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Showing posts from August, 2011

Potato GLaDOS (from Portal 2)

I haven't done a proper project in a long while, and this past weekend it finally got to me. So I decided to try my hand making a prop/replica of the tuberous AI from Portal 2. I give you Potato GLaDOS : Most of it was sculpted from Sculpey and painted with acrylics. The audio comes from an old mp3 player I had lying around. The electronics consist of a LM386 audio amplifier, speaker, LEDs and a simple circuit to pulse the LEDs with the audio.  Here's a long winded explanation breakdown of how it was made . There's a boat-load of build pictures out on Flickr. The audio was pulled from here and spliced together in Audacity . Please support the developers and artists of these amazing games: Purchase Portal 2! And remember: "This. Sentence. Is. FALSE".

Potato GLaDOS Build Notes

I started with pictures and models from the tubes. The image below is a particularly good example showing both sides. Model Reconstructed by ~ Zareste I went to the grocery store and found some models that I could hire for pennies an hour. I used Sculpey for the potato and GLaDOS, but I didn't want to bake it for four million years, and I needed a hollow inside for all the electronics so I made a potato-ish shape with aluminum foil. Keeping the outer layer of aluminum foil as smooth as possible will help when the foil is pulled out of the baked Sculpey. As you might expect potatoes are particularly easy to sculpt. Imperfections are the main feature...trying to keep fingerprints and fingernail marks out of the clay is the most difficult part of it. I don't have a picture, but the large hole (through which electronics are inserted) was cut out of the clay before it was baked. Scupley isn't too brittle after baking, but I didn't want to take a chanc...