Anybody remember the hexagonal stickers on the walls of the main colony block on LV-426? You can see some originals at Harry's site.
I've been drawing up the designs - that was the easy part. The originals were screen-printed onto Scotchlite, or front-axial-projection material. (The stuff roadsigns are made from.) This means that they reflect light back towards the light-source very brightly.
I managed to find some of this material on eBay. I asked the vendor and it's not specifically for printing on... but I had a go anyway.
[img]http://i19.tinypic.com/67qd3jr.jpg[/img]
This was done on the solvent printer at work. They look okay from a distance, but the quality is not great up close.
[img]http://i17.tinypic.com/4kz7n7l.jpg[/img]
I'm told this is because I don't have a profile for the material, which means telling the printer how much ink to lay down, how fast, what temperature etc. These things can be figured out by trial and error, but personally I don't fancy it - and the material wasn't free!
Overall though, they look all right. Here's one hung up, photographed in normal light:
[img]http://i19.tinypic.com/6bnv2qg.jpg[/img]
And from the same angle, but with the lights out and camera flash on.
[img]http://i9.tinypic.com/63j9mk9.jpg[/img]
You begin to see the effect. However it works best from a distance. This one is from down the corridor, in the dark, using camera flash. The flash is too weak to illuminate the walls, but the sign glows back perfectly!
[img]http://i15.tinypic.com/4qzal91.jpg[/img]
So overall not a bad experiment. I remember they had these stickers (left over from Aliens) on the walls at Alien War, and the effect was striking.
Mike
<span style="font-family:times new roman;font-size:x-small;]"We're not heroes - we're from Finchley"
