Spaceship Found in a Car Boot Sale

[RockDoctor]

they get asked to deflect it from hitting Milton Keynes;

Did the protagonists get to launch herds of concrete cows on deflection trajectories?

[ffutures]

No, they took a nuke up in an improvised spaceship but for various reasons didn't get to use it as intended.

[RockDoctor]

No, they took a nuke up in an improvised spaceship but for various reasons didn't get to use it as intended.

Well, that's one thing to do with Milton Keynes.
Did they put some sort of protective dome over Bletchley Park?

[ffutures]

Given it was a Wallace and Gromit / Top Gear crossover things like common sense and conservation are fairly low on the agenda... A small quote:

“We’ll launch it from somewhere a bit safer,” said Jeremy. “Salisbury Plain ought to be okay. Worse we’ll do there is blow up Stonehenge. That’ll annoy the hippies, so it’s a win/win situation.”

[ffutures]

Rough paint job - needs more work and some imperfections such as brush hairs need to be fixed, but it's getting there

[spud42]

nice, you are making me want to fix my 3d printer....

[ffutures]

Still can't get hold of Wallace and Gromit models the right size (they'd be too fine detail for the filament printing most people use) but I did find some steampunk-ish astronauts I made as conversions from figures wearing diving suits in the eighties or nineties that look quite good. Here's the ship (still working on odd bits that aren't quite right) with crew and some Martians I made from corn kernels and wire:



Hope to add a ladder for the door shortly.

[RockDoctor]

Still can't get hold of Wallace and Gromit models the right size (they'd be too fine detail for the filament printing most people use)

Well, if you've got access to an ROV and a kilometre or two of water depth (or equivalently, a pressure chamber rated to a couple of hundred bars), you could print up a model in some spongy material like polystyrene packing foam, then just expose it to uniform water pressure (not gas pressure ; really, not gas pressure!) and the polystyrene foam will collapse down about 30-fold volumetrically (3-ish fold linearly ; you'll need to experiment with your available pressure) giving you a reduced size model.
The polystyrene also acquires a much denser, more paintable surface.

Beats the hell out of scaling drawings with a pantograph.

Also works on packets of fags, as long as you enclose them in an air-filled waterproof bag before dropping them into the sea. For those who remember "sweet cigarettes", they come out looking very familiar. Totally un-smokeable though, and a great way to piss off the Directional Driller who won't go to the smoking shack to smoke.

The things you do to stave off boredom, when someone else's equipment is expensively broken.

[RockDoctor]

and some Martians I made from corn kernels and wire:

This one has been Touched By The Noodly Appendage!

[ffutures]

Still can't get hold of Wallace and Gromit models the right size (they'd be too fine detail for the filament printing most people use)

Well, if you've got access to an ROV and a kilometre or two of water depth (or equivalently, a pressure chamber rated to a couple of hundred bars), you could print up a model in some spongy material like polystyrene packing foam, then just expose it to uniform water pressure (not gas pressure ; really, not gas pressure!) and the polystyrene foam will collapse down about 30-fold volumetrically (3-ish fold linearly ; you'll need to experiment with your available pressure) giving you a reduced size model.
The polystyrene also acquires a much denser, more paintable surface.

Beats the hell out of scaling drawings with a pantograph.

Also works on packets of fags, as long as you enclose them in an air-filled waterproof bag before dropping them into the sea. For those who remember "sweet cigarettes", they come out looking very familiar. Totally un-smokeable though, and a great way to piss off the Directional Driller who won't go to the smoking shack to smoke.

The things you do to stave off boredom, when someone else's equipment is expensively broken.

Amazingly, I have somehow failed to acquire access to a suitable pressure chamber. So it goes...

I'll probably print some "cardboard heroes" style paper figures instead if I want to game with Wallace and Gromit again.

and some Martians I made from corn kernels and wire:

This one has been Touched By The Noodly Appendage!

Just so long as nothing that regards corn kernels as edible touches them I'll be happy.

[ffutures]

I really wanted some Wallace and Gromit figures to go with the rocket, but nobody actually makes any in role playing sizes. There are some larger cake decorations and 3D printed models around, but reducing the latter to 28mm scale would be very tricky, and need a high-resolution resin printer - and there are some practical problems, not least Wallace has a VERY narrow neck which would be weak as part of a model that small. It might be possible to get around this by designing the model to use a metal rod for the neck, but you would be working with tiny parts and I suspect a lot of frustration would ensue.

Eventually I decided to make myself some foldable paper figures instead, using fan-made clip art from a variety of sources that's free for non-commercial projects. I made them double sided with one side a mirror image of the other, so that if they're printed on OHP film they have a slightly 3D look. Unfortunately this doesn't photograph well due to reflections from the acetate, but I hope this gives an idea:



Characters depicted are:

Wallace
Wallace in Techno-Trousers (The Wrong Trousers)
Gromit
Piella Bakewell (A Matter of Loaf and Death)
Fluffles (A Matter of Loaf and Death)
Feathers McGraw (The Wrong Trousers)
Moon Robot (A Grand Day Out)
Shaun (A Close Shave)
Preston (A Close Shave)
Preston without skin (A Close Shave)
Wendolene Ramsbotham (A Close Shave)
Lady Tottingham (Curse of the Were-Rabbit)
Victor Quartermaine (Curse of the Were-Rabbit)

My first attempt turned out to be roughly 35mm scale printed out, and it was easy to print that out at approximately 28mm scale by simply scaling it down to 80%. For convenience I've made PDFs in both sizes, and they are on line at the URLs below

https://forgottenfutures.co.uk/album/WG-Heroes-35mm.pdf

https://forgottenfutures.co.uk/album/WG-Heroes-28mm.pdf

To make it as clear as possible, I do not own these characters, the art, or anything else here, and these are NOT for commercial distribution - they are simply a transformative fan work in a slightly unusual format.

I may still try to make figures from modelling putty etc, but they would be for my own use only since they would be a pain to make and VERY fragile. For now, the PDFs are probably a good deal more practical.

[cbr]

enjoyable hand(i)crafting and imagery

[Massively Locked]

ffutures-
Wonderful work! I luv it!

A general question to all- has anyone ever modeled W & G's ship for Oolite? While I'm generally not a fan of crossovers, this is one I'd take in a heartbeat.

[RockDoctor]

It might be possible to get around this by designing the model to use a metal rod for the neck,

I think the sculpture trade call this an "armature" - they do a lot of trial models in clay, and often do it with a wire armature to support the clay.
They - the sculptors - have also got several designs of 3-d "pantographs" for scaling their model up to the block of finest Carrera. I expect (from their 2-d versions, which I have used) that you could also use these to scale a model down.

[ffutures]

It might be possible to get around this by designing the model to use a metal rod for the neck,

I think the sculpture trade call this an "armature" - they do a lot of trial models in clay, and often do it with a wire armature to support the clay.
They - the sculptors - have also got several designs of 3-d "pantographs" for scaling their model up to the block of finest Carrera. I expect (from their 2-d versions, which I have used) that you could also use these to scale a model down.

As it happens I've been trying that over the last few days - body is done apart from some final detailing but I'm finding it very difficult to get the face right, he looks like a cross between a Harry Potter house elf and Morph at present... I'm going to have to put it aside for a while anyway, I'm editing some old game stuff at present, it'll take a few days since I'll have to do some maps and other art work as well as the text, this stuff goes back to when I was selling my RPG on floppy disks and is VERY low resolution monochrome graphics...