peto blog

[figure] Pinky Rin & Archer

2010-09-08T00:43:00.000-07:00

Here are the finished resin kits of Rin and Archer in pinky style, along with the previous Saber. These two are from a different sculptor and I'm not too fond of the shape of Rin's face compared to the more rounded shape of Saber's. It just seems to me a bit too big and "normal" as if it might fit on a full sized figure instead.

Medium: airbrushed acrylics on resin. Scale: non @ 10-11cm. 6 photos, the rest embedded here:

[wip] Pinky Archer & Rin

2010-09-04T00:47:00.000-07:00

[ 02.17.09 ]

I've started working on these pinky resin kits of Archer and Rin to give Saber some company. They're characters from Fate/Stay Night, but these two come from a different sculptor. I really like the Archer pose, though there's something about the Rin that bothers me, but I can't quite pin-point what it is yet.

Anyway, these parts have been washed, pinned and some putty applied. Rin's cheeks don't have the typical pinky dots, so will need some work to see if I can fix it. Maybe that's what's bugging me about her. Still looking around for reference material to see how I should paint them.

[ 03.15.09 ]

I did this a while ago but forgot to update this post. Here's Rin's face with the dots sculpted onto the cheeks, but I'm going to leave Archer's face without. The eyes were painted while I was painting Mikuru's eyes. They're done in flat tones for a more pinky style face rather than mixed like I do with the regular kits.

I've started painting some of the other parts, but still haven't got a hang of how to schedule the painting with multiple kits. Right now, I'm just doing them in batches, so similar colors get painted together, but it just feels like I'm doing one big kit instead of making better use of time. :P

[ 08.20.10 ]

Yes, some progress on these guys. I think I have to focus on finishing them up or they'll never get done. ^^;;;

Archer's legs have some putty work that need to be done where the resin was not cast properly and I didn't notice it until late - that's why it wasn't painted in this batch although it shares the same colors.

And my jar of flesh tone has completely dried out over the past year so I need to mix more. I had already sprayed the faces before I stopped working on them, so there might (likely) be a mismatch in the tone, but luckily it is just the "hands" and Rin's thighs that need the color. I think it should be ok.

[ 08.27.10 ]

Got around to painting the base coats for all the red parts, as well as a base coat for Archer's legs after doing some putty work on it. Ended up making some new rivets for a couple of the straps that were deformed.

And some shading work I tried doing with the HP-C+. I'm not happy with it, there's too much spatter and little of the smooth fade you see in my previous kits. I kept wishing there was a mac valve on it and there's not fine enough control at the regulator.

[ 09.04.10 ]

[RANT] I absolutely *HATE* the new blogspot post editor. It screws up all the span tags and spacing in the compose view and you can't insert images in the HTML view. It is extremely painful now to extend posts, and I give up on trying to get it right. Thank you Google.[/RANT]

Anyway, I have the legs masked and the silver parts painted and some new flesh tone painted.

With most of the detail work done, there is just some cleanup left to do and to figure out how to paint the daggers. The parts aren't very detailed, so I don't know if they will look anything like they are supposed to, but I am looking for reference material on what they look like anyway.

That'll be the last of it except for final finishes and assembly, they should be done this weekend and move on to something new.

[ complete ]

Finished photos can be found here.

[mecha] Schpeltor

2010-08-08T21:41:00.001-07:00

This is the Work Shop Cast 1/100 resin kit of Schpeltor from Five Star Stories. The build up for this kit is here.

This was a commissioned build and my first mecha build. It was mostly the same process, but prepping was a little more difficult as the angles and hard edges of the mechanical pieces need more care when sanding. I found it very challenging, with so many pieces and being fairly large, but it was worth the effort. Makes me want to build an FSS kit for myself, I never followed the series, but I do like the designs.

Re-imported all the photos with the correct white balance and they look much better now.

Medium: airbrushed acrylics on resin. Scale: 1/100 @ 28cm. 19 photos in this set.

[wip] Schpeltor

2010-08-01T23:27:00.000-07:00

[ 05.14.09 ]

Kaien was looking for someone to build this kit she got for her birthday and as I have all the tools, I offered to build it for her. For me, it'll be interesting and fun to build a non-figure kit and as it is still resin, it should be mostly the same process. The kit is the FSS Water Dragon "Schpeltor" from Work Shop Cast.

Inside the box are the familiar bags of resin parts and an assembly sheet - these things are very simple diagrams, so they take some time to figure out how the pieces all fit together, and there are a LOT of pieces in this kit. What's new for me are the white metal parts and the decal sheet.

I don't know why some parts were cast in metal instead of resin as they aren't more detailed than resin. Some of them are thin and long, so perhaps the metal is less prone to warping, but is still slightly piable. The sword hook is probably stronger using metal, so less likely to break. If anybody knows the real reason for metal parts in a resin kit, please let me know.

I've just started removing the parts from the gates, sorting them into their groups and examining them in the process. There are extra hands for different poses of the sword, as well as parts to build either the original Water Dragon or the modified Kaien version. We'll be building the latter verion, naturally. :)

Most of the parts are clean cast, but there are some problem areas. Some of the resin was not mixed properly before casting, so a few of the parts have uncured blobs in them. They have a consistency like dried syrup when poking at it with a knife. There are also the usual surface pinholes, seam lines and a few paper thin areas that need cleaning up and puttying. Save that for later while I look for some reference material.

[ 05.25.09 ]

I did some basic flash removal so the parts could be pinned together. There are lots of parts, about 73 used in this version and a half-dozen more for the other version. Here's the dry fitted kit, held together with just pins and some tape on the metal parts (the metal parts are pinned as well, but they won't hold without glue).

The kit has some sort of "free pose" so the joints aren't snug like other kits. They can be posed and then pinned into the pose, but it's sort of a pain to fit together, making it difficult to tell if it's done right or wrong until the rest of the kit is assembled and balanced.

Now to break it all down again and start cleaning up the parts. A few seams need to be puttied and a few parts straightened. But I think the most time is going to be filling in all the pinholes, more than I've seen in any kit so far.. *sigh*

[ 07.01.10 ]

Wow, it's been over a year since the last update on this project and yes, it's still being worked on.. ^^;;

I took a year off to focus on other activities, some much needed socializing, and took a trip to Japan - maybe I'll post some pictures. I finished relocating all the hobby stuff to the basement, built a new spray booth area and started off painting the difficult white. It has some micro pearl powder in it to give it a metallic look.

And then the gray, with a black wash on the panel lines. The lines are a little messy right now, but a Q-tip with some solvent will clean it up easily.

