DIY Arcane Hexcore: 3d printed League of Legends cosplay prop actually works like a Rubik’s Cube! 🔮

Josh Stapleton - 00:00

What's going on guys, it's been a while, right? I hope you're excited for a new video today, because it's probably about time uploaded one. Now if you're wondering what I'm gonna be doing today, it's gonna be a prop from a TV series. And that TV series is going to be Arcane. I really enjoyed watching this series. And there were a ton of cool things in it that I would have liked to make. But one of the things that was really exciting for me was the Hexcore. Now, this is basically a magical stone that sits inside of a load of runes. And when you align the runes correctly, it creates magic. In the TV series, this thing looks and functions very similarly to a Rubik's cube. And that got me thinking, I like Rubik's Cubes, I like Arcane, why not mix the two together. So I created this thing. Now, this looks exactly like the Hexcore from Arcane. And I'm pretty proud of how it's turned out. Now, the very key component of this is it actually functions like the Hexcore from Arcane too every single face twists exactly like it does in the TV show. And I gotta say, I'm incredibly impressed with the results, I feel like I've outdone myself this time. The mechanism, this thing is quite complicated. And it took me quite a while to get it perfect. So in this video, I'm going to do a little bit of a different format, it's going to start out with some CAD and CAM kind of stuff, going into Fusion and doing a little bit of a breakdown of how something like this was even designed. Now, if you're not too interested in CAD and CAM, not many people are, you can skip ahead, I'll put some timestamps down below. And yeah, you can see where you're gonna go from there. Now one final thing, before we get started, I want to give a big shout out to Martin Stanger, who was the first person to buy me a coffee through my website. Thanks very much for that, that money has gone towards helping with this channel and if you guys want to support the channel too, you can do that down below, you'll see the website down there. With that shameless self promotion out of the way, let's get started.

Josh Stapleton - 01:32

I thought I'd do things a little bit differently today and give a bit of an overview of what I'm actually doing on Fusion, I'm not going to show everything that I'm doing but I'll probably stop at some of the more notable points and explain what's actually going on. The first thing I'm going to do is make one of the pyramid shapes.

Josh Stapleton - 01:53

So that's the first bit out of the way, it took me a little while to get there. Basically what I did was create a pyramid shape on two faces of the square, and then extrude those out. And I also made like a square on top there, and extrude that down. I think the next thing to do would be make some runes to go on the faces of these.

Josh Stapleton - 02:12

Okay, and that's our runes. So if you're wondering how I got those, basic breakdown is I got an image online, then put it into Illustrator, put the contrast really, really high up, did a color select, which then allowed me to select just the runes and the background. Created a new blank layer, did a black fill on that layer, which gave me just a black outline of what the runes look like. Exported that as a PNG and then put that into Illustrator and did image trace, and image trace just gives me vectorized versions of the black tayer that I had.

Josh Stapleton - 02:39

That took a little bit longer than expected. But basically what I've just done there is align all the runde up with the permanent shapes. Now we can save these as SVGs and import them in to fusion and use them to extrude out those runes on the actual pyramids.

Josh Stapleton - 03:18

Few issues there. For some reason, whenever I export from Illustrator as an SVG and pull it into Fusion, it scales it down by like 1.33 recurring. If someone knows how to fix that, please let me know in the comments. That would be really helpful. But yeah, we've got the runes put on the faces of the pyramids now and the next thing will be to extrude those runes out through the bottom.

Josh Stapleton - 03:42

I know there are a lot more decorative pieces on here, I'm going to ignore those just for the time being because I want to make sure that this is all gonna work first and do like a really simple test piece. Then when that's done, I can work on some of the finer details for the final piece, the internal cubes that we're gonna be using, I'm gonna have some magnets and stuff in them. I think it's probably best that we work on that for now.

