Josh Stapleton - 00:00
What's going on, guys? I know it's been a little while, but I'm finally releasing a new video today, and I'm gonna be making the elemental stones from the Fifth Element movie. Now, these are pretty straightforward to 3D print. You can find the models online, but I thought I'd take it one step further and add fiberoptic lighting and a chassis to hold the lighting system. And then I thought I'd make these little frame things that diffuse the lights. So, yeah, wanna take a look?
Josh Stapleton - 00:25
Now these things look okay in the light. And there's two different ways that you can use them. Obviously, with the diffuser around them, they get this little star pattern, or you can just use them with the fiberoptics showing, but they really come to life when it's a bit darker in the room. By now you're probably wondering how I made them. So, yeah. Without further ado, let's get started.
Josh Stapleton - 01:02
Okay, let's get the 3D modelling out of the way first. I began by modelling the chassis that are going to hold the lights. These were made to fit snugly inside the elemental stones. I split the chassis into two halves to make printing easier and to allow the models to slot together later on, the cylindrical shape you see in the middle will be used to hold the torch. I then began plotting out all the holes for the fiber optic cables. I spent quite a while working on this to make sure that they were evenly spaced and weren't packed too densely. I then started working on a cone to pull all the fiber optic cables together inside the chassis. The Wikipedia page you're seeing is the formula I used to calculate the size of the cone. More on that later.
Josh Stapleton - 01:35
Then, after a little cleanup, it was time to send all the models over to the 3D printer. This took quite a while, I think all in all, it came to a total of just under four full days.
Josh Stapleton - 01:46
So now we've got the stones printed off, we need to remove all the support material. You can see I've already started on a couple of the pieces and I've still got a lot of work to do. It's actually kind of tricky to do this, and because I'm an idiot, I printed it with, like, really dense support material. And also my printer was kind of playing up at the time, so some of them are a little under-extruded.
Josh Stapleton - 02:26
After removing all the support material, it was time to push the top halves of the models that I designed into the top halves of the elemental stone models. Then came the very laborious task of drilling 216 two-millimetre holes in the top of all of them.
Josh Stapleton - 02:59
Now, I actually struggle with choosing the paint for this project for quite a long time. I ended up settling with this Rustoleum stone texture finish in mineral brown and plastic coat in, I think, French grey.
Josh Stapleton - 03:08
I was pretty worried about getting this wrong, so before choosing, I spoke with a few people on the NerdForge Discord, and we came up with a few ideas. I then reached out to the owner of the Etsy store, "Fever Dream Supreme", who had some really amazing elemental stone replicas. I promised him a shout-out in return for him letting me know the secret to his amazing paint jobs. And it turns out it's just a light coat of the textured finished spray paint. I was a little concerned at first because the colour that he recommended was really, really dark, but with just like, a light mist over the top. It seemed to work pretty well, and I got some really good results. So big shout out to him if you're looking to get some elemental stones, similar ones I've got, but without the lighting, of course. I'd really recommend checking out his store. They're by far some of the best ones that I've seen so far.
Josh Stapleton - 03:45
Okay, so I've done a fair few coats on these. Now I've pretty much finished one whole can of the green-grey, grey, green spray paint, whatever colour it was. Reason being is I kind of realized that I forgot to do any sanding and filling on these before painting. And I thought rather than waste all the layers that I'd already put on, I'd just try and fill it with the spray paint. It's not worked particularly well, but I mean, it's good enough for me. At this point, I think I'm relatively happy with how they're looking. There are a few seams that you can see. You may be able to spot them on this one and that one in the back there. But for the most part, they're not too bad. The next step, I've bought another can of this stuff. This is the textured stone finish, or stone texture finish, whatever you want to call it. I'm going to try and go over the top of these with this stuff now. So the first time I went over this, it gave the actual, like, this base layer a load of texture, that's worked quite well. Probably didn't need it, although I was just experimenting at the time, I guess. So now I've got the new can, we're going to spray them with this stuff and hopefully, that's going to be more or less the finished effect.
Josh Stapleton - 05:04
Okay, that's looking pretty good to me. Seems to have done a pretty damn good job of hiding the seams as well, which I'm quite happy with.
Josh Stapleton - 05:14
With all the parts now printed out, we can start work on the actual lighting element of this project. This stuff right here is fiber optic cable. It's made from HDPE, that's high-density polyethylene. And although you can buy HDPE for 3D printers like on a spool similar to this, I'm not sure whether that stuff's capable of transmitting light in the same way that the fiber optic cable does, which is why I chose to use this over the 3D printer material. This didn't come on the spool originally. I put it on the spool just for storage because I've had this a little while. What we're going to be doing is unrolling this stuff and heating it with a heat gun so that it'll kind of retain its straight shape because, at the minute, it just wants to return to the spool, and we don't want that. We want these things to basically stand up on end. In terms of length. I think we want to be going for about one and a half times the length of one of these 3D-printed elemental stones. That means we're going to have one times the height sticking out of the top and half of it... Not half of it, part of it in there.