Then silver and gold on all the leg parts, which needed a lot of masking.

The decals are applied on the legs, and then brushed with decal setter to mold them to the part. The decals were larger than the part and needed to be cut up to fit properly as shown in the instructions - yes, it was designed that way. After careful aligning, they came out pretty nice. You can't see the seams, which I think is pretty good for a first try at decals.

Up next will be painting the skirt, while finish detailing the torso and assembling the main body. We'll see if that takes me another year. ;)

[ 07.08.10 ]

The legs are assembled, but the hip and ankle joints are not yet glued so they can be adjusted for stance when the full kit is done. I'm thinking about making it disassemble at the torso, so it can be packed easier for moving.

The skirt and main torso parts are painted with their base colors and then some silver painted. Gold will go on top of the remaining black base coat. I wanted to do a two-tone on the detail part of the shoulder blades, so that area has been painted with silver and then masked for the gold coat.

I tried using tape for masking but the irregular shape and curve made it extremely difficult. I ended up filling the area with silly putty as a masking agent and it turned out to be simple. The putty is very stretchy and only slightly tacky, so I just used a pick to push it around where I wanted to mask.

Sprayed the gold layer and let it cure. At first, I tried picking off the mask, but it got a little messy with the paint layer on top - it crumbles and gets everywhere. The paint doesn't adhere well to the silly putty, so I lightly smoothed some tape over the putty and it pulls off the paint easily. Then take a ball of putty and roll it over the mask and it lifts right off. Since there's relatively little paint remaining on the mask, the ball of putty could probably be reused a few times. But silly putty is pretty cheap anyway and a tiny piece can stretch to a large area.

Since it worked so well, I used the same masking technique to the inside panels of the skirt parts. The masks are very clean with almost no post clean up that's usually needed with imperfect tape masks. Since the putty can be pushed right up the edges, it creates a good seal and it can be stretched until it's nearly transparent and still masks.

Next up for painting is the shoulders and arms. I'll detail the skirt and torso panel lines and assemble them while waiting for the paint the cure. It's actually starting to look pretty good.

[ 07.25.10 ]

While painting the last gold color, I was getting some excessive clogging in my airbrush and decided to buy a new Iwata HP-C Plus to try out. It seems to have much higher airflow for the same PSI setting, but like my Eclipse, I find it difficult to get a really good mist from it. I started by masking the grey and spraying a base black layer for the rest of the metallics.

Then sprayed the silver and gold, removed the masks and applied a glossy clear coat to all the metallic parts. While there was less clogging, there were more large particles that sprayed out causing lumps in the surface. I tried scraping these off after they dried and it doesn't look too bad, but there is a clear difference between the parts sprayed with the G44 versus the HP-C Plus when inspected closely.

The rest of the parts are painted and just some detail lines are left to paint. The shoulder decals need to be applied and a final clear coat.

I don't think any parts need a flat surface as they're all mechanical, but maybe some of the interior parts could be. Anyway, that should be it, just assembling everything and it should be finished soon! It only took a year to do. :P

[ 08.01.10 ]

Finished assembling the major parts and dry fitting them to check for correct fit. With so many parts and some very tight fits, I ended up scratching some paint that will need to be touched up after final assembly. Here's the underside of the skirt to show the panel work.

And all the major parts.

And the dry fit.

A few smaller pieces still need to be attached, but the will go on last to avoid any damage. Just need some touch up paint, a simple base and it should be done.

[ complete ]

The finished photos are in the gallery here.

AeroGarden, First Planting

2009-04-26T18:27:00.000-07:00

[ 03.08.09 ] Planting

I recently picked up an AeroGarden Elite when it was on sale at Costco. I love growing things and have about 20 plants in my home started from seeds or cuttings and many more that I've given away. When I first heard about the AeroGarden, I thought it would be cool to play with, but it was way too expensive for what it does. So, when it was on sale last week, my curiosity took over my wallet.

The Elite has 6 pods and the Costco version came with 2 bulb kits (4 bulbs) and 2 herb seed kits (12 pods) for $89. The kits themselves run about $20 each, so I justified it by thinking I got the unit for $10. ^^;; Obviously, the bulbs and seed kits are still way too expensive, considering you can get a gram of herb seeds for under $1, and the bulbs are just 26W daylight spectrum CFLs with a proprietary connector.

It does look like it may be possible to modify the hood to take standard bulbs, though you'd want the pin kind and not the edison kind. I'll look into that after I've used up the kits it came with as well as how to make my own pods.

The unit is essentially a water bowl with a small air pump (sounds like an aquarium pump) aerating the water with nutrients, which soak up into the pods like a self watering planter. The roots then grow down into the water, while the hood is height adjustable to get the optimum light as the plant grows. The little clear dome caps act like mini greenhouses while the seedlings establish roots. Since I have this bright light on anyway, I brought over some plants that aren't getting enough light in the winter and see how good the light is.

There is a low-pitch hum from the pump that could get annoying if you are always in the same room, but I suspect it's not any worse than an aquarium that uses an air pump. It is much louder than my aquarium that uses a Whisper bio-filter though.

As for the herb kit, 4 of the seeds I've grown before using standard planters, so it will be interesting to compare the results. I'll update with weekly photos so we can watch them grow. ^^

[ 03.15.09 ] Week 1

Amazingly, just one day after planting the basil had a tiny sprout, which was followed by thyme and oregano on day 2. Mint sprouted on day 5 and chives on day 6. The dill hasn't sprouted yet, but it's labeled at 7-14 days for germination, which is still short when compared to my packet of dill seeds listed at 21-24 days. One week and we have 5 of the 6 pods with tiny sprouts. They're so cute.

I had a problem with the mint pod, the spongy material inside didn't seem to expand like the others and didn't rise to the surface. Kaki-mei said she was having the same problem with her pods and suggested lifting it manually. I took a toothpick and gently prodded it up and it worked. It actually had expanded, but since the pod is tapered, it jammed itself into the bottom of the pod and couldn't rise.

The basil which has the fastest germination time of the pods is listed at 3-7 days, but only took 1 day for the first seed to show growth. After the minimum 3 days, it had these nice sprouts.

I also did some research on the hum noise and it looks like the 6 pod units have an "advanced grow" system which uses a noisier air pump/stone to aerate the water instead of an impeller to move the water. An impeller is what a biofilter uses and aerates by moving water in a waterfall fashion. They are nearly silent, but since it moves water, it requires more maintenance over time. It's also why the 7-pod seed kits are not compatible with the 6-pod units, since the pods get water from the impeller, they are shorter and don't reach the water bowl like the 6-pod kits do.

