The Diorama Lives

It’s been all quiet on the diorama front for the last couple of months, but I’ll failover to the perennial “I’ve been busy!” excuse.

In fact, I would have made much more progress on the forthcoming They Live cityscape diorama, but my obsession with fixing a G07 chassis threw off my timeline. The life of an arcade reclaimer is always intense. Anyway, the panelled “living room”, showing off various games from various consoles, has been a really good stopgap diorama. I still haven’t made progress on playing the games from the other side of the window, but what is it that Luther said?

bav-o-rama, Now with More Panelling!

In fact, I took a short video of the current status of the bav-o-rama just the other day when my niece asked what it looks like. I have the Atari 7800 with Pole Position II to appease the European penchant for F1 racing.

But behind this tranquil scene of an 80s media center, the bones of the next diorama are being printed. At the end of last year I picked up a Bambu Lab A1 Mini 3D printer for creating Reclaim swag.

As we got deeper into planning the They Live diorama, the idea of printing the buildings and cars for the cityscape emerged. My partner in crime on this one, Mattia, actually has some 3D design chops and cares about things like perspective and making it seem convincing. So he mapped out the diorama and worked through how we will define the angles based on a single point of perspective that extends beyond the physical area of the diorama.

The diorama perspective for They Live as mapped by Mattia

Beyond that, he started filling in the design with various buildings and posters to create something of a hybrid between a scene from the film and a movie-poster collage.

Mattia’s concept art for the diorama

It’s really fun. What’s been the most fun, however, is that he started creating designs for the various buildings (there are six in all) that we will 3D print.

A design for one of the skyscrapers in the They Live diorama

We (royal we, it’s all Mattia) had to break the buildings up into pieces that fit the platform, and after that the 3D printer has been hard at work creating the tallest of the six buildings.

Bambu Lab A1 Mini hard at work

Mattia had to split it in half and then into thirds so each piece would fit cleanly on the printing platform.

First print for the They Live diorama

It was fun watching the puzzle come together as each piece printed. As of right now, it takes anywhere from 6–9 hours per print, so patience is a virtue.

First half of the building stacked like Legos

Yesterday, the last piece for this building finished. You can see in the image below (it’s laying on its side) how Mattia accounted for the perspective, and the ground will be at an angle, similar to The Shining diorama. The prints definitely make it feel like the most professional bav-o-rama yet.

The building on its side gives you a good sense of the angle it will use to create perspective

Unfortunately, the last 10% of the final print didn’t finish, most likely due to issues with the filament getting stuck. On the upside, its unfinished nature gives you a good look at the internal cross-hatch design. I’m impressed with how solid each piece came out.

A look at the cross-hatch pattern inside each plastic piece

Now that we have the first building all but done and have figured out how we want to connect the building pieces (most likely grey silicone), we can start thinking about peripherals like the cars, billboards, satellite dish, etc.

A vertical look at the first and tallest of the printed buildings

At this point, it’s just a matter of printing the rest of the building pieces, which could take a couple of weeks. In the meantime, it might be time to turn to designing the various posters, getting the base cut out, and starting to make this dream a reality.

Screenshot of Bambu Studio with the final piece of the first building re-printing