Class 6 Escape Pod
The little escape pod that jettisoned from the Tantive IV with the two droids that made galactic history!
The Project
As I modeled the Tantive IV, I eventually hit the escape pods. Since I was getting burnt out on the Tantive Model, and wanted to see whether 3D printing a model I custom designed would actually be possible. I decided to do a high fidelity model of the escape pod R2D2 and C3PO escaped in during Star Wars Episode 4.
The base shape is pretty simple, two cylinders joined together. The tricky part was the modeling of the details and learning how to set up regions I could extrude from the main hull without adding too much geometry.
As this was my first project intended for 3D printing, so I got crazy on detail and did my best to recreate the outer greebles as best I could from various pictures and model references online.
Model History
The escape pod in star wars was built from a two one-gallon paper paint buckets joined end to end. The outside was plastered in greebles to add detail. The entire model was built by ILM in just under a week.
Building for 3D Prints
Designing something with the intent to print it requires some planning. You need to think about how to decompose the object into different pieces that can be printed separately. You also have to account of size, because resin printers requires you to print objects at an angle to avoid defects during the printing process.
I opted to decompose the object into several pieces - the top of the pod, the main body of the pod, the base of the engines, and various engine components (reflectors and nozzles). The objects also need to be designed in such a way that they can fit together into a cohesive whole. In the case of the engine for example, this required that the base of the engines be printed with holes into which the engine nozzles could be installed.
There's a bit of experimentation that's required here - because resin prints aren't always exact - so you need to build in tolerances to ensure that the pieces can fit together seamlessly.
Texturing
Once you've built a detailed model, it's almost impossible not to want to texture it. Like I said in the Tantive IV post, texturing is what brings a model to life and tells the story of the object. In the case of this escape pod, this meant lots of rust streaks and damage in the form of worn / chipped paint and fainted markings.
A fun thing about this particular project was that I used a combination of procedural texturing for the base color with an overlay of hand-painted rust streaks using a stylus / 3D graphics pad. It was the first time I've ever used a stylus on a model, and I was surprised to find that it's really easy to paint on digital models. I also find the effect to be really nice, as it adds imperfections and an organic look you can't easily achieve mathematically.
Texture painting requires you to learn about UV Maps, which is essentially taking a 3D object unfolding it into a flat surface ("e.g. imagine taking a shipping box, cutting the edges and folding it flat on a table). For simple shapes, this is very easy to do, but for complex shapes like this one, it can be quite daunting if you were to do it manually.
Luckily, Bleender provides a bunch of "UV Unwrap" tools which allow you to automatically slice and dice an object into smaller pieces which can be represented on a flat surface. The computer gets to remember how it all comes together, what edges join with what other edges, and do the hard part of mapping a stroke on a 3D object to all the little pieces of the texture so it appears to be seamless. It's insanely cool and complex technology - and is really simple to use.
Animating the POD
Wait. Wasn't this project all about creating a printable object?
Yes. But sometimes opportunistic detours present themselves so you can learn new things. I was wrapping up the printing piece of this, had just done the texturing - and then decided to see if I could create an animation using the model.
This allowed me to explore keyframing, setting up camera rigs, and learn about camera constraints that create the illusion of motion. It also taught me that animation is EXPENSIVE. My model and scene was pretty basic - a planet and the escape pod - but it took a solid night of work for my PC and trusty RTX 4090 to render the frames... and when something looks bad, you have to start all over.
This taught me the value of doing a super fast workbench model render (no raytracing) before committing to doing a full render. Getting the motion study down first, and then laying in things like lighting to perfect the scene really helps save time and resources when doing animation.
MANIFOLD THIS MUTHERFUCKER...
Please pardon my french (well, in this case english). This deserves some explanation.
When you print an object, it needs to be manifold. What is Manifold you ask? I'm glad you did... really, I am.
Manifold means that the 3D object is completely solid, and that there aren't any gaps or torn edges in the model. You'd think this would be pretty easy to do, but there are a few things it would have been helpful to know about at the beginning of the project that would have saved me a TON of time at the end.
First of all, when you model, you frequently do so by combining lots of primitive shapes into more complex ones - for example, cylinders, cubes, spheres, etc. You might manipulate those objects too, flattening or distorting them to create the shape you need. This can often lead to complex models with A LOT of individual objects.
Since you don't want to print out hundreds of objects and combine them IRL (in real life), you need to combine them digitally into large objects that can be printed in a single shot. To do this, you use boolean operations (Intersect, Union, Difference) to combine objects into a single shape. There's a catch though.
Sometimes, if you try to combine objects who's geometry is radically different you can end up with weird artifacts in the mesh. This is where holes, tears, or extra vertices can quickly turn your pristine models into a nightmare of weird-ass geometry.
This is where that motherfucking manifold shit really gets real - because that nice model you just made can have hundreds if not thousands of issues with it that will prevent it from being printable.
Luckily blender has some nice 3D printing tools that help you track down things like non-manifold edges. It even has some tools to help you fix these issues - but it's not perfect. there's only so much the machine can do.
So, you need a technique - which is basically to start small, perform small operations to add objects together, and check that they're manifold - then you do this repeatedly across hundreds of objects, fixing issues as you go. This helps make the geometry cleaner, but is no guarantee... because at the end of the day you often have to spend hours hunting down those faulty vertices and edges and fix them manually.
It's a labor of love and frustration. So yeah, manifold this motherfucker.
Printing
Once you get your object buttoned up, you can export it as an STL from Blender and bring it into a 3D printing App. Many people love Chitubox for printing, but I much prefer Lychee Slicer, which has some amazing features and gives you a lot of control over how you position the object to be printed.
If you haven't done resin printing before, it's a pretty insane process. Resin printers are designed with a UV screen on their base upon which a basin with a transparent plastic base is placed. The basin is filled with liquid resin which hardens when exposed to ultraviolet light.
A motorized build plate then descends down into the basin and presses tightly against the bottom of the basin. The UV screen turns on in the pattern you want to print, and the resin instantly hardens and attaches itself to the build plate. This process is repeated thousands of times as the build plate rises out of the basin, and layer upon layer of resin is solidified into your object.
I probably am not describing this super clearly, so I recommend a video or two to visualize the process - suffice to say that printing requires you to set up your model with supports so it can be 3d Printed, and then export it in "slices" that can then be printed one at a time until your object is complete.
Example of one of the components of the escape pod ready for printing.
Assembly
So now that you have all the pieces printed, it's just a matter of assembly. Just print the objects, paint them and glue them together. Right?
Wrong. As you may have noticed I tend to like to make life complicated for myself - it's how I learn. So when I built this model I scaled it and designed it in such a way that I could install a PEMENOL 15W USB Power Supply Module in it.
Now why would you do something like that for Marc?
Well... the lighting of course! With USB power, I can connect multiple LED lights to illuminate the engines as well power the fiberoptic lights dotted across the hull. Yes, I apparently have issues - but there's no arguing that the results are pretty freaking cool.
Conclusion
This was supposed to be a small project to test whether I could print out a complete model and assemble it. It was meant to get some experience with the design and printing process - and I'd say it was really successful in that. There were a ton of lessons I learned about how to build objects and set myself up to successfully print them. It also taught me a ton about texturing, 3D painting and animation to boot. All in all, this was a great project.
If you're into 3D modeling and printing, I'd highly recommend a project like this. It's great to be ambitious and see where it takes you, and you're 100% guaranteed to learn things along the way you would never have set out to learn at the start of the project.
Happy Modeling!