Knight Rider KITT diorama

At first glance, the first print looked really encouraging. But only when you look closely do you realise it’s not quite right.

For a start, you can see that one of the seats has only partially printed. And all those little stubs around it? They’re supposed to be supports holding the dashboard up!

I thought I’d be a bit “clever” with the chassis and print it flat to the plate (instead of the usual 45 degree angle). It meant far fewer supports were needed – but also that the reduced overall height means a much quicker printing time (about 2hrs compared to the typical 4hrs+)

But it also turns out that relying on auto-supports for the car top (even though this part was angled at about 45 degrees) wasn’t the best idea – there are a couple of areas that really needed a little more support, to stop them deforming

And even though it was properly supported, this corner of the windscreen buckled  as I was being a little carefree when removing the supports – the lack of material holding the roof made this section very soft and pliable, straight off the build plate.

So, in Blender, I combined a few of the separate parts together, to give the roof some more structural strength overall. While I was in there, I noticed something I’d missed, even when inspecting the printed model: on the bonnet, there is only one raised shape, on the drivers side!

I did some quick boolean operations, and a bit of copying-and-pasting to make the bonnet look more symmetrical.

It was at this stage, I decided to do a little more posing of the car. Instead of a boring, static car (albeit with flashing lights in the front grill) I thought it’d look a little more dynamic with the drivers’ side door open – leaving us a nice little space for our Michael Knight model to fit!

Heading over to Hero Forge (https://www.heroforge.com) I was really impressed with the quality and range of miniatures you can make with even the simplest of tweaks.

It took me a while to get my Michael Knight figure just right – but as soon as I found out how to change the hairstyles and discovered the “afro” setting, I reckon I had him!

I posed Michael with his arm in the air – when placed on the diorama, he’d appear to be lazily leaning against KITT’s roof. The slightly self-satisfied smirk (character faces can be given a range of expressions by simply moving a few sliders) just about finished the mini.