[ 03.22.09 ] Week 2

Two LEDs on the base unit lit up today, one to add nutrient tablets to the bowl and the other to add more water. There aren't any sensors, so these are just on a timer, which I obeyed and hit the reset button to restart the timers. The seed kit came with 8 packets of nutrient tablets, which is about 4 months at a 2 week cycle. Anyway, all of the pods have sprouted and I removed the domes on 4 of the pods.

The chives, which were the last to sprout, grew very fast and bumped into the dome, so I had to remove it. However, only two of the seeds had sprouted, and I don't know if more will sprout later with the dome off. The other pods all have many seeds growing and you can actually see the roots coming out of the sponges through the water refill flap.

I'm a little concerned about the growing surface that the pods sit on, it's kind of thin and I can tell it is already warping, either from the heat of the lamps or the weight of the pods. The corners already won't sit flush to the bowl like it did 2 weeks ago. Kaki told me a few days ago that all three of her Aerogarden pumps broke at almost the same time after a year. So much for quality. :(

[ 03.29.09 ] Week 3

All of these little guys are doing well after 3 weeks. The chives still only have two seeds that sprouted, though they each sent up another branch. At this rate, it doesn't seem like there will be enough chives to harvest. The tending guide shows about 8 seeds sprouting in the sample picture, but I got just 2.

The tending guide also suggests the plants start being pruned at weeks 3-5. So far, none of them seem large enough to be pruned yet. The largest, basil, is still just shy of 3" tall - probably another inch and it can be pruned. I haven't had to raise the lamp yet, so it is still on the lowest position.

[ 04.05.09 ] Week 4

Another 2 week cycle and the base was blinking for more tablets and water today. I also raised the lamp one notch as the basil is growing very fast, even after pruning the growth above the 3rd branches.

Nothing was happening with the chives pod, so I popped it out to check inside and to my horror the un-germinated seeds had a film of grey/white mold on them. I took my tweezers and pulled them all out and then rinsed the pod under running water. The other pods all looked ok, but the chives pod will need daily attention (although the two plants look healthy). I will toss the pod if any mold comes back, though I am considering just tossing it now and taping over the empty hole. Totally was not expecting that.

[ 04.13.09 ] Week 5

Late posting due to income taxes being due this week. Here's the growth for the last week:

I've started trimming all the pods and used the first trimmings in an omelette. Even though the trimmings were few, it added a lot of fresh flavor. I think the basil is growing a bit too fast - if I raise the hood, I'm concerned the lamps may be too high for the other pods. I'm going to just start removing the larger leaves of the basil, since it is shading the lower leaves and pods, in an attempt to even out the plant heights before raising the lamp another notch.

Also, no hint of any new mold in the chives pod, and the two chives each grew another shoot. If it continues to grow a shoot a week, it might not be too bad.

[ 04.26.09 ] Week 6 & 7

Here's the week 6 photo which I forgot to post - the plants were trimmed and the lamp raised another notch:

Mid-week, some of the plants looked like they were starting to wilt and looking in the tank, the water level was very low. The plants were only getting water from the longer roots, so I refilled the tank. 3 days later, it needed another 4 cups of water, so the plants are absorbing enough water that the 2 week timer simply isn't sufficient any more. At this stage, I need to add water at least weekly. Here's the week 7 photo:

The plants were big enough that the lamp was raised another notch. Except for the chives, there's enough growth to harvest each weekend, I think even more often, but I only get to cook on the weekends. I will call the chives a failure, since only two of them sprouted, there wasn't enough growth to cover the hole on the pod. This let light leak through allowing algae to grow. I've covered the hole with a small bit of painters tape to block out the excess light.

What's nice about this set of herbs is that most of it goes well together, so if you're not using a recipe and just want to add some flavor, pinch a twig off two or three plants and you're all set. Here's what I made with some trimmings this weekend - a seared shrimp with garlic sauce over pasta, topped with toasted parmesan and bread crumbs:

I'm not a good cook, so it's not the prettiest thing, but it's delicious and the fresh herbs are very flavorful. I think the appeal with something like this is you don't have to plan ahead on what to buy. Whatever I'm making, I find myself thinking if anything will go well with it and just pinch it off. ^^;;

Anyway, apart from the chives, this is what you could expect from the herb seed kit. In under 2 months, the plants are mature and producing plenty of fresh herbs to use. This will be the last update until I run out of nutrient tablets. I'll update with how long the plants survive without the tablets.

[figure] Goth Punk Mikuru

2009-04-08T20:40:00.000-07:00

This is one of the 100 limited edition resin kits of Griffon's Goth Punk Mikuru. For those interested, the build up for this kit is here.

I painted her in light pink to differentiate from the standard white PVC version. She also has toned down hair and eye color to more closely match the artwork the figure is based on.

Medium: airbrushed acrylics on resin. Scale: 1/7 @ 24.5cm. 16 photos in this set.

[wip] Goth Punk Mikuru

2009-04-04T14:44:00.000-07:00

[ 08.30.08 ]

This kit arrived last week and I've just gotten around to laying out all the parts to examine them. It is one of the 100 limited resin kits of Griffin's Goth Punk Mikuru from WF2008. Many thanks to gundamjehutykai for letting me know it was available as a kit or I probably wouldn't have gone to look for it! And many thanks to Hyou for snagging it for me on such short notice!

These photos came inside the box, including a nice detail of the eyes to show how they should be painted:

Here are all the parts laid out, mostly clean cast with a bit of flash and some minor seams throughout. The biggest concern are some really thin areas to the point that the resin is nearly transparent. I think it will just need extra care when sanding and prepping the surface. Nothing to really worry about unless I mess it up.

There's also no castoff option as the skirt is molded onto the waist, but this makes things much easier. ^^;; I love kits with lots of parts as I think they end up more detailed and this is 47 parts with no guitar! But in keeping with the music theme of Haruhi and Yuki, I'm thinking of giving her a tambourine - her left hand looks like it should be holding onto something and that just might be perfect.

I'm going to start prepping her while waiting for Alita's paint to cure and we'll see how well I can manage to juggle two kits at once.

[ 01.31.09 ]

Well, that didn't pan out like I had planned. Here it is 5 months later and Mikuru is finally pinned. Still not prepped yet and on closer inspection, some of the parts will need a bit of work. The casting is poor on the small parts - belts, ribbons, hands and they are going to be very delicate to work with. The belt is worrisome as it comes in two parts, is too thin to pin and there's not enough surface area to make a strong glue bond.

