Star Wars: After The Fall Of The Empire. AT-ST Diorama. #starwars #scalemodel #diorama #scalemodelkit #scalemodeling

Welcome to the Scale Model Geek and this week I cut up some plastic, I chop off some heads and I paint some teeny weeny little people. I bought this Star Wars Return of the Jedi AT-ST kit way back in 1992 and it's a snap together kit so no glues are required which means it's perfect for my skill level. Now I've had this idea for many many months now where I want to do actually a series of dioramas based on scenes that what would have happened after the fall of the Empire. Now since I bought this kit 30 years ago a lot of the bits and pieces inside no longer apply like this fan club. Oh well missed out on that one. Now having a look at this kit today it really is an atrocious kit. The molding on it is just really bulky and compared to something like the Bandai kit that's been released these days which is far superior in quality and fit this is really really pretty atrocious and as you can see on the inside of those legs they're hollow and total lack of detail there so that's something I'm going to have to fix up. Now I'm gluing the hatch down which turns out to be a bit of a mistake because later on I do decide to customize the whole top of that and you can see the joints are really really bad. Now the story behind this series of dioramas I plan to do is once the war was over basically the retired troopers they went out and repurposed all the vehicles to suit their own enterprises. The troopers became mercenaries and the vehicles became a mishmash of whatever they could find. Now here are the basic pieces laid out and it there it is all completed finish actually I'm kidding this is one I actually built back in 92 93 and it was pretty straightforward in a bit of a bush type setting but this time around I'm actually planning to do the AT-ST Walker in a desert scene. So let's get stuck into the basics I need to actually fill up all the joints a bit of sanding as well and filing and there was a fair bit of filling to do like I said because it is a snap kit so the joints are pretty rotten and I'm going to fill in this leg area and I'm only going to do one side because the other side's not really noticeable and I'm just going to use some plastic card for this so I'll grab some really thin plastic card marked it out roughly to where I need it and because it's so thin all I did was just cut it out with a pair of scissors glued it into place and once that was all dry I trimmed it and sanded to shape. Now after the horrific loss that they suffered on the planet of Endor by a whole bunch of little baby teddy bears they've kind of refitted these AT-ST walks with some extra plating on the sides because they kind of got squashed between trees so all I'm doing is cutting some plastic card to size and then heating it up with a heat gun and shaping it to the actual hull and a bit of super glue to keep it into place. Now I just randomly cover the whole hull with that and all I did was just cut out some random pieces and basically to cover as much of the sides as I could. Ages ago I put together these 3D files of nuts and bolts and I've got them in various sizes so anytime I need them I just print them out and I've got literally hundreds and hundreds of them sitting in a little box and because I've got these set up as little mushrooms I can just snap them off the base as needed and I'm just going to apply them to the corners of those panels with a bit of super glue and there we go looks really good really happy with that look. Now this turrent top I actually found on Thingiverse and I just printed it to scale to suit the AT-ST which is 1 54th scale now this is where I should have you know thought ahead a bit better so I need to rip off that hatch and then scrape as much of the detail as I could off and a bit of sanding as well and back to the old super glue once again and in this instance it was a lot easier for me to actually use resin as a filler harder with the UV torch than it was to actually use some putty and it's time to assemble all the bits and pieces that I prepared earlier and of course we've got to glue everything in place even though it's a snap together kit and the chicken walker is actually looking really good now I also want to upgrade the weapons systems on there because the ones that actually came with the AT-ST were pretty shocking just don't like the look of them and I don't know what they are they look like some sort of missiles or something so what I ended up doing was printing up some new ones that I got once again off Thingiverse and when I print them up I usually print up a whole bunch of them so I've got some in storage to attach the weapons to the hull I designed these ball plates and they're basically a ball and a rectangle and that's all it is and I use the piece of software called Blender the advantage of using these ball joints is I don't actually have to worry about pivot joints or anything I can just stick the balls on the side there and directly stick the guns to the I personally thought it was pretty clever I thought it was a really simple solution to a problem let me know in the comments what you think of it I won't actually glue the blasters to the pivots until the whole thing's been painted up now I did run into a slight problem I needed to grind out a section in right in the middle because it didn't quite sit properly and look at that perfect joint and they just blew tacked into place until the whole thing is ready to be painted off camera I undercoated it and then gave it a coat of this light gray from Vallejo now I'm going to use some of this dark Prussian blue on a technique that I just saw on a video from Fine Scale Modeler and this technique is called dot filtering and as you can see it's just a matter of putting a whole bunch of dots on the actual hull and then watering it down and I'm just adding some of this tan yellow just to add a bit more interest to the discoloration in the hull it does look a bit heavy at the moment but once it dries it does become lighter now I'm using this wood grain in IDF blue to add a bit