Little Alice

Like many of my modified 3d printed miniatures, the first job is to modify the .stl file in Blender – creating cutouts and channels to accept the electronics and other mechanical wizardry.

Already I had an idea of what the finished model would look like – it was going to have electronics, a motor, a speaker, some LEDs, would need space for a battery or power supply….. all stuff that needed to be hidden in a base, somehow.

So I needed to stop the mechanics of how it all worked from being visible to the viewer. Which meant “filling in” between the legs of the armchair

I then took an unusual delight in chopping off the head of the evil doll (I’d already decided that the doll was evil, so felt vaguely relieved in decapitating it!) and placed a thin cylinder through the body of the doll and the armchair.

A quick boolean operation, and I had a channel for a axle to fit

Rather than simply glue the doll’s head onto the end of a rod, to enable it to rotate, I thought we’d really try to push the boat out on this one – and created a void inside the head to take a tiny LED, in order to make the eyes light up.

I figured that if it didn’t work out, I could always just fill the head with glue and stick it onto a small rod anyway and wouldn’t be any worse off for it. But if it worked…. light up laser eyes!

I created “supported” versions of the .stl files and dropped then onto my AnyCubic Photon printer. Now it was just a matter of waiting the four hours or so for the pieces to print, and I’d be able to tell if this idea was going to work or not!