I've been looking around for reference pictures and it seems there's only one piece of artwork that the sculpt is based on. I've also found lots of pictures of the mass produced PVC to compare with and there's just something odd about the color of the hair and eyes on the PVC. They don't look like the reference photos of the original figure above, which already felt a bit too red from the original artwork.

Since I have a clean canvas, so to speak, I'm feeling that it would be a shame to build her to look just like the mass produced PVCs. I'm thinking about ways to not stray from the original artwork, yet make her more unique. Using the artwork as reference, a couple things stand out - the boots are dark brown and not black, the outer skirt has a spider web lace texture, and she's not wearing the "leg warmers" which I think came from the garb on the ground behind her.

The lace is probably too hard to simulate, though I do have some extra nylon stocking fabric, that I could try on the skirt to give it texture. Or possibly give her thigh-high stockings which also goes with a goth motif. There's not much you can do with black, white and red colors, although there is a pink laced shirt on the ground behind her as well, and I could make a pink version instead. Maybe she would stop crying if she were wearing pink.. ^^;; poor poor Mikuru.

[ 02.17.09 ]

All right, all the parts have been washed and cleaned up, but there were a ton of these micro pin holes on a lot of the surfaces, especially on the hair pieces. The grey epoxy putty I normally use can't really get into the space, so I tried using thinned Bondo glazing putty which other modelers have had success with.

The Bondo is quite a bit softer than epoxy putty and seems to need multiple applications - or more likely, I'm just not using it right. But being softer, it ends up feathering really well when sanded, just have to restrain from sanding too hard. I've sanded the putty down and then reapplied where needed: rinse, repeat.

The two belt halves have been attached using 2 part epoxy, which is flexible enough so it doesn't shear like CA glue would. It actually feels pretty strong, but I've yet to sand it flush and see if it continues to hold. While this is happening, I think I will start painting the eyes. Haven't done that in a while, so hope I remember how. ^^;;

[ 02.22.09 ]

Some results after sanding down the Bondo, which really shows some of the nastiness of the surface. So far, I'm not too fond of using Bondo though. Even with light sanding, it still feels too soft and sands away much faster than the resin.

It's also not a neutral tone and requires more priming passes to get a uniform base color, which sort of defeats the point of using it as a surface putty. The more you spray, the more detail gets lost - for the hair, it probably doesn't matter, but the other parts, I need to find a better way. The grey epoxy putty was neutral in tone and never had this issue, I just wish it could be thinned.

[ 03.01.09 ]

I started painting some of the parts this weekend. Wasn't sure how the tie would turn out, but it looks pretty good. I bought this Scotch "Artist tape for curves", which is low tack and stretchable and produces a much better seal than masking tape for sharp lines. Cut it in thin strips to make the masks for the stripes on the tie.

Also used it for the curves on the flaired legging with good results, but decided to use masking tape on the triangular flags since this stuff is more expensive. The masking tape ended up lifting some of the red paint in a few spots which will need touch-up, so maybe it would have been worth the better tape to save some trouble. A light mist of black over the red will darken it as well as give it some much needed shading.

I ordered some Aves Apoxie Sculpt and safety solvent to try on the problem parts. It's a non-toxic, thinnable 2 part epoxy putty which I should have tried in the first place, but the Bondo was easier to get a hold of locally. I broke my non-toxic materials rule with the Bondo, so that nasty stuff is staying in the garage forever.

[ 03.09.09 ]

I sprayed a second layer of black this weekend as well as a light misting over the red to darken and shade, then a sealer to protect the paint. The belt buckles and eyelets need painting, then a final finish on these parts. I think the belts will stay glossy, and a satin finish on the rest.

The eyes were painted as well, using orange and brown instead of red. Definitely forgot how to paint them and had to try 3 times before I was happy with them. I think all of the difficult work is done though, so the rest of it should be fairly simple and hopefully go faster.

[ 03.22.09 ]

I ended up drilling out most of the Bondo filler on the main body parts and replacing them with Apoxie Sculpt. These were going to get a light flesh tone and would have needed a dark base layer to mask the Bondo and that affects the color of the flesh on top. I got the white Apoxie, but it actually blended to a light grey, not quite the color of white resin, but still neutral enough to blend in.

I also sprayed the flesh tone on some of the white parts as a pre-shading. It's a very tight shirt and usually the folds would look whiter than the parts that touch the skin. I'm hoping when I spray over with white, it'll give the whole thing a good effect.

The hair took me a few tries to get the color the way I wanted - a rusty orange like the artwork and the anime, but mixing this turned out rather difficult. It usually wanted to turn too red or too brown, but I finally got this look by spraying a base of orange, shading with a muddy brown and then spraying with a light mist of red mixed into the orange.

This is what it looked like before the red was misted over along with the two base colors used. Next is shading the skin and painting the white parts, which I'm still debating if I should do a light pink. Then the final finish coats and assembly.

[ 03.29.09 ]

I decided to go ahead with a light pink after trying out the plain white. It's actually the plain white as a base, but the shading is done in pink and gives the whole thing a pink look. I also finished hand painting the face details and did the shoes in a dark brown leather with black soles.

There's just the black laces on the shirt and skirt left to do and they'll be hand painted. I don't think I'm going to do anything extra since I'm feeling lazy now and haven't found the inspiration. I'll still need to figure out how to attach the chains that came with the kit and make some sort of base. Though she does stand on her own, I'd like it to be a little more earthquake proof.

Here's an interim photo of the body parts with a single layer of white to show how the skin shading came through. It's a good reference for if I want try this again with some other kit in the future. A second layer of white was applied to get a more solid white look and the pink over that. There's still some of the skin tone that shows through on the pink version, but the pink tends to be overpowering so the effect is very subtle.

[ 04.04.09 ]

I finished assembling all of the major parts and attaching the chains. There's not really any guide on where to attach the chains, just a diagram on how to attach the hooks to the belt, so I ended up winging it to create nice looking loops. There's a lot more chain material and hooks in the kit than is used in the PVC, so I have larger loops and a few more loops on the back.

Since the belt has to go onto the main body before it is attached to the skirt, the chains really needed to be attached to the belt beforehand, or else there wouldn't be enough room to work on it without risk of damaging the main body. I just used the top of a plastic bottle to hold the belt while I attached the chains, then transferred the whole thing to the main body before attaching the skirt.

I do like how the pink shading turned out on the main body and am very happy with the result. All that's left is to assemble the major parts and then attach the small ribbons which are a little fragile, so they are going on at the end.

