Baphomet Portal

thingiverse

Well, now that I have found out about the scad "surface" primitive, the sky is the limit. This project is intended to be a prop for Paizo's "Wrath of the Righteous" campaign. In this campaign one of the main antagonists is the demon lord Bephomet, Lord of the Ivory Labyrinth. This will be a complicated little project, but eminently do-able now that I can 3d-print. The baphomet sign will be printed in clear plastic (mirrored so that it's all double sided) and supported between a pair of infinity mirrors. At each point of the star I will mount an Adafruit Neopixel, which will be driven by an arduino - I'll make the colour sort of slowly cycling red/orange. Additionally, I'd like to have a couple of really small LEDs at the eyes, and I'd like to etch a labryinth motif into the polycarbonate infinity mirrors, which I will illuminate in white (maybe a little blue) for colour contrast. The whole thing will be built - say - four inches across. 20ft at D&D scale. We use Dwarven Forge tiles, so the base should be compatible. I might have it "up" a bit so as to have more room in the base for batteries and the arduino. For bonus points, I might be able to make it controllable via bluetooth: colour, speed, flash the eyes sinisterly. When it's done and we have finally defeated Baphomet and Deskari and saved Golarion from the hordes of the Abyss - or then again, perhaps not - I'll sell the thing on Etsy. 17-Dec Very happy with the holder. Holds the neopixels against the sprues at the end of the Baphomet nice and snug. Printed off with no support, so support for the thin part of the ring is built into the design - it printed without fuss and broke away perfectly. 19-Dec Redid the Baphomet symbol completly. I found a balck-and-white image on the web with just the Paizo-style logo - wit the weird flamy headstalk. Quite a bit of faffing about with several editing programs: gimp, meshmixer, meshlab. In gimp, I made the black surround a mask and blurred the central white area with the surrounding black. This gave be a contoured heightmap with a crisp edge. The forehed and nose are a flat area, so I tried contouring them with meshmixer. But every time, as soon as I touched the STL, OpenScad couldn't read it anymore. Something to so with triangles. In the end, I just used the surface() primitive and got a result, flat forehead and all. Printed with Slic3r. Rectangular fill, coincentric top layer, no bottom layer. Clear PLA. If you go with coincentric fill, which you thing would be good, what happens is that the ring gets all thready and pulls apart. I think I shall have to extend the sprues, to a) get the holder away from the logo and b) make room for the horns. Quite a lot of light leaking, which doesn't look cool. Perhaps if I extend the sprues and wrap some black electrical tape around them. Some sort of cap for the gap in the open side of the sprue holder bit might be the go, too. But it's getting to a point where the holder and the central moulding is good enough. I shall have to start thinking about hijacking some of the OpenForge pieces to make the body of the portal. The peice should have a maze there, as Baphomet in Pathfinder is "lord of the ivory labryinth". 27-Dec I have built a pair of modules to allow the building of openforge-sized walls and floors, which can of course be combined into corners and whatnot. Most notably, these modules allow you to pass in wall and floor textures as submodules. I have not had much luck putting the maze logo on the polycarbonate - printing kinda works, but is very fiddly. What I need is a CNC machine, which I don't have. So I will settle for printing a maze logo into the frame and its surrounding tiles. The logo will be hideously complicated, so I'll develop it using just a shape for the logo, then put in the labyrinth .stl later. 01-Jan Well, problems, problems. What I want is to do a union of a background of bones (2mm) and a foreground of a labyrinth (3.7mm). But these things just won't union properly. The stls are too complicated or something. I have abandoned using 'surface' on the labyrinth logo, instead just writing some scad to build it. I might try 'surface'-ing the bones at much lower res. 05-Feb Well, well, well! Turns out that Baphomet's "Ivory Labyrinth" is ivory because it's made out of bone! I have added a slight modification to the openforge module - a chamfer from the "lower floor" texture to the "upper floor" texture. Improves it a great deal, I think, although it does add more complexity. I may have to rethink things a bit - the module will not behave well when you attempt to make a textured corner. I have a "floor inset", but I may need a "wall inset". And my Lord don't these things take a while to render!