Return to Dwarrowdelf (Moria)

Like so many fabled trips to Moria, I was never really happy with the outcome of my own adventure there. Specifically the infinite mirror effect on my Dwarrowdelf booknook (redit video) fell a bit short. 

These short comings are:

1. The pillar in the center obstructs much of the view / looks wrong as the door should open to something that looks more like a hallway.
2. Viewing the infinity mirror effect through the corner joints requires a lot of precision that simply isn't there.  After a few iterations the eye gets lost.
3. I used the same front surface 2-way mirror on all four sides, and two way mirrors have significant losses such that each reflection is quite a bit dimmer than the last.  This effect actually works well for Dwarrowdelf/Moria as Gandalf is the light source.  However, a similar effect would have been achieved with better mirrors on the back and sides and the dimming mirror only on the front surface.

Here I will be attempting to fix issues 1 and 2.

The Plan (pass under the mountain undetected)

The plan is to place one quarter section of the pillar in each of the four corners of the mirror box.  By virtue of the mirrors, each of the quarter sections will appear as a complete pillar and we will no longer observe a pillar directly in front of the door (issue 1) and the corner seams in the mirror box will be hidden (issue 2).

My existing pillar is made of foam, detailed with thin cardboard, and glued in place.  So it will not be possible to cut that into quarter sections. Furthermore it will be very tedious and difficult to build four high quality quarter sections.  I'm going to shop around and by a model which I can slice and 3D print.

The model

I found this Moria Pillar model on Cults3D for just a few dollars. I bought it and brought it into Blender and cut out a quarter section.

Printing

I scaled the model down to 15 cm height then printed four of them with my FDM printer. The model reported a bad polygon somewhere (my fault) but it printed just fine.

Results

Originally this was just supposed to be a single prototype and I was going to get my neighbor to print them in resin.  But I set the first one up in the mirror box and it looked great.

There is some damage modeled on the pillar and it looks a bit silly when mirrored and I will fill it before painting.

Also note that the appearance of the gaps will diminish when the pillars are painted dark gray. And the gaps themselves will be smaller when the base and ceiling are installed. 

Next Steps

I will provide full documentation on this modification and the original build when I button it all back up.