[ complete ]

Figure post is here.

More Supplies

2009-03-15T15:34:00.000-07:00

I bought a bunch of stuff over the last two weeks and am starting to experiment with them. Here's the Aves Apoxie Sculpt, which comes in two containers instead of a tube like the 5 minute epoxy putty. It also has a working time of 1-3 hours instead of 5 minutes and comes in various colors - I got white to match the tone of resin.

The safety solvent lets you smooth and feather this stuff out nicely. It also seems to work with regular epoxy putty, but there is a finer difference in the putty grain with Apoxie Sculpt. I think this stuff will work out really nice, was actually cheaper than the tube stuff by weight, 1 pound for $12, and it supposedly can be frozen to extend the shelf life.

I also got this 5 second gel resin to try out. Originally intended for use on fingernails to smooth out the surface before painting, you brush it on and it fills pin holes ready to be sanded in 5 seconds. At least, that's how it's supposed to work. I'll have to see if it really does on the next kit, it was pretty expensive too, so it'd better work!

And last, a new nozzle for my G44 airbrush, which had started to feel like I was fighting it to get a fine mist. I knew nozzles and needles would wear eventually and need replacement, but since I'm still fairly new to this, I didn't know how to tell when it needed replacing. Well, I think when you feel like you are fighting with your airbrush after having just cleaned all the parts, it needs replacement. ^^;; Comparing the two nozzles under a loupe, it's easy to tell the opening has grown larger on the old nozzle (it's trumpeted) due to perhaps excessive force cleaning it or just regular wear. After replacing it, it's like night and day and back to being a joy to use. Best part - it was just $4 for a new nozzle. ^^

Color calibration

2009-02-23T00:03:00.000-08:00

I took Stan's color calibrator for a spin this weekend to see how it works. I've been using the display optimization wizard in the Nvidia control panel along with the Lagom LCD tests to adjust my displays. But, while they looked fine to me, I never really knew if the colors were correct or not. Here was the chance to find out.

The calibration software starts off working like normal calibration tests - set the contrast, set the brightness, set the color temp, but the nice thing here is you get to actually test it. The i1 calibrator lets you adjust the monitors white balance compared to a known color temperature. You adjust the monitors RGB settings through its OSD and the i1 measures the result and moves RGB sliders around in a dialog box. Changing one value of R, G or B can cause multiple sliders to move in opposite directions, so it's like a mini game to get all the sliders centered in the middle. Once you do, you have the correct color of white.

Once contrast, brightness and color temp are correct, it runs through a long sequence of color squares measuring and creating a gamma curve for each color. When it's done the gamma curves are written to an ICC profile which is then set as the default for the desktop and calibration is complete. You can then switch between the before and after to compare the new calibration to the previous setting.

This is the before and after, taken with a camera so you can see what the monitor is actually putting out. The left half is the before calibration colors and the right half is the after calibration colors. Can you tell the difference?

It's very subtle, and the most noticeable change is the two inner grey squares, which have a slight tint before calibration and are neutral grey after calibration. The gamma curves are fairly linear with the widest correction occurring in the mid tones.

Now how does this work for a TV? I ran it on my HTPC attached to the Samsung A550. The Samsung has settings for custom color space, but the generated ICC profile is only valid on the computer input. However, the temperature settings can be applied to all inputs, so the TV (ota/cable/sat/etc) can be adjusted for the color of white, which I think is the most important part anyway. Given the before and after colors, it seems any decent gamma optimizer, like the Lagom tests or those built-in to your display driver, should do a good enough job for non-professional use.

[figure] Angel Rebirth

2009-01-25T14:47:00.000-08:00

This is the SOL Models kit of Angel Rebirth from GUNNM/Battle Angel Alita. If you're interested in how this was made, you can follow my work in progress here.

This is resin kit number 6 for me and the largest one I've tackled so far. The body contains multiple parts that are hard to make seamless given how the parts must be assembled. I don't think I want to build another kit with so much skin.. ^^;; I took a long break in between building her, but picking up the airbrush again was pretty simple. I'm glad she's finally done.

Medium: airbrushed acrylics on resin. Scale: 1/6 @ 23cm. 20 photos in this set.

[wip] Angel Rebirth

2009-01-24T21:17:00.000-08:00

[ 06.08.08 ]

The next kit on my workbench is this Sol Models figure of Gally from GUNNM (Battle Angel Alita). She doesn't actually have wings in the manga/anime, so this is a conceptual sculpt and there are very few references - just the box picture and this illustration:

I've started removing the flash and marking the areas that need extra clean-up. Despite being an original cast, there are lots of seam lines throughout, including some of the very detailed areas. On close inspection, I count 11 pieces of mould material stuck in the recesses that need to be picked out - that can't be good for the subsequent casts using this mould. It's going to be a lot of work, not as bad as the Mina cast, but it took me a month to clean that kit up and this one has more surface area. She's the largest kit I've worked on so far. At a real 1/6 scale, her face (3.5cm) easily dwarfs Satsuki's (2cm).

[ 06.19.08 ]

I'm not really sure what to make of this kit. I spent some time picking out the stuck mold material and there was a lot more than I originally thought, including some fairly large chunks:

The detail is amazing when it's not near a seam and I expect the seams, but the stuck mold.. I'm afraid to think what the next pull would have been like. Maybe I should be happy that I didn't get the next pull. There's already over 20 pieces I've picked out with a dental pick - some so deep, part of the resin broke trying to get them out.

[ 07.08.08 ]

There hasn't been much progress on this kit, partly due to the Diablo3 trailer causing some nostalgia and a lot of us installed Diablo2:LOD and replayed it. But the other reason is the parts fit is giving me a headache. Here's the two halves of the hair, which don't align at all.

On the top, the red on the left part is how much higher it is versus the right, so it needed to be ground down. You can see how thin the resin is on the right part, it's nearly transparent in the middle. This area needed filling in with putty. On the the bottom, the two halves are almost aligned, but still needs more putty. *sigh*

The body is mostly pinned and final assembly of this is going to be tricky. Due to the parts breakdown, the mechanical arm will have to be fully painted and attached first. Then the human arm attached and puttied to the body for the joint to be seamless, then painted. I'm waiting to pin the head first before trying to align the wings so they don't end up at a bad angle. And that's the just pinning so far. Notice all the red marks that still need sanding.

[ 07.20.08 ]

Finally, here's the pinned kit. The egg shells were a pain as while it is supposed to be cracked, none of the parts fit all that well and needed joining with putty. Some parts are too thin to be pinned and are simply held together by epoxy putty, which should be strong enough since these aren't bearing any load.

