oh Deuteronomy I'm so happy about that that's great cool look at that I'm just gonna take care of that joint right now because if I undid this and then re-bent it it would it would immediately snap itself it's just a reality oh that's perfect that's a nice strong 90 degree joint s great thank you and then this puppy will come up yeah that is close enough okay come up from here and bend down all right yep now I'm gonna slice this there we're gonna bring it up a little farther I'm really digging these Flush Cutters I think this is probably wide enough right yeah yeah that's gonna look awesome right as the paint I'm going to glue these on and then they'll that will this will all be nice and stable and then the yellow will glue to the outside of it cool I love it all right come on last last bit okay so now I'm going to take these two screws out that we're in here I'm just going to kind of guess here where my starting is the helper oh that helps thank you all the other crimes can hide guessing then at one point you just have to commit yep no no I'm right there I'm so exactly like that there's no more worrying I can do so now I get the reverse of what you did and I get to slowly peel although the vinyl sticks better than this one did so oh Neato oh it's a little funky oh I won't tell anyone No One's Gonna notice so all right I'm putting the screws back in the bottom oh dude that's awesome sometimes when you're holding the smallest thing and you're like this is like it feels like I'm clamping something between my knees yeah because my fingers are so giant that's all oh and these can go in can't they yeah they're dry yeah the CO2 from your breath helps kick the CA glue does it it does I mean I've definitely blown on it I just didn't know if it was legitimately yeah no it's totally legit oh my God then crazy glue is so terrifying so the reason I'm saying that thin CA glue is terrifying is because it's so thin it um it can run almost under any circumstances and if you touch it wrong I'm holding this wrong so I have to re-jigger my hold and so if you touch it wrong it'll stick to you and everything else in the world and then it won't let go it's uh yeah but under certain circumstances there is nothing that will get you where you want to go faster I loved NCA glue I hate thin CA glue both are true dude that is fun it's that is just like I mean all the uh all the design work that Sean's been doing wrapping his head around this one ridiculous thing uh that's really fun that's gonna look nice no come on something like that you come up in there look at that that's great come on okay great yeah this is how we're doing this we're just gonna so I pulled out three brushes for this weathering a small one for actually attaching putting in the paint but there's always a reason to save your sort of big crappy brushes that get caked with a lot of stuff because they're really great for sort of randomly moving weathering around and I'm using it right now to get me some nice oily business up here where this thing is leaving the ship and it just allows me to kind of go in and sort of sculpt the light of the uh of the weathering I'm really happy with how this is going but so yeah when you end up with a brush like this and you didn't fully clean keep it the the the the actual shittiness of that the actual crappiness of that is is to your advantage all right get in here all right there'll be a final pass over there so I'm gonna I'm gonna move on to the other side I'm happy with that come on back come on back oh oh did you all fall apart you did that's fine all right uh it is the first weathering pass is mostly complete I'm going to because I never do a single color pass for weathering I'm adding in a little dark like a burnt umber kind of wash and this is all still in the close-ups you're seeing of this in the b-roll it may look slightly incomplete and that's because it is we won't do the final weathering pass until the whole ship is assembled uh but for right now this gets us 90 90 of the way and this is just me adding in some just like brown spots which adds a little bit of warmth oh that's great I mean even that just it does so much awesome I declare the weathering pass complete uh for now uh and the ramp is ready for when it's time to assemble it onto the ship this this is Joey was asking me off camera is does this like wake up old parts of my brain and maybe I've already said it in this video but yes it wakes up these delightful old parts of my brain where I spent years doing this kind of work and like my friends at the time would say when I described my job I would say tomorrow I get to not tomorrow I have to tomorrow I get to that that's still what I say but yeah it was great back then okay come in look oh my God Adam that's perfect so much fun all right so what was your what was your wash my what I'm I'm addicted to this Vallejo these vallejos and then I did a final wash of uh of uh dark brown oh cool and ice them with anything I literally so I sit here with a thick brush and a thin brush and I go I put the paint on with the thick and I move it around with put a paint on with a thin move it around with the thick keep on what technique because you thick brush and then like Patel are around yeah but I'm literally sitting here kind of like this doing this and it allows me to kind of like you know we'll add some silver kicks once we're finally yeah doing this we'll add a couple of yellow bits in here and there you know cool all right Mal tell me where we are with the lighting okay so let's just plug the sucker in um basically there's a couple things to the Circuit right now I'm just showcasing the cargo haul as well as the ideal light for the cockpit this cool cool white that's a nice white yeah it's great it's pretty bright I'm super happy with