The plan was to include custom lighting for the red/blue "ears", the searchlights and randomly firing laser cannons. To ease the implementation of this, I reproduced some of the kit parts in CAD but with accommodation for the LEDs/fibre optics which were then printed out in resin. A small microprocessor board drives all the animations, and lives in the bottom of the body, along with a small battery pack.
The base was quickly put together in a cheap picture frame using polystyrene, mod-roc and some broken up pieces of plaster of paris. All the skulls came from a pack of STLs for gaming figures I bought, but scaled up to 1/35th to match the rest of the kit. I think there's 72 in total! The endos come from the Pegasus companion set.
The chrome finish is Dark Chrome from SMS. I base coated with SMS Jet Black gloss, but really struggled to get a decent gloss finish. No matter how wet and glossy I laid it down, as it dried it just went horrible and rough. I ended up using 2 whole 30ml bottles of black - spraying, sanding back, spraying, sanding back, over and over until I got a barely acceptable coverage. At least the chrome coat is pretty durable, if not massively chromey due to the lack of gloss in the undercoat. Last time I did chrome I used AK-Xtreme and that just rubbed off with finger touch!
I did shoot some video of the lights in action but just found I can no longer log into my Vimeo account without verifying my age in a security and privacy nightmare, so balls to that.
Enjoy the pictures!
