It has been no secret that I have been loving everything about The Mandalorian series. So picking up the seven or so inch interactive Grogu was a no-brainer. If you haven’t checked out one of these things, it’s pretty amazing. The motors for the movements are super quiet and the sounds and motions are as delightful as he is in the series. I wanted to better display him and figured the hover pram was appropriate. At the time, roughly just before season 2, there wasn’t a whole lot of files floating around. I considered modelling my own until I came across some files on Etsy by Jartog’s Armory. Based on the season 1, first appearance pram, it wasn’t 100% accurate, but was close enough for my purposes. The original file is supposed to be 1:1 scale, but my little Grogu was smaller. Not knowing by how much, I just ‘winged it’ to something that looked good. I wasn’t concerned in making it perfectly to scale as it was an over-glorified display stand.
I printed up the scaled down parts in PLA on my printer and bonded the parts with 3D Gloop. That stuff works great, but man-o-man, does it have a short shelf life. Bonding strength is good and it does help with smoothing. But in hindsight, considering how little stress this prop replica is getting, CA glue or epoxy would have been as good and much cheaper option. After all the necessary sanding and filling was done, I primed and painted a metallic paint. In studying whatever reference material I could get my hands on, it was my opinion that the paint on the actual prop was actually chipped off. I dabbed on some petroleum jelly in the areas I wanted to chip off later. I have never tried this technique before, but was pleased at the results it gave me. I further damaged and weathered it with paints and pastels. There looked like there was some kind of orange padding in the lid that was not included in the print files. I simply made a pattern and cut it out of some EVA foam. To finish off the display, I modeled up a base in ZBrush for it to securely rest on.
