Title
Project Overview
This is my Toy Story 2 movie accurate Zurgbot!
Materials & Tools
- 3D Printer
- Soldering Iron
- PLA Filament
- LEDs
- Battery holder
- Arduino Nano
- Resin
- Silicone Molds
Build Process
Step 1: Gather Reference Images
Gathering a lot of reference images is always the first step! It was pretty easy gathering these this time around, since they’re literally in one scene.
Step 2: Modeling
I modeled this in Maya, which is a 3D modeling and animation program. It’s a little trickey making articulated toys in Maya, but I made it work. It’s already a challenge modeling a character to be exactly screen accurate, but it’s a whole other thing to add articulations and rook for electronics.
Step 3: Print Prep & Printing
Printing the Zurgbot is pretty straightforward. He doesn’t have a ton of pieces and they’re all easy prints. I could even print in whatever color I had laying around since he would be painted.
Step 4: Remove from printer & Cleanup parts
Most of the supports break away easy, but there’s some that are extremely tough. Since I created channels for wiring, lights, an Arduino, and batteries, I had to run supports inside and it was extremely tough to get them all out. Took a ton of attempts at poking and prodding, but I eventually got them out.
Step 5: Creating the electronics
This was an adventure for sure, lots of trial and error. This was the first prop I created with electronics, which in this case was just lighting. There are two places that needed lights, the visor and its right hand. The arm is pretty straight forward, and the visor is where the main challenge was.
I needed to create a scrolling effect, and the lights needed to be crammed into a pretty tight spot. I opted to use led strip lighting ran by an Arduino nano. Even with the most dense strip, I was only going to get 4 leds in the visor. It would work, but it’s certainly the bare minimum. Any fewer it wouldn’t have the scrolling look, only alternating lights. I also needed to cram in a visor up there as well. For the visor I used an acrylic plastic with window tint over the front of it to darken it, and behind it is a white piece of paper to diffuse the lights. After doing some research the coding wasn’t too complicated, it just took a few attempts to get the correct brightness and blinking speed down.
Powering everything took some more research because calculating voltages and creating my own circuits I had very little experience with. The tricky part was the hand light was a 3v led and the Arduino and strip lighting was 5v. I also wanted this to be powered by normal 1.5v batteries. So to get the 5v I would need 4 batteries, but yeah, that makes 6v. To get to the Arduino I needed to drop the voltage down by 1v, and down 3v to the hand. I also needed a switch on the circuit to turn it on and off, so I added that too.
Creating the circuit was one thing, but cramming this all in there was certainly a challenge in its own. Luckily the upper body is pretty large, so I was able to fit the battery hold and Arduino all in there, and I designed the channels in the head and arm to run the wires through.
Step 6: Sanding and Painting (and casting)
For once I was excited to get to the sanding part of the build haha. I have painted so many props that for simple paint schemes like this, it’s almost a mindless task at this point. So not much pressure or stress like the electronics, it was just to time. Well, I did decided to casting for the first time. Maybe I spoke too soon, more on the later.
Final Thoughts
I am super happy with how this project turned out! On the surface it may look pretty simple, but there was quite a few challenges that needed to be solved along the way. It was a great learning experience that made me comfortable to tackle bigger projects like my DJ-R3X!