hey everybody norm from tested here and today's build is going to be another
laser cutter project and fingers crossed hopefully
something of a milestone for my own
journey through learning adobe illustrator
designing vectors for laser cutting on the glow forge now over the past
couple weeks and months during this lockdown i've done a variety of small
projects from risers to figure displays of things that house led
lighting strips and all of those skills i think will
culminate in something a project that's almost a rite
of passage for figure collectors and that is yes a
death star hallway diorama you've seen them online everyone's done
one we've even done it untested before with
just some cut foam core and cut styrene using our
qriket maker but i want to do one that's specifically
designed for the laser cutter for eighth inch acrylic material there's
some matte black acrylic that i'm really curious to work with as well as
something that would fit in some ikea furniture so
the parameters for my idea is something that will be uh
that will accommodate a 12th scale figure so about six inches
tall so whether that's star wars black series figures or i have
these bandai ones i really love um these are six inches and they can
perfectly go inside some ikea furniture like your classic
glass detail case that's about 14 by 14
by 11 or so or something like an expediter or callax was what they sell
now that's that classic gridded wooden shelf that's about 13
inches by 13 inches and a little deeper at 15 inches
so i'm probably going to design something i've done some sketches
that will probably be 13 by 13 by 10 and i do want the acrylic pieces to
interlock and i do want to have room to do that classic lit
lighting panel behind that iconic grille so
i've pulled some references from the internet that i'll be using
and let's head over to adobe illustrator and get started with the design
so once again this is a project that i'm completely
designing in adobe illustrator i'm not doing a 3d model and then flattening
the orthogonal views for laser cutting i i'm trying to do the problem solving of
how all the pieces fit together and i've been pretty happy about that
in when i say this is a culmination of all the
skills i've learned so far it really is in terms of aligning
and duplicating shapes creating non-standard
shapes like these polygons and then also what i had a lot of fun doing
was these panel lines i didn't use any direct photo reference
i kind of did my own interpretation of it
trying to keep the same relative shape and number of
these holes for example but the proportions are going to be a little bit
different because i want this to fit inside some ikea
furniture
all right so we've cut our first piece and that
is this back wall here so this is going to be the size of it
always ends up bigger in person than i think because it's smaller on the
computer screen i mean i initially thought i was going to do this
for something like sixth scale and that would be 12 inches and
double the height and i think that would be way too big and probably use up way
too much material but i'm super happy with how this turned
out this design work was so much fun and this is that matte black acrylic
that i wanted to experiment with and peeling off the front
this matte black looks really good no need to spray paint it
and you can see i've already etched in and done some outlining work here which
i got to decide whether i want to keep that as the detail
or if i want some added relief probably not with this thickness of material this
is an eighth of an inch and i don't want that much sticking out
so i might just try cutting some styrene pieces because i have this vector work
already and then gluing the styrene on top
now what's also nice about this material is that the
back is glossy so i have the option of going for
matte black or shiny black and i want the floor panels
to be shiny black so that's next piece i'm going to cut
and then we can do our first test fit okay so the floor panel just finished
cutting and i'm not removing it from the laser cutter because
as it was cutting i decided to do a bunch of etches for the pattern on the
floor i had another idea something that's not
canon and not true to the design but because i'm already going to have led
lights behind the back panel of the back wall i
think that i can even extend that lighting
strip to the floor as well and there's a part of it that i think
would be cool if light was coming out from underneath
so i'm going to keep this acrylic in place cross my fingers and see if i can
turn a score into a cut and have it still
perfectly aligned and see if that works let's go check it
out
okay things are getting exciting i have my major pieces cut out now
so as you can see this is what i had earlier uh this is the back wall
probably the most important piece uh one they forgot to mention
is after looking at it in illustrator decided to go for
not a square design not 13 by 13. so this is essentially 12 inches by 8
inches which for a six inch figure if you think
of that as a standard six foot tall person
it is an eight inch ceiling a standard height
that star might actually be taller than that but uh the proportions didn't look
that great so this is what i went for um i also
have a sheet of frosted acrylic and so behind the grates here for the
lights i would put this frosted acrylic
right behind it so you get some diffused light and yes i will have
led lighting strips behind it now one thing i realize
though is it's something i never thought about with the death star
wall paneling is are these grates um are they flush or is it like i have
it here where the the lighting panel
that clear frosted diffusion panel is set behind the grates
and i've seen now people do it both ways they
have it like this where it's behind you have the grates first
then just another panel behind it and i've also seen it where
you have essentially a very flush panel and
i think i'm going to go with the flush panel i think looking at the screenshots
on a new hope uh the walls are flush and so that's why on this
frosted acrylic sheet i actually have cut out
these individual pieces uh in a place where you don't see them
and so i have these extra pieces and uh with the kerf adjusted is a pretty
good fit and then i get a little bit of extra diffusion with two layers
of the frosted acrylic so that's a ton of these small pieces
um but it's pretty good fit i wonder if i can just leave them in press fit
and not have to glue them in but we'll see
and speaking of a press fit now we're going to do
our first test fitting so here is that base panel so this is the
base dimensions again i base it off of about 12 inches by this is about eight
inches here um with some extra space in the back for
the lighting panel this is that extra uh cut hole i had
and it worked out really well it did the first pass where
