![]() Interestingly, around half of the software stack Knoll relied on for this Mandalorian motion control system was old code he had written back in 1990 that ran on a ‘Tondreau’ system. The end result was a machined pan-tilt head and a three-axis model mover, as well as the necessary electronics and control systems. And a couple years ago, I did a hobby CNC project and that tech is all the same as motion control.” “So this wasn’t something that was alien to me. “I used to build motion control equipment and I wrote software to drive my own motion control system years ago,” he says. ![]() So, in true Knoll fashion, he made it himself.Īll of the build was handled in Knoll’s own machine shop in his garage, using CNC milling equipment the VFX supervisor had also developed to aid in the machining process. He had also considered renting or purchasing an existing motion control set-up, but this proved too costly. Knoll looked to 80/20, an aluminum extrusion based rapid prototyping system as the basis for for the track framework. Then we could get shots that were dynamic enough that you get far enough away from it on the track and that we’d have a hope of getting enough detail in the model that would hold up for those closer views we needed to do.” “I played around with a couple of different scales.” advises Knoll, “I thought if I built 50 feet of track-which is about the longest thing I can fit on our motion capture stage-and we had a 24-inch model, that would be the right balance. The track, the camera head, and model mover were also designed and modeled virtually. Knoll started his ‘guerrilla-style’ motion control build by taking an early CG model of the Razor Crest, and animatics of the kinds of shots that were planned for the show, to help him work out how big the model would need to be and how much track he might need to shoot it. ![]() So I figured the only way we could afford to do this was if it was this total guerrilla-style, garage operation, where it was John Goodson building something out of his garage and me putting together whatever I could put together to do the shoot.”Īnd that’s precisely what happened. This was a tightly budgeted show, and the all CG version had already been approved. I was pretty sure that any effort along those lines of doing a full-on, traditional shoot was just going to get rejected as being too expensive. “I’ve had the experience of going out and doing miniatures and it can end up being quite expensive,” relates John Knoll, in terms of the move to build a practical Razor Crest model. However, during the planning stages of season one of The Mandalorian, creator Jon Favreau suggested to the ILM team that they could build a model of the Razor Crest to use initially for lighting reference, as a way of helping to base what was initially to be a CG model into reality as much as possible. John Knoll with the Razor Crest model for s1 of The Mandalorian. ![]()
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