Portal 2: Core Replacement Station

I think Portal 2 is one of the best video games in history. I love the story and the characters in the game. They are written very well and the voice acting is one of the best I have ever heard in a game. The dialogs are funny, interesting, and sarcastic at the same time. The look and feel are futuristic enough to make every inch interesting. Every button, stair, and console feels like an engineering masterpiece. I always wanted to create a diorama from this game, so I spent some time creating one. The first idea was a Portal Gun, but the internet is full of amazing LEGO Portal Guns already. I wanted something, that would look great on my desk, mainly a display piece, but packed with some play features. The last time when I replayed the game I thought that the core replacement console would be a great model if I could achieve a good look for it.

The round thing in the image is Wheatley, who is a funny little robot. I loved every minute when he tried to make my life harder.

I received a lot of requests from the community to make potatOS as well in this set. It took some time, but luckily I managed to fit my LEGO version of potato GLaDOS in the same form factor as Wheatley. I think it adds to the playability of the set because now you can really change cores in the core replacement station.

Wheatley is a sphere basically, with a ton of moving parts. Making him from LEGO bricks took me some time. I decided to make the outside of the sphere a stair-like structure. This technique looks awesome on my helmet collection, so I made various size stair configurations to test. It took 8 iterations to get the size and the stairs right. Although I thought, that it looks cool, the community requested a more round design, so I spent another two days redesigning the robot. I received 136 votes for the round version and only five for the stair-like one. If you are still interested in the previous version, you can find it in the updates section.

I spent at least a day creating the custom graphics for the eye (probably camera) section. In the end, I'm really happy with the result. There are other cores in the game, so I made the graphics for them as well. The body of the robot is the same for all versions, only the eye has to be replaced to create a different core. Of course, GLaDOS has custom graphics elements as well.

Wheatley has two handles on the front and they look like kind of an eyebrow thing. The game uses these handles to mimic some facial expressions, while Wheatley is talking (and does it brilliantly). For this reason, I made them poseable. The back side of the robot has a connector, just like in the game, and this is the point, where it can be connected to the core replacement station. The eye is connected to the robot with a ball joint, which is poseable as well.

I tried to add as much detail to potatOS as much I can. The wood nails are connected with ball joints, so they are poseable. The wires are flexible to make them more realistic. I had to use some tricky techniques to make this LEGO potato.

Portal 2 takes place in the future. When the game starts, it seems like nature is taking over all over the place. There is vegetation everywhere. For this reason, I added some vegetation to the scene. There is a bird's nest on the floor with three eggs waiting to be hatched (it is an Easter egg if you played the game).

I tried to make the model good-looking and fun to build. I think there are a lot of interesting build techniques in this idea, that need to be explored. I hope you liked it, if so, please let me know in the comments. Also if you have some ideas about the model, please let me know as well.

There is a short video about the set, I hope, you like it:

Part count for this model: 995 LEGO pieces

Time takes to build( approximately ): 9-9-9-9-9-9...