I pride myself on being self taught, and sometimes to aleviate boredom, I try to find projects to both pique my curiosity and fulfill a dream of having a item I never thought I’d have.
I built an 1:1 R2 that cost a little over $8,000, mostly because he’s all metal and that’s expensive.
but my latest crazy experiment is building a pinball machine from scratch, having NEVER seen one from the inside before. it’s just as expensive as R2 and taking just as long, but amazingly it’s nearing completion. this is it’s first power on and amazingly, no smoke!
what are your ‘crazy’ passion projects?
I don’t really have that, unfortunately. If I had the space to do it, I’d experiment with building my own telescope. I even found instructions online for making my own Dobsonian telescope, but I have no space to do it.
I have written a couple of novels, but honestly, the craziest thing I’ve done is get my Ph.D. That took me a full five years, no end of stress and I can’t remember how much it cost me. But I do have it.
I have dreamed of building my own physical, unique pinball machine. However, the cost and time and space prohibit me, so I may scratch the itch with Visual Pinball and make something virtual instead.
I’ve also dreamed of coding my own RPG, which I have started. I’ll be done in about… 35 years, probably. Maybe 40.
Visual Pinball is fun to try, but the problem I have with it is that there seems to be no rhyme or reason. it takes ALOT of patience to find what works where and with what program. and VERY easy to get distracted when stuff DOESN’T want to work.
that being said, it’s possible to get it working with a little persistance… and there are companies out there that sell Virtual pinball cabs ready to go and will even put on custom art for you.
i’d recommend giving it a shot as it was a fun project :).
What I’d LOVE to do, is create a custom video game with my CGI models. but I have ZERO coding skills… sadly.
Building a virtual pinball table is a project I have had on the backburner. The only obstacle right now is where it’d live once complete; the other obstacle was in wanting to build the cabinet from scratch but I’ve since resigned to probably acquiring/gutting a broken table to speed things along.
One thing I’ve always wanted to do is get into T-shirt making. The space constraint hit this one as well (I wanted to screen everything myself, by hand). A print shop I work with for some other things just got into churning out shirts, so I did a test run recently on a throwaway illustration. The end result was fine – for the test, they failed but it told me a lot about the process they’re using and where their limits are, and I could see running batches through them if I decide to move forward with something in the future.
A friend and I designed a board game, kinda. Technically, it’s still in the playtest phase but, honestly, this project’s probably gonna die.
Oh wow that’s impressive… There are so many build projects I’d love to do but limited by time, money and space… my art studio is also my bedroom but I can and do take it out to the balcony for painting, drilling, dremeling etc… so if I had space to store materials and completed projects I’d build a lot more.
My annual big project is my MST3K Tricycle of Love parade contraption for the Intergalactic Krewe of Chewbacchus.
I dabble in pretty much everything you can do on a computer. I foolishly volunteered my talents to help a work buddy make music videos for his act. He bought a greenscreen, and I’ve now completed one video - below the standard I was hoping for, but he seems thrilled - with motion-tracked footage greenscreened into a virtual set.
That’s the second video I started, and it’s much less ambitious than the first, which is dragging on. I scanned his head and then, to my everlasting regret, wrote a bunch of terrible custom facial animation code. Nothing ever looks quite right, and it’s a bunch of work to animate every line of the song. I’m considering doing mocap of myself singing the song and mapping it to his face, because we aren’t often in the same area.
But I do have it.