Josh Stapleton - 06:04
Welcome back to another episode of "Cooking with Josh". The last time you joined me in my kitchen, we were ovening some Led matrix goggles. Check out the video up there. And with that shameless self-promotion out of the way, let's get started. So today we're going to be making noodles, HDPE noodles. Here's the plan. You may have seen a similar setup to this before if you've followed anything. In the 3D printer world. It's a water tray for a "Pull Struder".
Josh Stapleton - 06:26
A "Pull Struder" basically pulls, filament out of soda bottles or stuff. And I've seen a lot of these trays used or similar trays with holes going through and water running to basically cool the filament afterwards. We're going to be using just this part, pulling by hand and then I've got my little aluminium thing over here with a mark on it so we can see exactly how much we need to cut off. At this end, I have my filament holder and we've got some rubber mats down just so that we don't heat up the worktop too much, because we're going to be blowing a heat gun down in this direction while the stuff is pulled in this direction under the water, cooling off, and then we can cut it at this end.
Josh Stapleton - 07:02
Now, looking back, I probably spent far too much time doing this. The whole process was pretty slow, in all honesty. And it was just made even worse because I had to like, cut the stuff every single time that I moved it about a meter or so.
Josh Stapleton - 07:14
When I'd finally had enough of doing these things one by one, I decided a different approach was in order. I started by cutting these things all to the same length and then started running my boiling tap. And I put a pan in the bottom of the sink just to make sure that the boiling tap didn't get so hot that it cracked the sink because that has actually happened before. Anyway, started running the hot water over the fiber optic cable and this did a pretty good job of straightening out the middle parts.
Josh Stapleton - 07:37
I then held the stuff up vertically and just let the water run down it to the point where they were able to straighten themselves out. Gravity did most of the work here and it worked out pretty well all in all. I also went over them again with the cold tap whilst holding them in position just to make sure that they got like as solidified as possible.
Josh Stapleton - 07:56
Well, that worked out far better than I could have expected. Most of these have turned out pretty straight. There are a few that aren't perfect, but I think all in all, pretty good job. You're probably thinking these look a little bit long. There is a reason for that.
Josh Stapleton - 08:10
So initially I started by cutting these to the exact length that I needed, which was about half of this. Then I realized the ends that I was cutting ended up getting a little bit bent. So I think to fix that, the best thing I could advise is doing them double length like this. The middle is always going to be probably the straightest part. So if we were to cut in the middle, these would be the ends that are on show and then the potentially bent ends could be the parts that go inside where the torches live.
Josh Stapleton - 08:33
Now the next step, I want to split these into, I guess, like a third of a pile. And then with that third, we'll be cutting them into I guess, thirds. And then the other ones we're going to be cutting in half. Reason being, when I have this thing finished, I want there to be some variation in the lengths of the fiber optic cables. And I guess. This is probably the best way to do it in some kind of equal way.
Josh Stapleton - 09:02
And again, just pointing out that's the. Cut ends, I'm going to put those all together. So they're all at this end now. So we know that these are the. Straightest parts. And those are the ones that are potentially going to have bends in them.
Josh Stapleton - 09:13
So I think it's probably worth going over the lighting element of this project. We're going to be using torches. What are we actually going to be doing with this torch? I'm going to be disassembling it and I guess modifying it ever so slightly. At the minute. It's got a lens in there. You can actually disassemble these if you unscrew the top part instead of the bottom part. You can then push on the spring part in there, and that'll just push the lens and the little retainer in there, out of the front.
Josh Stapleton - 09:37
There we go. So you see we've got the lens, that's the little retaining ring, the Led there with the heatsink. And that's just like the chassis, I guess. Now we've got a few things to do. One of the main things is these lights need to be coloured. Obviously, these are white LEDs, so not coloured. What we're going to be using to colour them is these things, inside of here. We have, I believe they're called gel filters. So these things are used in videography quite a lot. I'm pretty sure they're used to change the colour of lights when you're shooting something. So like, studio lights, they would go on the front of. And as you can see, I've already cut one of them up into a circle and melted it.
Josh Stapleton - 10:17
Yeah, turns out these things get pretty hot. And I was using it behind the lens like so. Yeah, it melted within about 5 seconds. So what we're going to have to do is when we put these back together, you can notice there's a sliding mechanism in here. This basically is used to adjust the focus of the lens. What we're going to be doing is pulling this all the way to the back so that there's plenty of room between the lens and the gel thing, so that the gel doesn't heat up and melt. Another thing that we're going to be doing is inverting this little lens. So by default, these sit this way up so that the dome is pointing upwards. We don't want that, though. Reason being, if I remember from physics in GCSEs, I'm pretty sure using the dome this way, it will spread the light out like in a V shape. But if we invert it this way, we should be able to, I guess, centralize the light, and make it a lot more parallel. And now we have four different coloured torches.