She's heavy though and it all balances on the "cord" connecting her to the base at an angle. That area has me worried, as the one joint is bearing the entire load and there's just one pin there. I've been using soft brass pins, but I think this area needs something harder as the brass is bending under the load. A second pin might do it, but there's not a lot of space. While not many parts, this is by far the most complicated kit I have in terms of detail and I'm struggling with planning out how to paint this. Next though, is finally sanding off all those red marks and giving her a bath.

[ 08.02.08 ]

When I started this kit, other than being large at 1/6 scale, I thought it would be a breeze to put together - especially after finishing Satsuki which I thought was the hardest so far. Boy, was I wrong.

The feathered wing comes in two halves and again, they don't quite fit together. I ended up pinning this with 3 pins and a lot of epoxy putty. The wing tip didn't meet at all, so it's been filled in and will need some reconstructive sculpting to blend it together.

The legs have been carefully sanded down. I think the biggest difficulty with this kit is you can't just go all out and sand away because there is a lot of surface texture everywhere that would be lost with aggressive sanding. Consider all the feather detail and the tiny mechanical parts - there's actually corrugated textures on the hoses and weave textures on the metal cables. This means I need to sand down every tiny surface individually while avoiding the textured ones. Definitely not a starter kit and maybe even more advanced than I can handle right now, but I'm going keep at it.

You can still see small red marks showing in the flat areas - these are actually small indents and pinholes in the surface which will need to be drilled out, filled with putty and then sanded flush. It's been taking so long that I miss my airbrush though. I've only been attempting one kit at a time so far, but I'm considering starting something simpler so I can get back to painting.

[ 08.13.08 ]

It's been a while since I posted an update on this kit, but it's still in the very boring and tedious surface cleaning stage. The divots and bad surfaces on the body parts have been drilled out, puttied and wet sanded flat, like so:

Yay, no red marks left on the body! I've started cleaning up the wings and have taken a hack saw to clear out the larger chunks of resin in between the big feathers (marked red).

You can see where I've started making the cuts on the center one. I've seen some photos of finished kits where you can see these chunks have been left in and simply painted, but you have to be looking for them or they're not so noticeable. I was thinking of doing the same, but I didn't think I would be happy with it, so the saw came out.

You might be able to see where the mold line passes through, just above the cut. The feathering doesn't align across the seam, so the short side needs to get sanded down and the feathering redrawn in putty. :P But on the bright side, there's just the egg and the base left to clean up.

[ 08.23.08 ]

Nearly all of the cleanup is done and I've decided to start tackling the more difficult parts to paint. Primarily, I have no idea how to paint the mechanical limbs, but I have an idea what I want them to look like in the end. Looking at how others have done this kit, the mechanical parts range from single solid colors (metal/black) to varying colors of off-flesh parts. What I'm looking for is the metallic framework to show through with flesh-colored veneers.

Not knowing how to get this look, I've decided to experiment on the different parts. For the leg, I hand painted the recessed areas black as a base for the metallic colors and then masked it off. In theory, everywhere that's exposed will get a flesh tone on the surface only. It's turning out to be an awful lot of work though..

For the arm, the whole thing is sprayed with a flesh tone. Masking on top of this will produce the veneers, while the metallics get worked on. In theory, the patches of skin-tone will be protected by the masks. It seems easier, but which will turn out better? If neither do, they might just get stripped and the whole thing started over. Since I haven't painted parts like these before, it's challenging and I'm taking this opportunity to learn from it.

[ 08.31.08 ]

After unmasking the leg, it didn't turn out bad, but not as clean as I would have liked. I decided to apply masks to the skin tone like I was going to do with the arm, so it looks like that method's the winner.

Masks applied over the skin tone veneers leaving the metallic areas exposed, then the whole thing gets sprayed with a black base and metallics on top.

Spraying on top of black lets you get some nice shading on the metallics, the recessed areas stay mostly black and brightens as the area gets exposed. Since the spray needs line of sight, spraying from the angle of light creates some nice effects. You can already see some depth to the metal parts and once dry, running a wet sharp toothpick along the seams will expose more of the black base and it should look even better.

I just added a drop of color to the remaining silver in the cup and sprayed some metallic tones on the fingers, toes and joints. I think this will make it more interesting as all the metals aren't just one color. Since I took the trouble to put on all those masks, I'm going to leave them on while painting the tiny details by hand. Then the masks come off and we can finally see what the result will look like. ^^;;

[ 09.01.08 ]

Here are the details painted and the masks removed. There's some edges and lines where the paint seeped under that need cleaning up still. Overall, I'm pretty happy with the results so far.

The masking came out close to what I had wanted and with the tiny details painted, it all pops out. Two of the panels on the forearm reacted with the masking tape and the surface is really bad. I probably didn't let it cure long enough and it will need to get sanded down and repainted. Since I have to paint the body the same way, I will just repaint it at the same time.

[ 09.09.08 ]

I've been working on the main body and it's been giving me some headaches. I wanted to assemble the parts and smooth the seams before painting to get a uniform piece, but the glue that I've been using for all the other kits just won't stick to this particular resin. It's bizarre, so I've resorted to using epoxy putty to attach the parts:

To get a better bond, the parts have extra holes drilled into them so the putty has somewhere to grip into (like fillings) and the entire outer seams have been carved out with a dremel so the putty can be sanded flush. You can see this in the arm joint, which can't be attached yet, but I wanted to do the carving now so it will just need putty and sanding once the pieces are assembled.

I also broke off the hydraulic at the waist in one of my attempts to glue on the leg. And again, I couldn't get glue to stick to fix the part, so I just replaced it with a brass rod and putty. This part goes into the mechanical leg, so only the surface will be visible and it will look normal once painted.

Fixing bad casting in the base cord as well - a lot of the cables that wind around it are full of bubbles or missing segments (blue). The worst of these have been cut out and replaced with fishing line (red). Once painted, they should also blend in normally.

Next will be wet sanding the body so the seams are smooth and then painting the flesh tone and more mechanical parts.

[ 11.12.08 ]

I finally got around to spraying on the base coat of paint for the main body. It was easy to tell, once the first coat was on, that there were more problems that needed fixing. I didn't think the joint seams were smooth enough, so there's been some more filling and sanding as you can see here.

