On the surface, TARS is just a robot companion in Interstellar. But the truth is that he is a hero and an omen for the relationship between humans and robots. SPOILER ALERT: the film hinges on humanity’s need to gather data from a black hole such that the protagonist, Cooper, can return (the info) to earth, save humanity from its hubristic stewardship of the earth, and as a byproduct, reconcile with his daughter. TARS is the lynchpin of the narrative. He volunteers to drop into the black hole, sacrificing himself in a space where human could not go. Cooper takes the data and gets it to his daughter (via tesseract). This division of labor is the omen.

For this week’s assignment, I wanted to print a small figure inspired by TARS. It is made of four slabs, 52.9 mm wide x 91 mm tall x 13 mm deep, joined by a single pin along a pivot.

The pin is fused to the first slab and passes through oversized bores in the other three, ending in a wider head trapped inside a sealed pocket in the last slab. Because the slabs print already assembled with an air gap between every surface, the figure comes off the printer in one piece and can never be taken apart.

V1 has small magnets glued into pockets on the mating faces let the slabs click into a resting pose and swing freely everywhere else. V2 pauses the print and embeds those magnets into the structure for a more elegant look.

You can see in the video below that I created three magnet holes at an angle, holding a radius to the center pin to line up with a singular hole on the opposite face. This was meant to allow the legs to hold three positions.

In the end I failed re: the magnets. I managed to seat them, although that itself was very challenging. It appears that the magnets were not strong enough to create the click-into-place that I desired.

The first cut had too much space between the slabs AND the slabs were too loose on the pin. I suspected this was from creating too high a notch on the bore hole (had just done a 45 degree hat). The second cut was an improvement but I had too hard a time placing magnets and it lacked personality. The third has more appeal but I still failed with the magnets.

Lastly, I worked on the 3D scanning but I ran out of time before I could do as well as I would have hoped. I used the Revopoint POP 2 and used an automated turntable, ran this up to 600 frames and did 8 or so iterations. Below is the best version I managed to produce.

I decided to try Polycam to see if I had any more luck, and that was much better. This was shot on my iphone.

I had one more idea to make a mask in honor of my veteran friend Travis who killed himself two weeks ago such that he might visit us ceremonially, but I wasn’t able to pull it off. Maybe this week.

My use of AI in this week’s assignment was: when I hit roadblocks in my development within Fusion, I asked Claude to help troubleshoot. Claude did not do any of the Fusion development of course.