it was just in a score essentially an engrave
but i decided hey let's have light come through the bottom as well
so that worked out i haven't peeled off this protective sheet yet because this
is the glossy side as you can tell it's like a fingerprint
magnet and but you can now really clearly see the the floor panel
design that i went for and this is just a score so it's essentially just an
engrave on here not actual individual panels but
i have my wall and i have this
and i think i did test this off camera just to check but it will fit
pretty pretty well
and there it is it is a pretty good fit right here
um yeah press fit and it stands by itself that i'm really
really happy with and then of course i'll add in the
frosted glass back i have these kind of door panels
that will be right here as well so now the next step is let's take a
look at this wall paneling and think about
how we want to add that relief um to it i don't want to use laser cut
acrylic again i think eighth inch is too thick for this wall paneling but i do
want to try styrene so i have some white sheets of 40 thou thick
styrene which is thicker than i've used before when we use the qriket maker
to the vinyl cutter to cut our styro in the past that was
uh 20 thou and so i'm going to try it on the laser cutter we'll do some test cuts
i know styrene doesn't work really well with laser cutter
tends to curl i have to be very careful about how hot and how powerful
you have your laser or else it'll just smell real funky and
it could be a bit of a hazard so we're going to take
this very carefully and we'll head back to illustrator and take
this already designed vector split these apart
and then send it over to the laser
cutter
so a quick check-in uh turns out my styron sheets are 8
inches by 10 inches which when i expand these shapes it basically fills
up the entire space onto one sheet pretty pleased with that but i meant to
be pretty precise i also did some testing in terms of
uh the power and speed on the glowforge and i'm using a 150
speed and 35 power on two passes if you have a glowforge
and that seems to work for this 40 000 styrene
i did try a lower power but unfortunately i can't do for example
a high power one pass and low power on the second pass and it
has a little bit of scorching um the edges
you know they're clean but there is a bit of that
curling up close you can see there's a lip to this so it's not as clean as if
it was cut with a vinyl cutter and a blade
but for the sake of this project i'm going to use the laser cutter and
well let's try it out
all righty i would say that was a moderate
success uh definitely not ideal so if you look
in that time lapse footage you can see that the styrene definitely was
bowing after that first pass along the second pass and that means for
this much of a design it's intricate this many pieces that need to be cut out
from a sheet there are parts of the styrene that then
lifted off of the bed and didn't get as precise of a cut
as i would have hoped and so uh here's the popped out
sheet and you can see there are still some pieces stuck in there
you can see it's not perfect but i think good enough for this project and i
didn't then hit every single piece with some black
spray paint and now it's the fun part it's going to
be the assembly let's put it all together
so
all right so we are done and actually had to
call a few audibles in the assembly here so
as you can see this is the finished diorama
i could not be more pleased with how well everything
fit together like none of these actually these sides
they're not glued yet they can be and i could use like acrylic cement
or super glue but everything is rock solid
and really rigid um i'm also really pleased
with the uh the matte acrylic here which has the glossy side you can tell
that gloss on the reverse side works perfectly for
the floor here um but as you can tell as you saw
with the time lapse i decided not to end up using the styrene pieces
for that panel relief and i started to assemble it together
and it just it wasn't clean enough the laser etched outlines here of these
panel lines looks so good especially on this matte
acrylic that the styrene with those bowed edges
the curled edges because it was laser cut and it wasn't
cut with a knife it just didn't work and i think 40 foul was probably too thick
styrene to use so what i've done is i've placed an
order for some 20 thou half as thick and i'm going to try it
again another time with the qriket maker uh with the vinyl
cutter just to see if it looks any cleaner um
but right now i do love the look of this and one thing i'm really happy
that i did do was that inlay for the lighting panels and i
think that really really helps keep it flush it looks
really clean and the other audible i called was
in peeling off the protective covering for the flooring
i ended up leaving these little corner accents because i think some contrast is
needed if they're off and one of them is off it
just kind of fades away the etching doesn't show as much and i know it's not
canonical to have that type of contrast on the corners of the paneling but i
think it looks pretty good so let's turn this thing on so the
lighting is all installed with an led strip in the back it's just
cool white and i'm really happy i decided to also
add this little bar underneath so i can have
light coming up from up underneath the floor just on
that same uh same strip so i
thought ahead of time and cut a little hole out on the side of the panel here
so i have an out for the power and let's plug it
in and see how it looks fingers crossed
oh that looks so nice oh my gosh i am so pleased
with how the fusion here works um it's not too bright double layers of
frosted acrylic really really help and i love that it's
flush here you know mostly press fit for now but i
probably will glue them in and i have that additional led strip
which isn't super noticeable but does give a little bit of that
under lighting for these figurines so i can
for example plop this storm trooper here and maybe this version of
vader here perfectly scaled for 1 12 for these six inch figures
and this will slot very nicely into my ikea furniture and it's one of those
projects where in my head i had an idea of how it could
look based on sketching it out and the references but
in person when it's all assembled and completed
it's even better and it makes me want to iterate and improve and add to
it and use this as a template for more dioramas
i could build for my other figures i'm going to include links to
where you can download this file yourself
if you want to laser cut it out and assemble it in our links to
the products i use to put this together but thank you so much
for following along this journey it's just another notch in my belt
in laser-cut projects and i'll be back next time with
another project until then see it
you