Some if it is at such odd angles that it's hard to get any sandpaper onto it. I ran out of flesh tone as this kit is much larger than the others and way more surface area to cover. Once I mix more, it'll be another coat and repeat if there's still problems. ^^;;

[ 01.05.09 ]

Happy New Year! It's been quite a while since I've done any work on kits due to other circumstances, but I had some time over the holidays to make some progress. I started with another jar of flesh tone paint and mixed a slightly lighter tone for the main body, which should help differentiate the mechanical parts more. I also sprayed a dark purple (almost black) base color for the hair and wings:

The hair and wings will get a lighter purple sprayed over and I did it in this order since there are so many recessed areas in these parts. The airbrush spray covers with line of sight, so it's hard to get into areas that are deep at angles. Since those areas are already painted dark, they should stay dark when sprayed over.

That's the same idea with the mechanical parts. I started with hand painting the deep areas in black using a brush. Then all the flesh areas get masked with tape and sprayed over with black to get nice coverage.

A base coat of metallic silver is then sprayed and then hand detailed with a thin mix of silver and colors to make new metallic tones. Next will be masking off the mechanical areas so I can spray the left breast with a metallic to fade it in with the flesh. This is it so far.

The mechanical "feathers" are sprayed as well, with a mix of blue, purple and silver. I saw a picture of her in a junk yard with her wings in a dark purple and really like the color scheme, so am painting her this way rather than the white/brown in the box photo. Her hair has a blue/purple tone in the anime as well, so dark purple scheme fits really well for the wings. The feather wing broke at the epoxy joint and is getting fixed, but will get painted the same way.

[ 01.11.09 ]

I removed the masks and cleaned up a few spots where paint had seeped under. It's always a risk when hand painting wet paint over masks, but I hadn't worked on it in so long I forgot about that. ^^;; The face detail and hair are done and just waiting to put a clear coat on these parts before assembly.

This is how the back of the mechanical side turned out, which after assembly will probably never be seen again as most of this detail will get obscured by the eggshell. :P

And here is some color on the wings, which still need more work. I added the light blue to the feather wing to give more color, but it's now off balance with the mechanical wing. I need to find some way to add light blue to the mechanical wing and some gold to the feather wing to help blend the two parts together.

[ 01.20.09 ]

Here's the extra work on the wings. I decided to use a light blue metallic on the edge of both wings to help blend the two parts together. It's hard to see here, but the shafts of the larger feathers also have a slight gold tone to match the metallic framework. I'm pretty happy with it now and they look very nice together.

While spraying the metallics, I started painting the base and the umbilical. The graphite tone is black mixed into silver and the copper tone is red mixed into gold. I'm going to try a black wash on them later to get a more grungy look. I've also attached the limbs to the main body and started the hard part of trying to make the right arm seamless.

The arm joint gets filled with putty, which is sanded down when cured (above). A base layer of paint is brushed on and again sanded down when cured (left). Then a final layer of paint is sprayed with some shading to blend with the existing painted parts (right). It looks ok so far, but I had a hard time keeping the plastic wrap from wanting to touch the wet paint. So there's like two areas that will need some touch up when the paint is dry, but I think it can be carefully done with all the masks removed.

What's left is to finish the egg shell and umbilical, then assembling it all together. Barring any disasters, I think it should be done this weekend. If you've followed this far, I'm so sorry for this ending up being such a long WIP.. ^^;;

[ 01.24.09 ]

I finished painting the shell in a white/grey with a slight purple tint. I think it goes well with the wings. To give it some texture, the exterior was lightly sprayed with a spatter of purple - this was done by turning down the air pressure below where the airbrush would finely atomize the paint. It gives the exterior a grainy speckled look.

The umbilical cable is also done, though I forgot to turn back up the air pressure and the black I was going to simply shade with, ended up spattering as well. After swearing for a minute, I went with the flow and kept painting with low pressure. It ended up looking like soot this way, which actually looks pretty cool so it turned out to be a good mistake.

The shell is epoxied to the base with 3 pins - in the center and where it joins the two pipes. I added a second brass pin to the bottom of the cord since it will be holding a lot of weight, but I've decided not to glue it to the base. It'll be glued to the main body and I'll leave the whole thing in 4 parts (base, body+cord and two wings) so it can be disassembled if necessary. I just need to wait for these parts to dry before assembling (probably tomorrow).

And that's pretty much it, so this should be the last update in this WIP!

[ complete ]

The finished photos are in the gallery here.

LCD TVs

2008-11-29T17:26:00.000-08:00

I recently purchased two 1080p LCD TVs, one to replace my 10 year old RPTV and another to use as a den TV and game/PC monitor. The living room TV is a Samsung LN46A550 and the den TV is a Sharp 32D64U. I figured the Sharp would make a good PC monitor and a lot of reviews I read said it would do 1080p over VGA, which I could hook up to the Xbox360, leaving plenty of inputs for other things. That didn't quite turn out to be the case.

I figured I've been using LCDs as PC monitors for ages now and it's about time for TV tech to finally catch up. But there are some pretty big differences, so I thought I'd do a quick comparison. Both TVs are hooked up to the same PC at the same time over dvi->hdmi, so they have the same signal and both calibrated with Lagom LCD test images. This attempts to produce a uniform gradient across RGB levels, but does not attempt to calibrate color temp - both sets are set to standard "neutral" temp. I took a quick photo of some large text to compare:

On the left is the Sharp D64U and on the right is the Samsung A550. The bright spots are dust on the screen reflecting the flash and both panels appear defect free. The first thing to note is that both of these TVs separate a pixel into upper and lower halves, but there is a clear difference in how these subpixels are arranged (and even used).

There seems to be this consensus in reviews that the Samsung has better picture quality than the Sharp and side-by-side it's easy to notice a "softness" in the Sharp picture immediately (despite that the Sharp is actually smaller and should look better). The closeup of an anti-aliased '3' shows some interesting differences in the subpixel structure. The Samsung always renders both halves of subpixels at the same level which always creates a square pixel, but the Sharp does not. The Sharp does this zig-zag of RGB over both halves for dark pixels and alternates only blue on bright pixels. I haven't found any settings that control this to turn it on or off, but pixels rendered this way are always fuzzy. For scaled SD content, this actually benefits the Sharp as some of the compression noise is fuzzed away, where the same noise is clearly visible on the Samsung. However, I suspect this is also why high definition pictures on the Sharp, while they look good at a distance, still can't compare in quality.

