In honor of Father day, here's a pic of my dad holding one of his paintings and wearing the cowboy hat I think of whenever I think of him. My Inspiration.

At their best, modelmakers create houses and cityscapes and space ships so convincing, we believe they're 100 feet tall when they're only one, or a thousand feet tall when they're really on a miniature set surrounded by other models. They build tiny houses in such excruciating detail, we think they're real when they explode into a million pieces. They build space ships so convincingly, we buy into the universe--even if, upon closer inspection, the white hot engines of a Star Destroyer look an awful lot like aluminum clip-on lights.

Or when R2-D2's holo projector looks like the spitting image of a reading light from a vintage airplane. Or when Luke Skywalker's lightsaber is a dead ringer for a 1940s camera flash with windshield wipers stuck to it to serve as a grip.

At this year's Bay Area Maker Faire, veteran modelmakers from ILM sat together on a panel to talk about the tricks and techniques of professional modelmaking. Like, for example, how they use found objects--just about anything they can get their hands on--to build iconic props like Luke's lightsaber or Han Solo's blaster.

"You can take things that you throw away, like the bubble blister packs that everything comes packaged in nowadays, pop them off, cut them apart carefully, and you've got little domes and cool shapes," said Sean House, a prop maker who's recently worked on the upcoming Pacific Rim and The Lone Ranger. "The things that the razor blades come in--you can plant these things on models and make the most amazing things and nobody will ever know. And yet it adds an air of realism that's grounded in reality. I think that's what made the Star Wars universe work, because people could sorta kinda recognize these things even if they didn't know what they were."

The hour talk included some really interesting modelmaking techniques and more than a few great anecdotes from the making of the original Star Wars trilogy. Two of the other panelists, Lorne Peterson and Charlie Bailey, spent 30 years at ILM, working on Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and dozens of other films. Don Bies, who began working at ILM in the mid-80s after remote controlling R2 units for Lucasfilm, also sat on the panel. Fon Davis, a younger ILM veteran, moderated the talk.

Here are some of the best Star Wars behind-the-scenes stories and tips from modelmakers with more than 100 years of combined experience.

Something is afoot (abrick?) in Legoland. According to a study picked up by The Guardian, Lego minifigs with happy smiles and silly smirks have become rarer since the 1990s, while angry-faced Lego figures have become more common. The study's creators expressed some concern about the angry-faced figures, and the possibility that they'll negatively affect kids who play with Lego figures for hours on end.

Photo credit: Flickr user pasukaru76 via Creative Commons.

That's probably a possibility, but we're more interested in the number of figures Lego has produced over the years. The study looked at 3,655 minifigs created between 1978 and 2010. Surprisingly, it wasn't until 1989 that Lego started branching out into multiple faces. For more than a decade, all Lego people shared a simple smiley face.

Over the decades, Lego has produced more than four billion minifigs. The study poses the implication Lego is steadily moving towards encouraging conflict in its faces, which isn't surprising--playsets often have good guys and bad guys, and Lego sets are probably used for faux battles as often as they're used for creative construction.

And while the simple smile has become less common in Legoland, it's not like all figures are now outfitted with nasty snarls. The range of emotions has simply widened, and even worried or angry Lego faces often have a certain goofiness to them. We can think of worse things for kids to base their emotional growth on.

In late May, someone posed an interesting, though odd, question about Facebook: "How much research has gone into developing the Facebook ping sound?" That ping, which the Quora questioner complimented, sounds off when you receive a video call on Facebook. Then something weirder happened: a former Facebook designer responded that a lot of work had gone into that ping, and he laid out exactly how they'd created it.

The Atlantic picked up the story, and Wired got in touch with the designer, Everett Katigbak, to find out more. He talked about designing the ping as the basis for Facebook's future audio identity; other sounds would take a cue from the incoming video call ping to establish a consistent sound for the brand.

Photo credit: Flickr user stevendepolo via Creative Commons.

Wired writes "He wanted Facebook's audio identity to be pleasant, inviting and familiar." And the breakthrough moment that led to the ping came, oddly enough, from the pronunciation of Facebook. "“I thought there was something interesting to the two syllables and the intonation happened when people would say it,” Katigbak told Wired. When he showed his collaborator, an audio engineer named Jim McKee, a hand-drawn sketch of an audio wave with F-A-C-E-B-O-O-K written out below it, they had a revelation.

FACE coincidentally spelled out an F Major 7 chord (composed of the notes F, A, C, and E).

In his Quora response, Katigbak added more detail on why this chord worked so well: