How I Built a Life Size Battle Droid in 2 Weeks

I can't believe I'm about to say this but today we're going to be building a battle droid if you've seen my latest videos you will know that for May I decided to stick to a Phantom Menace theme to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the movie I was trying to think of what else I could build because I already made a lot of the most recognizable props from the film and the one idea that I kept coming back to was a battle droid well I did briefly consider making a life-size W but the battle drg made more sense not only did The Phantom Menace Mark the first appearance of the B1 battle Droid but there's literally thousands of them in the movie this plan does mean that I need to try and pull off a 6 footish tall Droid from start to finish in about 2 weeks for reference it took me over a week just to weather ig2 forget any of the printing and postprocessing it's not that I'm slow I'm just very particular about my droids so I guess we'll see if I can actually pull this off we've got no time to waste so let's get started on this Droid I'll of course be using Droid divisions battle droid files for my build now since I'm working with such a tight schedule I want to talk a bit about how I try to be the most efficient with my time for these large projects the first thing that has been super helpful as of late is the multiplate function that in my case Orca slicer has it means that I can drag an entire group of pieces into the slicer and prep them all at once without worrying that I've accidentally missed a part it's also an insane timesaver when it comes to printing the opposite side of the various parts for a lot of these humanoid droids the parts are the same on both sides so all you have to do in your slicer is Mir near the piece that means any changes you've made to walls infill or custom support settings will automatically be replicated for the second side that you need which Speaking of settings I'll be printing everything on Ultra fast printers which all have 0.4 mm nozzles installed on them I never go below four walls on any of my parts I'll increase the wall thickness if it's a more delicate or loadbearing part A lot of the parts I got away with a 10 to 12% infill again if it's a structural part I'll increase that if it's a massive part I tend to try and go down to 9 or 8% to keep it lighter obviously all of these settings are subject to personal preferences but this is what I used for this particular build on the subject of personal preferences I decided to use abs for this entire Droid every time I do this it seems to confuse a lot of people and I think that's due to when everyone's discussing different filament options they tend to really only talk about their structural properties and benefits and never mention their postprocessing benefits and in ABS is case it is a million times easier to sand than pla or even petg not to mention being able to acetone smooth and weld it for printing ABS I always use my KD printers and I had the whole Army going for this project to try and crank out Parts as fast as possible for myself I essentially assigned each printer a body part group to focus on so I did the central structure like the Torso head any of the really large Parts on my x max 3 since it has the biggest build volume and these larger pieces really needed it my X+ 3 was focusing on legs and my q1 Pro was doing the arm parts I had the three printers running pretty much 24 hours for a couple of days and in that time built up a really decent collection of parts that I could start to work on so started off by removing any support material which only about half of the pieces ended up having any supports the great thing about using abs for these parts though is it means I can recycle all of these support Parts into my abs slurry that you can see me using here it's just ABS dissolved in some acetone that I keep in a separate jar so that I always have some ready to use and I use this to glue or weld ABS Parts together as well as smooth out the pieces themselves I decided to switch things up this time around and use a bit of a different method for these parts so instead of immediately going in with the foot sander as I would usually do I used some of the ABS slurry to smooth out some of the more rough parts of the pieces so anywhere where there were more visible layer lines you know where the layer height changes and you can see those more visible steps just any more visible artifacts I went over with some of my acetone ABS slurry mixture the great thing about this stuff is that you can change the consistency so if I wanted it really gloopy to try and fill in any of those areas I could just add more ABS into my mix and it would be thicker and fill in those gaps more and doing this before doing any sanding meant that I would just be able to sand all of this off without having to essentially do two steps like instead of doing the sanding and then adding the slurry I'm sanding and smoothing off the slurry that is hopefully already smooth these prints a little more so that this piece is already prepped a little better for the first layer of filler primer so of course had to start with the foot sander for sanding but then I always have to switch to sandpaper normally 100 grit for or sanding any of these smaller spots that the foot sander unfortunately can't fit into I also enlisted my mom to help me get through sanding some of these parts she's a big fan of using the foot sander and with that first initial round of sanding complete it means that I can start with the first layers of filler primer anytime you see me spraying filler primer I always do two coats unless it is like a finishing layer that maybe I'm just doing more like spot filling of a certain area on a piece I also started with working on the legs and any more difficult parts that I knew were going to need more work later on once those two layers of filler primer have dried I go in with 180 grit sandpaper to do another round of sanding over everything another Gadget that I use all of the time that doesn't often pop up in videos is this electric duster this is so useful for cleaning off prints of sanding dust and also yourself other than starting with the legs first I also prioritized any pieces that had seams because I knew these parts were going to involve a lot more post-processing work in order to hide the seams and make these parts be perfectly smooth in the end the gaps between parts weren't too bad so I decided to use Bondo spot putty instead of actual body filler once the spot putty is dried I sand that off with 180 grit sandpaper and then do another round of filler primer I typically concentrate this in the area where the seam and spot filler is because a lot of the time I'm using the filler primer as almost like a guide to see exactly how noticeable that seam still is while I've been doing all of the post-processing work on these leg Parts my printers have still been very hard at work completing the rest of the pieces in total my three printers managed to get all of the parts printed in about 4 days I say about 4 days because honestly time was a blur at this point I was just go go go sand sand sand I didn't have time to be concerned about when these printers were done doing things I just knew that like 4 days later I basically had an entire Droid done it also just happened to work out that all of the printers had completed their designated body parts at about the same time but of course that means with more parts comes more prep work doing the ABS slur first seemed to have worked really well on the leg parts so I decided to continue that for these new pieces the second round of Parts was mostly made up by the arms and hands obviously I prioritized the printers printing the legs first because I knew that's what I wanted to start with there were also some larger upper pieces like the head and backpack and I also enlisted my mom and my dad this time time to help me get through these parts because there were a lot of arm parts compared to the legs even though the individual arm parts are smaller there's just physically more pieces that you have to get through sanding the initial sanding with the foot sander is also really the only step that I can get any help with so while the second round of parts were getting sanded I continued working on the legs and first round of pieces that I still wasn't quite finished with yet I thinned down some spot putty to brush on some of the more problematic parts that weren't quite to the level of smooth that I wanted them to be at due to either seams or some still visible layer lines from how they were printed once the spot putty had dried sanded that off and then went in with another round of filler primer after doing the touch-up on this round of pieces I'd really completed everything from the feet up to the lower abdomen at this point I was dying to see these like Parts all together so I cut my wooden dowel down to size I actually had my miter saw set up for once so it meant that I got to save myself a bunch of time but these poles run through the entirety of the legs on the battle droid for strength and it means you just sort of put them on like a Droid shish kebab and you have yourself a pair of completed Droid legs since I got the lower half of the battle droid finish it meant that the next thing on the to-do list was the upper torso this piece is a beast it's basically the single largest piece in this entire build I slathered the ABS slurry pretty much all over it to try and minimize any layer lines as much as I possibly could so I wasn't blowing through filler primer on it even then I think I pretty pretty much went through an entire can just on the first two initial layers of coating this piece once the filler primer had dried of course went in with my 180 grit sandpaper to sand the entire piece again same for the lower piece of the Torso both of these parts were looking pretty good so I decided to assemble them together I always try and handle larger pieces separately for as long as possible because they're a whole lot easier to handle that way and for this piece I of course once again did my acetone and acetone slurry mixture to weld the two parts together the two parts created a bit of an interesting seam there is actually like a recessed line across the backside so I didn't want to accidentally fill that in too much with like body filler so I started off with spot putty because I felt like it was going to be easier to handle because I knew most of the work I wanted to do with some UV resin in my little fine point needle-nose bottle that I love using when I need parts to look like they're welded together it's just such an easy way to get a very precise amount of UV resin onto the area that you want and this is just some 3D printer resin in this bottle and that was pretty much everything for the Torso part which meant the last large piece that I had to deal with was the backpack this is actually an optional accessory for the Droid so if you didn't want this piece you don't have to use it but I thought it would be really cool to deck out my battle droid in as many of the accessories as I possibly could since I was taking on this battle droid project because of the phantom menace anniversary it felt only fitting to in include the backpack on mine since all of the b1s have them mon nebu technically other than the commander but that is a specific we will get into in a bit the last mean piece that I had to work on that had any sort of seam was the head this piece looked really good straight off of the printer so I didn't do any acetone slurry mixture on it I just sanded it and then went in with filler primer and once i' had a chance to sand that again I attached the front and back of the head together now there are a ton of smaller parts that I really haven't had a chance to mention or show honestly the post-processing section of these build videos could easily be hours on their own if I didn't edit them down like crazy just know that in between all of the pieces that I have talked about I was working on a lot more off camera there are almost 100 individual parts to this Droid the majority of my twoe time frame was spent on this post-processing pre painting step I did also decide to resin print myself a group of pieces some of these smaller parts that we're just going to look a lot better if they were made out of resin but also some just to try and save myself on postprocessing since these basically involved no sanding and a little filler primer and after that we were finally on to the last step before starting to paint which is where I go over every single piece once again with 400 grit sandpaper this helps to remove any possible overspray on the parts and just really polish them up nicely for painting I also wipe them all down with a damp cloth I decided that I wanted to paint this Droid the proper way with having real paint chipping showing silver underneath so the first step for this paint job was to spray all of the parts in a silver now I am very particular about my metallics most silver spray paints I absolutely despise they do not look real which is why I ended up with this Alabaster silver automotive paint even then I spent a very long time in the automotive paint section trying to find the perfect looking silver for this project and once I had everything painted silver I decided that I wanted to put this Droid together please appreciate my newly organized Droid Hardware I didn't have time to do any sort of full test fit before now so this was very exciting to see this battle droid in one piece and this Factory fresh looking silver was super cool and if I didn't already have a lot of silver and white droids in my collection I might have left him like this but now let's talk a bit about paint because there is no shortage when it comes to possible paint and color options for battle droids I always thought I might make a commander battle droid because those yellow accents look super cool at one point I even designed a Mr Roger Rogers Ensemble with a painted cardigan looking situation honestly still kind of tempted to make this but the more I thought about it the more I like the idea of having just any battle droid that I could have possibly picked up from some random planet and refurbished to achieve this look I'm going to start by adding some masking fluid onto my Silver Base I started with applying this using a scrunched up ball of tin foil but I did gradually switched to my scrunched up tape wall method the tin foil did work but it was a bit hard comp compared to the tape that more easily Contours to the shape of the piece either way this is one of the easiest and best methods to get naturall looking chipping on your parts I used reference from various battle droids to help me place the weathering but overall the concept for mine was to have the most damage be at the legs and feet and gradually as you worked up the body there be less and less which a lot of the battle droids in the movie seemed to have anyway I was really trying to hit those refurbished battle droid Vibes so I wanted him to look like he'd seen some battle action but he'd been cleaned up a bit and was now being better taken care of other than the masking for the paint chipping I also added some tape around the joints of the fingers as well as hips knees and elbows basically any of the joints on the battle droid seem to have stayed silver so I just masked those off since my entire Droid was already silver keeping with the theme of the over-the-top paint job I decided to have my beige ba two-step system because why would I make anything easy on myself but really I swear the color of the big battle droids changes every 5 seconds it's not even the lighting in the seam the figures are one color they're a different color on nabo they're a different color somewhere else even like the promo shots for the battle droids are all different shades of beige so I attempted to hit it somewhere in the middle so I started off with this Smoky beige this was a satin paint color I could not find this in matte but I actually think the satin worked out really well because in a lot of scenes the beige coating on the batttle droids does seem to have a bit of reflectivity to it this color on its own though is a bit light for the beige that I was going for so over the top of it I Ed one of the most infamous battle droid colors which is the Montana gold Sahara Beige I used this for the first time on ig2 and I had already known that this was one of the most commonly used colors for the beige battle droids and when I used it on IG I was kind of shocked at how yellow it was which is why I didn't want to just use it on its own at least Le to my eyes like I am a psycho paint color sensitive artist okay like either one of these colors might look fine to anyone else and honestly I think either one of them would work but why would I make it easy on myself even in all of these clips you probably have no clue what this color actually looks like in person because it seems to change every 5 Seconds depending on what time of day and what lights I was filming with at that point so maybe that means it is actually the perfect color the good news is that even though I decided to do a two-step beige process it only took me a single day to paint the entire Droid and once I'd let that dry overnight it was time to remove all of the masking