Dyne's 99-99 Build

[Dyne]

I got a fair amount done since the last update, including printing and painting all of the main body sections and head, adding the ball transfer units to the body, and testing the ... rollability (which works fine).  By far the largest print was the main body, which took twelve and a half hours on the 0.6 mm nozzle.



This print required a lot of support material inside (because the roof is flat with holes for the BTU's in it). Both getting it off the bed AND getting the support out of the cylinder were an enormous pain. I also had to deal with some body filler next to one of those rectangular panels and the little chevron shape above it (not the ones shown).  I have the magnets for the head, but I haven't put them in yet.  Strictly speaking, they aren't really necessary until I can spin the ball under motor control.

And to completely contradict my last statement, I have to report a fall.  At one point before I painted it, the ball slipped out of my hands and hit the corner of something on its way down onto the floor.  This caused a small bit of plastic damage (near the bottom in the photo below ... the top spots are just underextrusion holes that somehow didn't get properly filled, which I am steadfastly ignoring).  

This incident revealed that the plastic right around the damaged area was a bit spongy (likely due to the underextrusion issues on the rear of the head), which I hadn't noticed before as it isn't like that anywhere else.  I will eventually need to reprint the rear half of the head anyway, so I just decided to live with it for now.



These are the main rattle can colors I used.  Not shown are the self-etching primer and the black enamel that I used on the aluminum tube on the base, nor the green acrylic craft paints I'm brushing on for the lines.



Once I got the white and the yellow on together, I decided I wasn't really a fan of the combo.  When selecting the yellow, I either misremembered how pale the color I needed was or the store's lighting was messing with me.  I should've gone for the deeper yellow that I almost picked but put aside because I thought it was too much.  

This shade is too similar to the white (and it would've been worse with the heirloom white that I'd originally planned to use).  And even though I sprayed both colors with a satin clearcoat to help unify them, the originally flat white has a slightly different sheen that looks odd in some conditions, like it's not as well lit.

That's all fine.  The paint jobs on both droids are semi-temporary anyway, just to have them look somewhat correct for the con.


I clearcoated the lenses for both droids, which did improve their clarity.  This photo shows how they looked before this process (I did clean them off a bit to try and remove the red tinge from the polishing compound, which works somewhat.  



This is Four-Nines lens afterward:


Just ignore the green.  It's still in progress.  I could push them further, but I'm calling them good enough for now.  Need to decide how to attach them (so as not to get obvious glue everywhere inside the lens).


Here's the full droid so far.  The two yellow arms are going to be retracted as shown.  Depending how much time I have in the next few days, the white arms might also wind up being retracted.  But all four arms are fully painted and assembled.


The only thing that remains is to figure out what I want to do to attach the arms, and to model and print the internal structure (which at minimum is needed to secure the main body to the lower dome section, as well as mount any servos, battery holder, and microcontroller if I go crazy and decide to do last minute animation).

[Dyne]

I covered much of what happened at Dragon Con in my LD-F1 build thread, but I did want to post this Star Wars: Visions meetup photo.



This is my 99-99 and Tim Hebel's R-Duo. You can see build videos about R-Duo on Tim's YouTube channel TheEebel

While returning from the con and browsing the Star Wars: Visions "The Ninth Jedi" episode guide I came across concept art for 99-99 by Tetsuya Nishio that I hadn't seen before.  

It shows the real design of the "hands" for the yellow arms, which turn out to not be identical to the white arms after all.  I'll need to redesign those arms.  The real design is more like a little ball swiveled vector tube. The art also reveals that the "shoulders" were meant to be able to slide vertically, which justifies positioning them lower in the sockets for practicality.

[kresty]

Cute

[Vagabond Elf]

While returning from the con and browsing the Star Wars: Visions "The Ninth Jedi" episode guide I came across concept art for 99-99 by Tetsuya Nishio that I hadn't seen before.  

That concept art makes it look like the original plan was that Four-nines would move by rolling, using the centre ball as an impeller and the yellow-and-white arms as outriggers.  Which makes me suspect that having him float was an animation shortcut.

Now, if I were to attempt a rolling version I'd probably scale him up a bit, just to have some more room!

But that's not on-screen so not canon in any case.  And this build is very cool!  Eebel's build does a good job capturing the animation look, but it seems a bit bland in real life.  Yours looks more like a "real" droid, to my eye.

[Dyne]

That concept art makes it look like the original plan was that Four-nines would move by rolling, using the centre ball as an impeller and the yellow-and-white arms as outriggers.  Which makes me suspect that having him float was an animation shortcut.

I think flying in general was always intentional as the drawing does also show the whirlygig motion that he uses (center right), along with the micro thrusters.  However, I think you might be right ... maybe he wasn't originally meant to fly apart from those motions, but the animation omitted the rolling mode in favor of hovering.

Strangely, it never really occurred to me that he might have been intended to roll (in spite of being well aware of the wheels in the arms), probably because I didn't see this art until nearly a full year after I saw the episode.  

Now, if I were to attempt a rolling version I'd probably scale him up a bit, just to have some more room!

You'd need it for adding a drive system, especially if the lower dome became a full sphere and you still cared about the head's omnidirectional movement or any arm animation. I'm not saying it's not doable, especially if you didn't care about the head or arms, but I fear it'd be sort of like designing the Sphero R2-D2. Smaller builds have a tendency to be more of a pain as they require tighter tolerances and denser packing because, while the droids are smaller, the off-the-shelf components we have access to usually aren't much.

The idea reminds me of M-O from Wall-E, though, who is on my list of builds to do eventually.  I know rolling versions exist amongst the Wall-E builders like Matt Hobbs, and there are files in that club.

But that's not on-screen so not canon in any case.  And this build is very cool!  Eebel's build does a good job capturing the animation look, but it seems a bit bland in real life.  Yours looks more like a "real" droid, to my eye.

Thank you.

In fairness to R-Duo, this was also his first public appearance. I believe that he was still being worked on shortly before the con, and there undoubtedly wasn't much time for weathering. I suspect he'll get some love soon to help him look more grounded in reality.