more discoloration with a combination of all these colors you can see I'm starting to get some really nice tones through the plating and that's what it looks like when it's all dry and a quick temporary assembly just to give me an idea what the color scheme is looking like I'm using this white gray and the light gray and I'm combining those two to create the colors for the dry brushing and I'm just slightly hitting the raised areas of the model and this really brings out all the detail now the base color of this is obviously black I'm going to hit that with a bit of gunmetal from Ammo and they come up great happy with those ones and now with a bit of super glue gluing them into place I'm just checking my alignment make sure they're all nice and straight now I'm just adding a bit more weathering with this oxide rust and a quick spritz of water over the whole hull and this just makes the rust flow a little bit easier and just hitting some of the edges making sure it runs thinly through some of the crevices and now it looks like it's got a bit of a history on the battlefield now to bring out some more detail I'm using this panel line accent color from Tamiya and I'm letting that run through all the recesses as well you can see it's really starting to pop some more of the detail out it's subtle but it does add to the overall effect the AT-ST is really starting to get a bit of character to it now onto the base I'm using my usual picture frames that I do and for the terrain I'm using a combination of grout sand water and some PVA glue first I give it a bit of a spread out and then stipple it with a brush just to give me that texture now I'm just placing the AT-ST walker onto the surface just to get the imprints from his feet his little tootsies now I'm just using some kitty litter here just to add a bit more interest with some rocks laying around of course we can't leave a plane like that so we do need to give it a bit of a paint job magic now I did use a combination of three different colors for this particular spray job and I just used my airbrush to cover the actual base and the combination of colors I used were this sand the earth yellow and the barbarian flesh and to bring out more detail I used this light sand from Ammo to dry brush the and the combination of those four colors really gave it some life there it is now I wasn't going to put any vegetation on this particular diorama because I really wanted to give it the feel of desolation and to glue the AT-ST down I'm using this five minute araldite hey if you're enjoying this video please subscribe to the channel and hit the like button for me with the AT-ST all glued into place I think it does need some figures just to give us some scale I found a number of figures I could use as mercenaries of Thingiverse and I also bought some trooper figures from CG trader which I'll link in the description now because these troopers have now become mercenaries I decided to modify their heads the trooper I bought from CG trader and the head I actually found on Thingiverse now I'm going to remove the head and then replace with uh well if you look very very closely it's actually the head of Rami Malek and if you don't know who Rami Malek is he's the dude that played Freddie Mercury in Bohemia Rhapsody and also Elliot in Mr Robot so I've got a famous actor in my diorama I'm far from an expert on using this piece of software called blender I just know enough of the tools to actually get me by so if I need to create some basic shapes or to remove bits and pieces from a 3d model I can but if you ask me to create a figure well I'm not there yet so using a an effect called boolean I basically remove the original head from the trooper and all I'm doing just moving the cube around which I created and deleting portions of the figure and once I'm happy with that I also need to remove the shoulders of Elliot or rather Rami or Rami and then slide him into the position that I need him to be adjusting the size to suit and once I'm happy with that one thing I also need to do is fix up the collar and I use just a simple little cylinder and adjust that to get to the right shape and that gives me a really cool collar and I just need to hollow it out as well and there it is and once I was happy with all that I exported the figure out as an st file to chitterbox which is the 3d slicing software and that's the size of them now I've already uh undercoated and gave them some zenithal highlighting and I seriously these are the smallest figures I've ever painted in my life for the base flesh colors I'm using combination of the brown sand the live flesh and some glaze medium to thin it all out and for various tones I'm adding some of this burnt red and also some of this off white now at 1 54th scale these figures are actually 32 millimeters in height and that's for a six foot dude I just start off blocking out the flesh colors on the faces and the hands and then I go in start adding some of the highlights there really isn't a great amount of detail you can add at that scale now I start blocking in all the colors for the garments and that's one of the mercenaries all done sorry about these images being slightly out of focus I'll work on it next time and the storm trooper or x storm trooper now in this particular one I also replaced the head with an alien head and this character is a star wars character but I have no idea who he is let me know in the comments if you know which character he is and then I added some of the highlights and also out of focus now with all the figures all done time to glue them into place and this is the exciting bit for me I get to see everything together for the first time this x trooper is just basically giving some directions to mercenaries for their next job now I need to unify everything together so I'm using some pastel chalk here and I'm just grinding it down on some fine sandpaper and using a very soft brush just dabbing everything up with this chalk if you haven't yet please smash that like button and subscribe to the channel and I'm really happy with the way this came up so I think it's time to share the hero shots