Josh Stapleton - 11:37
Now, if you guys thought that straightening out these fiber optic cables was going to be the most tedious part of this project, you were very suddenly mistaken. I've now got to take one of these fiber optic cables and thread it through every single one of these little holes... Four times over. I'm not going to show a time-lapse of pushing the fiber optic cables through every single one of these, because it's going to be the exact same thing each time and it would take too long. So I'm just going to skip to what the next step is. And in this case, we're going to push them a little bit further through so I can get a decent grip on them. When I've got a grip on them on this end, we're going to be bundling them together and we've printed off some, I guess, cones. Those are going to go over the whole bundle, and then we can melt the ends of these together.
Josh Stapleton - 12:31
So this is one of the cones, this is going to fit over the head of one of the torches. The thinner end is the part that's going to bundle all of these together. And the way I found out the radius for this, you may have seen it very briefly at the beginning of the video. There's this mathematical equation. It's basically known as circle packing. And by knowing, I guess, the diameter of these circles, if we imagine them as circles or cylinders or whatever, we can basically calculate how many circles we can pack inside of a larger circle. And it will... I'll be honest, I didn't use the equation. I used an online calculator. But if you feed up all the numbers, so diameter of that, diameter, no, sorry, diameter of that and number of these, then it will give you the diameter of this circle that you need.
Josh Stapleton - 13:10
So that was actually quite a fun little equation I didn't know about. Like I said, didn't use the equation, used a calculator, but it's just good to know these kinds of things.
Josh Stapleton - 13:22
Now, with the cone on, I'm going to push this thing up a little bit. It does get a bit springy and want to remove itself, so I'm just going to keep my thumb there in the meantime. And with this thing laid on its back, I'm just going to pull on these, one by one. Until they're just disappearing behind the PLA on this cone.
Josh Stapleton - 13:52
Now for fire. And you should definitely be doing this in a well-ventilated area.
Josh Stapleton - 14:22
Now with all those ends fused together, it's just a case of assembling things. So this one is the wind one. I know that because this is the only one that has the pattern on the top of the stone. And the wind one uses an orange torch, not too sure why, but yeah, just double-check things with the orange torch. I mean, it should work fine. Looks like it does. So we can get the base there, and pop the torch into the base. The with that in the base, we should be able to put this on top. So we need the melted end to just sit right on the top of that lens, like another inch back by the looks of things. I might leave this tape on just to add a little bit of stability in there so these don't come falling apart. But to move this back. Can we push it just like that? Does not look like it.
Josh Stapleton - 15:12
This is going to be really hard, actually... Oh! Okay, I've literally just pushed it really, really hard and it seems to be doing the trick. So that's more or less flush with this top piece now. I think that's going to work ok, so, yeah, just drop this on here and the retention part should slip over the top of the torch. A little bit of persuasion, and there we go.
Josh Stapleton - 15:47
So I was like this close to calling the project done, but then I realized I could take it just one step further. So a couple of years ago, I got a gift for Christmas. It was like. Bottle with some film inside of it and some LEDs. The LEDs made the film like scatter the light in some way or sorry, the film made the LEDs scatter the light in some way, which I found really interesting at the time, but I didn't really know what to do with that... A few years passed, eventually got rid of the bottle. I think it broke, but the idea kept on ticking over in my head. And then it hit me I could make a, I guess, frame to go around the top of these and then cover it with that same film that I saw in the bottle.
Josh Stapleton - 16:27
So I did some research and I found the film. This is the stuff right here. If I open this out a little bit and shine a light through it. Don't know how well this will go on camera, but you can kind of see the light gets scattered into like a star shape.
Josh Stapleton - 16:42
After figuring out what film I needed, I went back to Fusion and printed these things. So this is a frame that we can put over the top of these things and basically contain all the lights inside of it. And we can wrap around the frame with this film. And hopefully, that's going to give us a much more interesting look than just fiber optic cables. So, yeah, you could leave the project here if you were doing it yourselves. I kind of like this look, to be honest with you. A few changes I'd maybe make are, maybe changeing the length of these a little bit more just to add a bit more variation to them. But I may end up doing that still with the film that we're going to be using.
Josh Stapleton - 17:17
So after printing the parts out, I just glued them together with some superglue. And now we're just going to cover the entire surface of these things with this light-scattering film, which I will leave linked in the description if you want to find it yourselves.
Josh Stapleton - 17:29
So just a quick tip, guys. If you're going to plan on doing this yourself, I wouldn't recommend trying to do it the same way that I've done it. I found that trying to stick this stuff to the PLA was really, really hard. I think the main issue was that the film is super glossy and I guess superglue just did not want to adhere to it in the slightest. What I'd recommend doing is getting some flat, clear plastic and attaching the film to that stuff and then using those flat sheets to then stick to the sides of the frame. It should make things a lot easier. I really, really struggle doing it this way. And you could definitely save yourself some time doing it the way that I've suggested.
Josh Stapleton - 18:00
And that's about all I've got for you today, guys. Really hope you liked the video. If you did, maybe hit the thumbs-up button. If you really liked it, consider subscribing. That definitely helped me out. You could also check out my website link below. I've got some free files there. So yeah, check those out. That's about everything. Have a good one, guys. See you later!