how bright they are um it's crazy bright um people don't realize how dim LEDs used to be spoiled now everything's just burning our room oh yeah there is a couple other components so I have uh these are the thrusters these are LEDs for the thrusters so I have manual triggers as well as these really nice um leads that take on for the 24 volts for the robot controller but just to showcase the LEDs and the sort of the animation so this can be controlled by the robot arm yes I see so we have these manual ones and then we also have um yeah the controller coming in for them you've written a real Blinky program for that yes dude Blinky lights oh these are the side ones now can you take that animation and slow it down to kind of any frame rate you want yeah we can play around with the the frame rate of it actually on Galaxy Quest the nacelles of the thermian ship they had a glow pulse to them and Grant and mahara to signed a circuit where the animation moved across like 10 different lights and he was able to make each one a frame so that on the motion control stage it would be like frame 13 and you turn it to yeah wow it was a re it was brand new technology for us Way Way Back Then I mean it's amazing just how easy it is to do now yeah he had to have a custom circuit board made because there was no Arduino or Raspberry Pi back then are these just little step down power bucks uh no these are um these are mosfet switches so this is basically so that I can power the LEDs externally and not drain from the board these it's because of how bright these LEDs are they do pull a good amount of amperage and it's it's not sufficient for the micro controller to to control them like to um to power them we just have a five volt line going directly in and the microcontroller is now just triggering a switch to turn them on and off to cause this flickering animation or to keep these oh they're just they're solid state relays yes right awesome oh um the lights these are for the thrusters right yes thrusters and engines yes okay I want to play around with the smoke uh right let's give it some nice oh excellent all right so let's see how columnar they are here it's sort of yeah okay it's really like so yeah it's not shooting out like a like a like a column yeah they don't really they're not beam like it's the one issue I'm worried about about oh actually you know it's it's hard to smoke up the place that's not smoked but if I get a bunch of smoke going on and this is going to make our motion control shot like potentially nightmarish but like I am starting to get a little bit of dude I love I love how bright these are and these are tunable to the frame right yeah so I I basically set it up with the microcontroller so that we can control the brightness fantastic and you got through am I right I'm looking at three and there'll be three per Thruster and three lights per engine yeah so for this yeah so for the back uh for the back engines there'd be six in total of these LEDs and then this will be about 12 for college Thruster which is uh about four um now there might be a chance and as we're trying one of these shots we might want to add like a couple of more like Blinky lights to the outside how hard is that to do in the field it's quite modular so I've at least prepped some micro LEDs and other LEDs for like say the side panels for these like sort of auxiliary lights and so we can add it to this particular circuit here and just drill a little hole and pop it through yes dude how awesome are these connectors they're pretty rad there's like four or five different versions I've got them all and they've changed my life they're just so nice and you can just like clamp things it's really great for prototyping yeah really great I can't wait to see this thing blend awesome thank you follow along in the coming weeks as the tested team and I continue our work on these models scratch building lighting painting detailing and prepping these Miniatures for filming thanks to Bethesda game studios for partnering with us on this project and inviting us to play in their new universe Starfield Launches on Xbox series X S PC and Game Pass on September 6 2023 and is rated M for mature you can find details below or visit www.starfieldgame.com to learn moreforeign we've partnered with Bethesda game studios to build a filming model of the frontier ship from their upcoming game Star field I couldn't be more excited for this project it's a celebration of the exact kind of practical effects filmmaking I'm obsessed with and that we all love follow along over the coming weeks as the tested team and I embark on a scale miniature build that combines the latest fabrication Technologies with my favorite old school model making techniques let's Dive In I got in the garbage can so uh I've got all 360 degrees of an enclosed cockpit to build but if I build you won't be able to see inside of it so I'm doing it as a cutaway which is one of my favorite model forms and right now I am cutting some of the floor here so that I may continue to floor forward I like a cutaway but I also like a cutaway to draw me into a space and half of the floor isn't enough so I'm completing the floor bringing it out this way and when I get the front part there I'll complete that and that should give me a nice surround and let you feel like it's a real environment this is some thick pieces of resin I'm cutting into though thank you in a model like this to me uh the front detail is really important it can't be wonky so I may Chuck this into my Mill and just do some cleanup on this yeah I think that's exactly what I'm going to do thank you foreign that's great well I'm cutting it out I'm I'm cutting the shreds yeah okay right right right great that's fine because you're you won't be together once I'm done with you so