Josh Stapleton - 04:01

Hey guys, post production Josh here. And I'll be honest with you, this is about the point where I started going off on a tangent with trigonometry and geometry, no pun intended, by the way. Anyway, I stopped talking to the camera too much during this part and it didn't really make for very good viewing. So I'm just going to explain roughly what was going on. I basically put together a really simple Rubik's cube using loads of different cubes. They would have been connected by magnets and the magnets would have been pretty much the only thing holding the pieces together. Now this worked in theory, and I did print out a few test pieces and put them together and yeah, it worked okay but I wasn't really blown away by it. The magnets didn't seem to have quite enough strength to hold things together properly. And whilst it was okay, I thought I could do better. So I ended up redesigning the entire mechanism for the cube. I didn't end up recording this process because again, I was kind of winging it and didn't entirely know what direction it was going to take. I took a lot of inspiration from how actual Rubik's Cubes are made. And while the mechanism is fairly similar, it's also got very distinct differences. I've also got to give a big shout out to Makers Muse, and if you're watching me you've probably already heard of him. He did a few videos a while back where he does on his own Rubik's cubes and his own mechanism for those Rubik's cubes, and I took a lot of inspiration from him. He also went as far as to create some templates that you can lay over an existing shape and cut out the internal mechanism of a Rubik's cube, which I thought was a really cool idea. And if I have more time for this, I'd probably give that a go myself. With that said, I didn't use one of these templates myself, I ended up designing the mechanism from scratch, and I'm really proud of the results. And you should be able to see roughly how things work as we move forward. Anyway, back to the video.

Josh Stapleton - 05:28

Okay, this thing looks incredible. I mean, look at that, I'm actually seriously impressed with myself here. This is probably one of the most complicated looking things that I've ever designed on fusion. I say complicated looking, I have designing complicateder... More complicated.

Josh Stapleton - 05:46

So finally got these things off the printer and I gotta say, this is doing wonders for my OCD. These are the center caps. They're the ones that are gonna have like the bolts going through them, we've then got the corner pieces, which are here. Now these are kind of tricky to print. Mainly because there's a sphere like being built up. You can kinda see just in like the gap there, there's some deformity to the sphere. I don't think that's gonna be too big of an issue, because it's not gonna like collide with anything whilst it's all moving about. We've got the edge pieces, which are these ones here, these have come out really well. We've got the core here, that's looking pretty good. We've got the tiles, they look fine. That's the runes for the caps, and I'm really impressed with these. They're not the greatest quality, you can see like there's some stringing and small issues there but I think overall, these things look absolutely brilliant.

Josh Stapleton - 06:35

So, we need to add these magnets and all the holes, that's going to be fairly complicated, matching up all the polarities. Or at least I thought so at first, then I realised there's a bit of tricks that you can do to do this. So if we start with all the corner pieces, we can put these in one by one, all in the same orientation and then if we do that for every single one of these things, then we just have to take these later, put a magnet in there and make sure they match up, that's gonna make it much easier to put this thing together. After that, we'll have to deal with these center pieces here. I think this was going to be a fairly straightforward way to get them all in there correctly.

Josh Stapleton - 07:33

So now we've got to put the magnets in these two opposing pieces. This is the center and this is an edge and these shouldn't really ever interact with any other magnets on the side of this one, but they may interact with the magnets on the corner pieces. That's because when you, when you have the cube together, the corner piece is gonna be up here like so, it could turn like so and if these magnets come into contact with each other, they'll end up snapping and we don't necessarily want that. So I want these ones to oppose these magnets. To do that, obviously, we can check the orientation by just snapping that onto here, we know that that would be the attracting orientation. So if I take this off and flip it around, that's going to be the repelling orientation and without messing up the orientation of that stack there, I'm going to put a bit of glue into the first hole on this and that's going to be a reference piece.

Josh Stapleton - 08:42

Now the last part to do is we can take one of these centerpieces and we need to match those magnets up with magnets that go in these holes on the edge pieces.

Josh Stapleton - 08:51

I think technically, you would be able to use this as is. It might not be the strongest Rubik's Cube going, but since everything would hold together with magnets you could technically get away with using this without core in it. Ahhh this is actually incredibly satisfying. Wow! Okay, very nice. Does it turn? It does! The opposing magnets actually seem to be doing quite a good job of keeping it moving. So next step - we can literally just take it like that and drop the core into the middle. Wow, that looks great. And now take the bolts and thread those in from each side.

