Hope you guys like it :)

However, my 3D printers are running 24/7 now and I'm getting ready to start actually building Wheatley. All the electronics are ordered and sorted out. Remote controlling is the last big task but that should be a major road block either.

I shot a few images today to keep you up to date on the progress :) As you can see I started with Wheatleys base and the inner shells.
The ring/circile/bucket inside is basically the main element everything attaches to. The while spherical parts are the inner shells of him. They will act as guides for the eye to move around in.

Might look like nothing special but I will make sense later on. I will do my best to keep the updates coming on a regular base from now on :)

Hope you're doing fine everyone!! :D
Mario

In the meantime I'm designing the damanged look of the glass in Photoshop. How it all comes together will be shown in the next update :)

Thanks for checking out guys! <3

You guys are awesome! :) Thanks a lot!!

Working on the model right now to hopefully present you a bigger update this week. Stay tuned!

The parts you can see on the shots are still in their raw condition so a lot of sanding is needed to transform them into one single piece :)

Unfortunately one of you (looking at you Nathan!!) suggested a great idea yesterday which I cannot get out of my head now. He asked me if the side panels of Wheatley are going to tilt open (as seen here: http://s264.photobucket.com/user/aug440/media/wings.png.html).

First of all I wasn't going to do that but it's stuck in my head now. With this movement in place there are some serious problems with the upper and lower bar rotation but I'm sure I can figure that out ;)

More detailed images on The Replica Prop Forum: http://www.therpf.com/showthread.php?t=252360

Cheers and thanks for checking out!
Mario

That gave me the inspiration to start on this very project, a completely animatronic version of Wheatley, the humorous robotic sphere you definitely know if you ever got to play one part of the Portal series by Valve.
Back when I worked on the Gravity Gun I already started drawing all kinds of sketches to give me an idea how I could tackle the project at best. Wheatley isn’t a quite difficult character to construct when it comes to his overall shape but the challenge definitely lies in working out his internal mechanics :)

I have studied Wheatley’s behavior quite a bit and came to the conclusion that a few of his moves are impossible to recreate while keeping the inside clean and not having it stuffed with mechanical parts, gimbals, gears and motors.

Luckily some awesome guys over at The Replica Prop Forum were such a great help on the overall project by providing me with detailed views of Wheatley’s model from the game which ended up in being the best blueprints I could ask for :) @Fishbowl, if you ever happen to read this: thanks a lot! :)

After weeks of thinking, trying and fooling around I came up with a mechanism which will hopefully fit perfectly inside Wheatley without compromising in variety of his movements too much.
It’s not yet done to 100% but I’m so hyped for this project so I couldn’t wait any longer to get it started. I’m sure a few things will change while working on it but basically the main stuff is done already.

What will be possible function-wise is as follows:

• Moving the eye-corpus 25° in every angle possible from its original position.
• Moving the eye-pupil 15° in every angle possible from its original position.
• Moving eye-lids independently from fully open to nearly fully closed.
• Rotating the “bucket” in Wheatleys backside around 40° to the left and right.
• Moving Wheatleys front bars on the top and bottom independently to get even more expression.
• Having a proper sound module embedded to bring Wheatley to life and add personality.
• Controlling Wheatley via a self-build remote & app.
• Voice regonition.
• Using Wheatleys “flashlight”-function as seen in-game.

As Wheatley is quite complicated to build by hand and 3D printing is a thing now I decided to have most of its parts printed! For that I bought myself a small 3D printer, the Wanhao Duplicator i3.

Starting with the outer shells I will update the progress tomorrow showing you exactly that :)
Hope you guys are excited to this project come alive.
If there are any questions, throw them at me! :)

Cheers and thanks for reading/checking out. Stay tuned for tomorrow!
Mario

Just had this delivered to me! I'm so hyped they even got to me :)

I'm currently working on my new project which will be posted tomorrow! Hope all of you are doing great! :)

And again, I joined Twitter and Tumblr! If you ever feel checking them out and/or following me, please feel free to do so as I will keep everything updated the same way :)

Twitter: https://twitter.com/thepropbox_
Tumblr: http://thepropbox.tumblr.com/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/thepropbox_
Tumblr: http://propbox.tumblr.com/

Hope you like the idea since I wanted to give you a little bit more insight since I received quite an amount of messages asking all kinds of stuff regarding the gun.

All of the illumination is done by using Adafruit Industries incredible NeoPixel led-strips and -rings. Each of the orange crystals have a strip of 18 leds embedded underneath them which are all controlled via two Arduino's (basically micro-controllers).
The barrel got a 24-led NeoPixel ring sitting in the back slowly pulsing in the frequency of the crystals. Basically every need of light in this project got tackled by using those very leds, including the gauge in the back and the three little leds sitting in the frontal arms.

Video showing it all in action will be coming soon :) Working on it already! :D If there are any questions please feel free to address them in the comments.

However I will upload some images from now on every day to give you guys an detailed look at every aspect and in every corner of this replica.

Thanks also for your incredible support although it wasn't really that Zelda related! I hope you enjoyed this build as much as I did! :)

Mario

Design by Valve

In the attached image you can take a look at the illumination once again and a few of the details I had added along the past days. For more in-depth info I'd recommend you visit my worklog on The Replica Prop Forum: http://www.therpf.com/showthread.php?t=239884 to check out even more.

Thanks a big ton for your nice comments and messages in regard to my last update, so glad that you enjoy this :)