this comes we'll cut this we'll do this foreign thank you well uh I am almost this is there's my cutaway I have initially Drew this beam too thick it hides too much I've brought it much thinner I'm really pleased with that you'll be able to see through this whole thing it feels like an environment I gotta fix that transition just a little bit but not too much when this model is fully painted the outside will be a neutral dark array the cut line will be bright red like any given cutaway and then the inside will be fully detailed um I now need but this thing is heavy uh 15 pounds 12 pounds it's real yeah I think it's actually probably 10 or 12 pounds I need to mount it on something so I can hold it up about here okay lovely see that okay parts parts dude cockpit Parts yes okay but we're not talking about Parts we're talking about lighting Parts Mel where are we at with electronics okay so um I was looking into uh at the interior video walkthrough and it looks like we have like a bunch of different segments of the Interior cockpit that we can use for lighting so I'd match them up with the cad file and worked with Daryl on like sort of setting placement holds on the different areas so here you can see where we've decided to sort of predeterminedly place the lights so you've pre-modeled so that you can slip in LEDs in here and get diffused light instruments out of that yeah this is the holy dream so that is super cool um I love that you have been thinking about it since before this was even fully modeled yes and so we're hoping to use micro LEDs for this oh my God these are like the three volt ones right yes so I just I just ordered a complete set in every color I could find here is the three volt yellows and the blues and these guys are coming from Amazon with proper resistors for every voltage three five six nine twelve twenty four nice um I love these things yeah they're they're great they seem very portable we can put them everywhere like all all over the cockpit so they're excited about that and there oh man okay and so these are we're going to have multiple Power Systems in there or multiple distros of some voltages yeah so like we're running off of basically 12 volts coming in and then it'll be tapered down to being around say like nine-ish and so uh then and that is just so we can actually control the brightness so we'll have abilities to like lower the brightness or raise it depending for the interior there's an entirely separate idea for the circuit for the exterior just because we have thrusters and we want to do some cool Thruster animation and stuff like that and so um building like pulsing light animation into this exactly exactly because you know it's this it's a spaceship we should have some cool animations for it totally so um yeah these are the side thrusters I was thinking about using these sort of high-powered um one Watts these little spotlights um they're great because they have like this nice Dome on the top that gives it a sort of a wider spread so I've got here a smoke machine oh sick so you can see how the columnar light out of that looks in Smoke because I think that's how we might get some engine carrier like some carried engine look in the in this on set oh that'd be amazing so you can borrowed that yes okay yes um smokes uh what other lights have you are you guys working on here yeah so we have the various colors so the warm light would be for the side thrifters and so for them to shoot down we also have like this sort of kind of almost yellowish orange which is I'm going to be using a more yellow tone LED and then the hole itself is got this nice like red and so we're gonna have like some ambient glowing red lights for it yeah this is awesome um do you have any plans for lighting the screens are we going to put like a diffusion of diffusion behind there I believe that's the plan so they ideally it could be something like these guys if we can fit them these are like tiny teeth actual screens it would be really cool it would be really cool I'm hoping we can we have to sort of determine if the screens are large enough to make this work but we have two of them and they're they would be ideal for like possibly the side there's like two side monitors and they're kind of cute because you just turn them on and I already have like it works a little tiny display now yeah it'd be cute holy cow this is like what I dreamed about when I was 11 12 years old making models uh one thing I'm curious about is have you have you actually written out a wiring diagram oh yes I'm starting to like compile it's going to be a ton of LEDs and different sub like sections of it and so I've been sort of categorizing and like starting to design the actual circuit for both of these so this will be a little bit more simplified seeing that we don't we don't need exactly we don't need like say a microcontroller for this it'll be just standard lights this will have like a microcontroller and a whole elaborate switching system um heard from the value that we're doing some cool stuff with motion control and so it'd be really awesome to have the robot potentially trigger the the thrusters oh wow and so I'm going to try to incorporate both a manual option as well as something for uh the robot to control for our shoot so are you have you done your experimentation with the columnar light and engine looks and stuff like that yet yes I've done a little bit I'm just playing around with I've basically Sean has given me some of the 3D prints for me to like just see how it would shine I think adding the smoke would be really useful the smoke is useful for it's carried profile I would play around two with some weird diffusers like I may have some uh uh I may have some mottled acrylic for like shower glass of different kinds in there uh it's