Josh Stapleton - 10:08

I'm actually dead happy with this, this is spinning way better than I could have expected it would. So next step is to actually get these parts on here. But before that, I need to paint them all.

Josh Stapleton - 10:18

Now I spent quite a while figuring out how I was going to paint these things and I thought about just using like a regular paintbrush for a while, but that seemed quite finicky and I don't really think I have the accuracy to do something like that. What I ended up coming up with in the end was these things... What do they call this thing? They're calling a paint marker pen - extra fine point. I mean, it's just full of paint and yeah, it floods the stuff out when you're drawing with it. This seemed like a really great idea, and pretty cheap as well. So this is what we're going to be using.

Josh Stapleton - 11:03

While the pen is quite accurate, there are a few areas where the paint has like, seeped through some of the layer lines and to clean that up, I'm going to be using a Q-tip and just some isopropyl alcohol.

Josh Stapleton - 11:17

After painting, I've made a quick change. So if you take a look at this, this is one of the existing center pieces you can see it's got the magnets around the side and nothing really to secure one of the pyramids on the top. I mean, I've got this cutout and one of the pyramids does have like a circle thing that can push in, but it's loose and I don't know, it just didn't seem ideal to me, I've kind of saw myself having to use superglue and that would lose me access to the screws that go through this thing. To fix that I've actually reprinted these with another hole for a magnet there and reprinted the pyramids as well with a matching one. So now we can put magnets on both of them. And these will snap together and stay in place but then also be removable when I need them to be removable. We're just going to glue these up now.

Josh Stapleton - 11:55

They're a bit tighter. Okay, these top ones are quite tight. I'll try and make this a little bit bigger for the 3d printed files. If you guys ever decide to make one of these, you may just have to use a bit of pressure if I end up forgetting to do that though. And the center piece.

Josh Stapleton - 11:55

That works pretty well, the magnets aren't crazy strong, but it's just enough to keep it on there and not be too loose. Not gonna go too crazy with this thing, but it's good enough for me. And it can be removed easy enough as well.

Josh Stapleton - 12:43

Okay, spent a little while taking the cube apart and putting back together with the new center pieces inside. There we go and, they could be better. Maybe I'll modify the model so it can accept two magnets instead of just one, but I'm happy enough with this for the time being. Next step is attaching these pieces. So these ones aren't going to need to come off, I'm just going to use super glue to put those in place.

Josh Stapleton - 13:15

And now with as many of those pyramids added as I can add at the minute, it's time to add some of these pieces. So they're the little triangle bits and going to sit on each of the diagonal sections. Okay, so camera died halfway through that, but you can see I've got the triangle tiles on now, that means it's time to add on some of these pyramid pieces. Now, these are probably going to be one of the more tricky pieces just because the tolerances aren't crazy tight. I'm thinking probably just a dab of glue on the very top of the pyramid, and then just slot these things on top like so. Hopefully that's gonna be enough.

Josh Stapleton - 14:12

And with those final pieces glued together, that's everything done. I'm really impressed with this thing. I mean, just look at it! It actually functions just like it does in the TV show and I couldn't be happier. Now one thing I considered for a while is adding color to all the different runes on here. That way you could have different faces on the Hexcore and be able to solve it just like a real Rubik's Cube. I decided against that in the end though, because I wanted this to look exactly like it does in the TV show. But you could very easily do that with some paint if you want it to. It'd just be a case of painting each individual face. One thing to bear in mind is that instead of having six sides, like a traditional Rubik's cube, this thing has an additional eight sides because of all the corners... Or lack of corners, I guess. That means you'll have to come up with some additional colors to use on these corners, maybe different shades of pink, blue, green and yellow to match the TV show? I don't know just a thought.

Josh Stapleton - 14:57

Anyway guys, I really hope you've enjoyed the video today and I can't wait to see you in the next one!