Starcraft II Marine

[JonnyMac]

One of the fun projects I did recently was build a 12-channel lighting controller for Hollywood FX legend, Steve Wang.  

The controller is for a life-size Starcraft II marine that Steve was commissioned by Blizzard to build.  It uses a Propeller chip (what we're putting in the HC-8) which allowed me to do really cool things. There is one channel that "assists" the video flicker on the face. There are four channels on the chest plate; they fade up and "stutter" in unison (like an old, fluorescent lamp) but each has a random dither value to give them their own life; once full light they shimmer (again, each with an independent dither value). Finally, there are two, high-brightness RGB LED modules on the back for engine exhaust ports.  The "engines" have a bit of random "stutter" the output to provide a bit of visual rumble.

Here's the promotional artwork:




And here's Steve and me in his shop with the real deal:




Close-ups that don't do it justice (though they do show how incredibly detailed this prop is), but it's all I have at the moment:







And for those of you wondering about "movie quality" props -- well, this is it, even if this won't appear on the big screen.  Steve is a master, and has a team of gifted artists that work with him.  "Movie quality" is not just a phrase, it's a standard of work that takes real effort to achieve.

[livinlowe]

This is freeking cool on soooo many levels! Bought the game and love it. Is there anyway we could see a video of it in action?

You the man - again - Jon!!

:D

[JonnyMac]

I only have photos from when we finished a couple weeks ago and Steve said I couldn't post until this weekend when BizzCon opened and it went on display.  Hopefully someone at the event will post video on YouTube that we can link to.

The cool thing is that the HC-8 will let EFX-TEK customers do the kinds of lighting control I did for Steve on this project.  I even tossed in a remote control to activate/deactivate each of the three lighting sections though he didn't use that for the display.  The Propeller makes doing things like this fairly straightforward.

[JonnyMac]

I'm still hoping to find photos and videos from the event.  While searching, I did stumble across this which is the first time I worked with Steve.

-- http://www.myspace.com/stevewangfx/photos/albums/album/2197471?page=1

There are six pages of photos that show how much work goes into a Hollywood (real "movie quality") prop.  One one of the pages you'll see a Prop-SX connected to the eyes.  It turned out the Prop-SX was overkill but I used it to give me the programming flexibility I needed in case Steve decided to do something very complex.