worth it to play with that because sometimes when you get those like even like crumpled up uh uh cellophane can sometimes give you some random artifacts that make these look less regular to each other oh that's awesome right okay um that's something I would consider playing with uh one of my favorite things is writing out a wiring diagram and then when it's time to wire I stop thinking and I just follow the diagram and then when that works it's awesome oh yeah that's like your Zen payoff moment right because you're just like a to B B to C C to D and then you and it works it only happens about half the time for me yes sir I kind of in the same same percentage um what part here are you most excited about honestly I just love how elaborate the system is I really love the idea of playing with animations for the thrusters like that's going to just be fun to code you're psyched about the complexity a little bit I love that yeah all right uh so you uh we need a couple more parts of the cockpit to determine whether or not we're going to be able to use those screens I think that's the next thing I'd like to play around with yes um and then uh once we get this mounted up we can start to route or figure you have you done uh routing figuring out about where the lights go in here where the wiring goes not entirely I've figured out that we can basically just wear their place and I think it's sort of how we're going to creatively either snake them through and out oh so we might actually see the wiring as a practical thing yes oh fabulous okay cool yeah certainly this is big enough scale that this 30 gauge wire is going to look totally real yeah for the Cutaway cockpit the wiring routing is pretty straightforward because I can I can hide a lot of crimes but for the big the big ship how are you planning on the uh hiding the electronics oh I see so yeah so the circuit would ideally fit in this this sort of cavernous space that we have for the ship um I think we can we can get away with a good amount of the circuit being here and then I think it's the rest of it will be just cabling that we were snaking through to this Central so this will be the brain of the chef all the wiring will come back to here the circuits that power the engines and their animations and all that exactly ideally that would be the case this is lovely to have such a big Hollow I know we might actually have a good amount of room that is fabulous foreign we're into the scratch building part yes I I it's just to be clear for the audience there's so much being digitally printed here but there's still some elements that are going to make more sense for us to scratch build and that in this case is this ramp with all this fine railing oh yes but actually one of the great things about having the Digital model is that we can then use that to our advantage for the scratch build so we can take that and get the parts we need from it so these are one to one elevations of the various pieces on the side okay so there's a couple of elements going on here there's some laser cut pieces of acrylic or styrene there's a debate about what the hell this is and then I there's some wire bending yes yes basically all of the handrails that are happening up there we have a side view here to Showcase some of the shapes that's the actual size yeah and that's one to one oh it's little so the thing I had here we were talking earlier a couple weeks ago when we were talking about this we're talking about doing it in um brass uh which I I have this styrene which I really like this is styrene with wire in it so you can bend it and also glue yeah I can't believe you didn't know about this stuff this is a game changer for me um however I'm looking at this and I'm thinking we need two of these right I'm thinking brass might still make more sense specifically because I need it to be structural to itself right um so uh uh I was going to start on that and we also have some really fine scale stuff going on here with masks yes so you can see a little bit of the tread pattern on the ramp itself this was that Vector file Cricut cut out with vinyl and then this was me weeding it so that we have our positive there's debate do we do a stencil and paint on there or do we let this be the positive this should be the positive that's easier yeah oh so you're going to use transfer paper on this yes great got the Crickets resolution is isn't it it's kind of amazing I love it I um I forget how good it is at making resist um so do you want to so then that requires priming this right basically I'm I think this should go on after the painting has happened on this bottom one I'll add this and then we can do a weather pass okay and then if we're doing there's some plastic parts that stick onto this probably put those on before we put this on two probably although there's great they're a different color right they're yellow so I could just get this one painted up scrape and glue it and then paint the transition yeah that probably makes more sense okay do you want to start doing that well I'll I'll use these one-to-ones to make a pair of these railings and it's all coming out of there that yeah I keep thinking that's the bottom it's not so it's that that's what we're talking about here oh dude this is going to be gorgeous it is and we have these uh kind of struts that are going to come down here and be supports but we'll wait until it's in place so we can cut it directly to length because there will be uh metal going in between the pieces terrific I've got plenty of metal to make those piston piston piston Pistons you know what I mean right should I just go ahead and Prime all of these parts absolutely okay this is great all right okay so I'm gonna do a Bend there to oh this is going to be so much fun I love this kind of miniature