fluid I used a combination of just scratching it off with my fingers and also using this metal sponge or steel wool the nice thing about using the metal other than it's a really easy way to find exactly where the masking fluid is on your parts is it also gives a bit more scratching and variance in texture even while I was still removing the masking fluid I found myself really going at the parts with it to give it more scratching and weathering once i' gotten all the masking fluid off it was time for the painting portion of the weathering I used my favorite technique for this which is mixing some black wash with some additional acrylic paint in this case a nice chocolate brown watering that down and putting it through an airbrush and spraying that all over your parts it's very similar to the process that I'm sure a lot of people are most familiar with which is just a watered down acrylic paint that you brush all over the piece and then blot off with a paper towel but I find in a lot of cases you really run the risk of still being able to see the brush Strokes from applying the wash and when you airbrush it on you get absolutely none of that you can go over the entire piece with a super wet wash so that you only get a hint of the color and texture that this gives or you can go in with a more refined spray to really build up the texture and darkness where the grime would just naturally build up more you know you can't have a Droid that has this level of paint chipping without also having some degree of dirt on it similarly to how I approached the masking process I had the mixture that I was spraying on be a lot more concentrated towards the feet and lower half and then gradually as I worked up the Droid I added more water to my mixture so that the overall effect of the weathering would be lighter and less intense I will say when you're applying this if you want the effect to be more subtle it's actually better to apply it really wet because when you spray it on super light it pretty much dries instantly so you really don't get an opportunity to blot it off whereas when you apply it wet it can be blotted off really easily you will sometimes see me also even Spritz more water onto it so that I can remove more of the color I know it sounds a bit counterintuitive that applying more of it would end up with a more subtle effect in the end but it really is due to just how fast airbrush paint can dry on a piece none of the painting steps for this Droid are particularly skill intensive it's just you're having to do these same steps to absolutely every single piece of the Droid so it's just a lot I did decide to keep most of my pieces more separated to weather them it is something that if you're not as confident with your weathering process that you might want to put more of your Droid together to make sure that the weathering matches across all of the parts when I do start assembling my pieces together I do what I'd like to nickname continuity touch-ups because sometimes there can just be areas that are a bit lighter and darker just depending on where the paint goes that all of a sudden are now right beside each other and they need to match the final step for my Droid is I decided to give it a unique model number I had my Cricut cut out a stencil using some stencil vinyl and then I applied that onto the backpack I painted this on by hand because the texture of the paint right here was very weird and I was concerned that if I tried to airbrush it on it would just bleed all underneath this stencil but thankfully the hand painting did work and this was a pretty clean stencil job the final step for this battle droid build was to reassemble all of the parts so adding the bolts to the various joints adding the Torso pole back in which I used an aluminum pole for this since it is a little visible on that back part added the Torso onto the top of that bolted the neck on added the head to the neck slid the arms onto these shoulder dowels added the shoulder armor attached the backpack and finally added the antennas onto the backpack and here is my finished B1 battle droid in total he took about 10 kg of filament 10 cans of filler primer four cans of silver and 2 and 1/2 cans of each of the beige colors and I don't want to even think about how many hours I did also make him a pair of binoculars as an added accessory I didn't get a whole lot of footage of him using them I did get this one really awesome photo but it did almost cause a car crash in front of my house I brought Mr Roger down to the workshop and lined him up with the rest of the tall Squad so that you could see a size comparison between them all he ended up coming in at about 6'5 thanks to his comp antennas but honestly his head isn't that much shorter yes I did somehow manage to get this battle droid finished in exactly 2 weeks which is an insane time frame do not try and do this I'm probably going to sleep for the next week he was a ton of fun to build though and I'm very excited to have a new member in the Droid Squad but that is everything so thank you so much for watching and joining me through the process of building this B1 battle droid and I will see you in my next video

Channel: M.M's Prop Shop

Views: 151,917

Keywords: mm prop shop, 3d print, 3d printing, 3d printed, star wars, prop building, prop replica, resin printed, life size, best 3d printer, resin print, resin 3d print, resin printer, best resin printer, prop making, diy, make your own, jedi, obi wan kenobi, lightsaber, resin printing, the phantom menace, queen amidala, anycubic, qui gon jinn, anakin skywalker, padme amidala, jar jar binks, prequels, darth maul, droid, sith, probe droid, qidi, Q1 pro, Battle droid, X max 3, Elegoo

Id: UEm0lbvAmkg

Length: 20min 57sec (1257 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 01 2024