work all right um okay I think a little bit more so when people wonder what actual model making is like as a living it's this it's two people working side by side super quietly on Tiny and every now and then you'll share crazy stories from your past is that about right 100 the really nice thing about it is you're in a room with other people so when you really when you really bone something you've got a lot of people to commiserate with like because no one's going to give you a lot of like it's not a model making isn't a profession where everyone's like you idiot it's more like oh dude I've been there thank God I'm not you today yep so because I've got here a main railing piece this uh this part that goes slant across and then right angle down I want to make that the main strut and I want to do it out of this Square stock that I have uh and I can't just make an angled cut and then butt weld it that's not gonna work so what I've done is I've made slices strategic slices that'll allow me to make these bends but I'm not cutting all the way through the material I'm still using its own material cohesion then I'm going to solder into those joints and that should give me some nice structure on these making something this small your odds of harming it are high even as you're building it so I'm just trying to make it kind of structurally sound but now I've I've made my little slot and so now I'm going to make this Bend and I hope I can make a right angle Bend here there we go oh it did it oh my God theory and practice that is great oh Deuteronomy I'm so happy about that that's great cool look at that I'm just gonna take care of that joint right now because if I undid this and then re-bent it it would it would immediately snap itself it's just a reality oh that's perfect that's a nice strong 90 degree joint s great thank you and then this puppy will come up yeah that is close enough okay come up from here and bend down all right yep now I'm gonna slice this there we're gonna bring it up a little farther I'm really digging these Flush Cutters I think this is probably wide enough right yeah yeah that's gonna look awesome right as the paint I'm going to glue these on and then they'll that will this will all be nice and stable and then the yellow will glue to the outside of it cool I love it all right come on last last bit okay so now I'm going to take these two screws out that we're in here I'm just going to kind of guess here where my starting is the helper oh that helps thank you all the other crimes can hide guessing then at one point you just have to commit yep no no I'm right there I'm so exactly like that there's no more worrying I can do so now I get the reverse of what you did and I get to slowly peel although the vinyl sticks better than this one did so oh Neato oh it's a little funky oh I won't tell anyone No One's Gonna notice so all right I'm putting the screws back in the bottom oh dude that's awesome sometimes when you're holding the smallest thing and you're like this is like it feels like I'm clamping something between my knees yeah because my fingers are so giant that's all oh and these can go in can't they yeah they're dry yeah the CO2 from your breath helps kick the CA glue does it it does I mean I've definitely blown on it I just didn't know if it was legitimately yeah no it's totally legit oh my God then crazy glue is so terrifying so the reason I'm saying that thin CA glue is terrifying is because it's so thin it um it can run almost under any circumstances and if you touch it wrong I'm holding this wrong so I have to re-jigger my hold and so if you touch it wrong it'll stick to you and everything else in the world and then it won't let go it's uh yeah but under certain circumstances there is nothing that will get you where you want to go faster I loved NCA glue I hate thin CA glue both are true dude that is fun it's that is just like I mean all the uh all the design work that Sean's been doing wrapping his head around this one ridiculous thing uh that's really fun that's gonna look nice no come on something like that you come up in there look at that that's great come on okay great yeah this is how we're doing this we're just gonna so I pulled out three brushes for this weathering a small one for actually attaching putting in the paint but there's always a reason to save your sort of big crappy brushes that get caked with a lot of stuff because they're really great for sort of randomly moving weathering around and I'm using it right now to get me some nice oily business up here where this thing is leaving the ship and it just allows me to kind of go in and sort of sculpt the light of the uh of the weathering I'm really happy with how this is going but so yeah when you end up with a brush like this and you didn't fully clean keep it the the the the actual shittiness of that the actual crappiness of that is is to your advantage all right get in here all right there'll be a final pass over there so I'm gonna I'm gonna move on to the other side I'm happy with that come on back come on back oh oh did you all fall apart you did that's fine all right uh it is the first weathering pass is mostly complete I'm going to because I never do a single color pass for weathering I'm adding in a little dark like a burnt umber kind of wash and this is all still in the close-ups you're seeing of this in the b-roll it may look slightly incomplete and that's because it is we won't do the final weathering pass until the whole ship is assembled uh but for right now this gets us 90 90 of the way and this is just me adding in some just like brown spots which adds a little bit of warmth oh that's great I mean even that just it does so much awesome I declare the weathering pass complete uh for now uh and the ramp is ready for when it's time to assemble it onto the ship this this is Joey was asking me off camera is does this like wake up old parts of my brain and maybe I've already said it in this video but yes it wakes up these delightful old parts of my brain where I spent years doing this kind of work and like my friends at the time would say when I described my job I would say tomorrow I get to not tomorrow I have to tomorrow I get to that that's still what I say but yeah it was great back then okay come in look oh my God Adam that's perfect so much fun all right so what was your what was your wash my what I'm I'm addicted to this Vallejo these vallejos and then I did a final wash of uh of uh dark brown oh cool and ice them with anything I literally so I sit here with a thick brush and a thin brush and I go I put the paint on with the thick and I move it around with put a paint on with a thin move it around with the thick keep on what technique because you thick brush and then like Patel are around yeah but I'm literally sitting here kind of like this doing this and it allows me to kind of like you know we'll add some silver kicks once we're finally yeah doing this we'll add a couple of yellow bits in here and there you know cool all right Mal tell me where we are with the lighting okay so let's just plug the sucker in um basically there's a couple things to the Circuit right now I'm just showcasing the cargo haul as well as the ideal light for the cockpit this cool cool white that's a nice white yeah it's great it's pretty bright I'm super happy with how bright they are um it's crazy bright um people don't realize how dim LEDs used to be spoiled now everything's just burning our room oh yeah there is a couple other components so I have uh these are the thrusters these are LEDs for the thrusters so I have manual triggers as well as these really nice um leads that take on for the 24 volts for the robot controller but just to showcase the LEDs and the sort of the animation so this can be controlled by the robot arm yes I see so we have these manual ones and then we also have um yeah the controller coming in for them you've written a real Blinky program for that yes dude Blinky lights oh these are the side ones now can you take that animation and slow it down to kind of any frame rate you want yeah we can play around with the the frame rate of it actually on Galaxy Quest the nacelles of the thermian ship they had a glow pulse to them and Grant and mahara to signed a circuit where the animation moved across like 10 different lights and he was able to make each one a frame so that on the motion control stage it would be like frame 13 and you turn it to yeah wow it was a re it was brand new technology for us Way Way Back Then I mean it's amazing just how easy it is to do now yeah he had to have a custom circuit board made because there was no Arduino or Raspberry Pi back then are these just little step down power bucks uh no these are um these are mosfet switches so this is basically so that I can power the LEDs externally and not drain from the board these it's because of how bright these LEDs are they do pull a good amount of amperage and it's it's not sufficient for the micro controller to to control them like to um to power them we just have a five volt line going directly in and the microcontroller is now just triggering a switch to turn them on and off to cause this flickering animation or to keep these oh they're just they're solid state relays yes right awesome oh um the lights these are for the thrusters right yes thrusters and engines yes okay I want to play around with the smoke uh right let's give it some nice oh excellent all right so let's see how columnar they are here it's sort of yeah okay it's really like so yeah it's not shooting out like a like a like a column yeah they don't really they're not beam like it's the one issue I'm worried about about oh actually you know it's it's hard to smoke up the place that's not smoked but if I get a bunch of smoke going on and this is going to make our motion control shot like potentially nightmarish but like I am starting to get a little bit of dude I love I love how bright these are and these are tunable to the frame right yeah so I I basically set it up with the microcontroller so that we can control the brightness fantastic and you got through am I right I'm looking at three and there'll be three per Thruster and three lights per engine yeah so for this yeah so for the back uh for the back engines there'd be six in total of these LEDs and then this will be about 12 for college Thruster which is uh about four um now there might be a chance and as we're trying one of these shots we might want to add like a couple of more like Blinky lights to the outside how hard is that to do in the field it's quite modular so I've at least prepped some micro LEDs and other LEDs for like say the side panels for these like sort of auxiliary lights and so we can add it to this particular circuit here and just drill a little hole and pop it through yes dude how awesome are these connectors they're pretty rad there's like four or five different versions I've got them all and they've changed my life they're just so nice and you can just like clamp things it's really great for prototyping yeah really great I can't wait to see this thing blend awesome thank you follow along in the coming weeks as the tested team and I continue our work on these models scratch building lighting painting detailing and prepping these Miniatures for filming thanks to Bethesda game studios for partnering with us on this project and inviting us to play in their new universe Starfield Launches on Xbox series X S PC and Game Pass on September 6 2023 and is rated M for mature you can find details below or visit www.starfieldgame.com to learn more\n"