This does present a problem in using it as a PC display, since a dot-by-dot image is always high definition, the image is always fuzzy. Bringing up a webpage, the text on the Samsung is crisp and clear like on a computer monitor, but on the Sharp, it's a barely legible (headache inducing) mess. To add insult to injury, Sharp removed the 1080p support over VGA in the 2008 S firmware models. Now, why would anyone remove support for the native resolution, essentially limiting it to 720p as the only VGA widescreen resolution?

Ok, two strikes for the Sharp, but perhaps it's still usable as a TV? I tried watching DVDs over 480p component and within an hour ran into what is known as the component blinking issue. The display intermittently blacks out for about 2 seconds and then shows the component input info in the upper right as it reacquires the signal. Sometimes this happens rapidly (5-10 times back-to-back) and sometimes about once an hour. Reading the D64U owners threads on avsforums suggests the problem is fairly common and some owners have had success rolling back to an older firmware resolve it. But like others, rolling back the firmware for me has only reduced the frequency that it occurs.

Unfortunately, the shipping and restocking fees would have been almost 1/3 of what I paid. Since OTA and HDMI do work, I'll be using it as an unplanned bedroom TV instead.

On the other hand, the Samsung has met my expectations for a living room TV replacement (and Rannie can no longer say my TV is small!). While calibrating with the Lagom images, it managed to render all of the black level and white saturation tests, while still maintaining a very deep black - something even my PC monitors have a hard time doing.

Drive Failures

2008-10-07T22:37:00.000-07:00

It's about that time where the drives in my main PC have started developing problems (drives over 6 years old running 24/7) and I lost a bunch of data about a month ago. Shopping for new drives, the large 1TBs have gotten pretty cheap, but thinking about losing 1TB of data on a drive failure is kind of scary. Since they will eventually fail, I decided to spend some time looking at Drobos and other RAID solutions for home use.

They all have their pros and cons (and costs), so I went and gave Windows Home Server with PP1 a try. I took the old gaming PC that I had put Ubuntu and XBMC on and converted it to a WHS and started experimenting with what it can do. I was initially looking for just a decent redundancy solution, but this ended up being so much more fexible and extensible with plug-in SDK, that I've been writing my own to support features I want.

To start with, it's not really RAID, but instead does file-level mirroring on any folders I configure and will balance "shadow copies" of files onto seperate drives. This means I get RAID-1-like functionality, but I can add any random drive to extend the storage pool without having to match capacities or losing any usable space. Since I can select what folders to mirror, the result is a file server that acts like a RAID for important files I can't lose, but acts like a normal NAS for everything else to make better use of space.

This is a main distinction as other RAID solutions protect everything or nothing. WHS allows me to choose either of those extremes, or some place in between. Another distinction is since it's file-level mirroring, a failed drive will contain all the data for any given file (unlike RAID striping). So even if the files on it were un-mirrored, I have all of my normal data recovery options to extract those files, like what I recently went through. The same goes for multi-drive failures - instead of potentially losing an entire array, each drive still has normal recovery options making it (slightly) less catastrophic.

But it's the other features that really makes this into more than a disk storage solution. I get remote access to the file server and Windows PCs on my network with a homeserver.com domain, including a free SSL certificate (nice!). I have it configured as a print server as well as hosting several virtual machines. All the stuff on my main PC is now running in a VM on the WHS, as well as my RedHat server, and the hardware consolidated. I used to remote access through SSH tunnels, but this is so much easier with no ports to mess with.

For Windows PCs on my network, it automates nightly backups to "set it and forget it". It does some nice tricks to save storage space by only storing the same files once and ignoring temp/swap files. It also saves all the necessary drivers to a restore folder, which are used if a full system restore is needed. This is as simple as booting a CD, inserting a flash drive containing the driver folder, and selecting the backup date to recover. To make sure it works, I tested this on my laptop restoring a full backup to an empty drive and had it back running in under 20 minutes with everything it had before.

It's disappointing though, that the automated backup doesn't work with my PowerBook or RedHat server. Those can still access the file server and can be manually backed up to it with other backup solutions (but that really means never). Overall, I'm very happy with how things are set up now and it's been running very smoothly. I've got 2 extra PCs that I need figure out what to do with... :) But now that I'm done fiddling with this, I should have more time for kit building which I haven't touched in a month!

Push-molds

2008-08-23T23:58:00.000-07:00

So, I've been experimenting with push molds made out of sculpey after that horrible failure using InstaMold. Having limited success, I've gotten to the point I can now cast some decent shapes I can actually use:

This is another try at making a pinky style head, this time using a push mold. As the mold isn't flexible, there can't be any undercuts to the object being cast and it turns out, it's really hard to remove an object from the mold. I've tried dusting with baking powder and using cooking spray as some forms of release, both which sort of work, but have their issues.

What seems to work best so far is simply boiling it. After pushing the sculpey into the mold, boil the whole thing for 10 minutes and the cast will partially cure. Once cooled, it actually had dislodged itself from the mold and was easily removed without deforming. The surface texture isn't so great though, but that might be because I used Sculpey III and not the super smooth kind. In any case, it should be easy to fix, like a resin part. The hardest thing is kneading the sculpey into a consistent mixture with no air bubbles or folds. If these are left in the cast, it has a tendency to crack when curing.

Anyway, I had an idea when browsing the pinky mods, so I'm planning to use this as the start for that project.

Dust Control

2008-08-16T10:35:00.000-07:00

Morning coffee with biscotti, Mmm... Thought I would share something that worked out really well for me. I've been doing my sanding and cleanup by wet sanding with sandpaper and needle files because I like the control and it doesn't get resin dust everywhere. But with my last kit, this was going too slow, so I decided to break out the dremel with a flex attachment and a vari-speed foot controller. I bought these a while ago, but only used them once because resin dust got everywhere. I looked around the house to find a solution for this problem and found a large plastic biscotti jar from Costco.

The opening of the jar is about 4" in diameter, which is perfect for placing a hand in with enough room to move a flex tool around. I cut the bottom clean off which gives a large opening for even the biggest parts and enough room to move around inside. Since the jar is clear all around, there isn't an issue with visibility and you can still see all around the part while working on it.

It's still hard to clean up detail areas with the dremel, but for knocking down seams and removing excess resin, it goes very fast. Still wear a respirator while sanding though, as some dust will escape and don't want to be breathing that stuff in!

Pinky Mods

2008-08-13T22:29:00.000-07:00

There's this whole community of kit builders that focus on Pinky:St mods and you often see some of these come up as event kits, like the Pinky Saber. Here are some recent additions in this kit category from WF2008, found on YJA.

These are like mini resin kits, and they work great as beginner kits and are really a lot of fun. They're small, so not a lot of surface area to prep and they don't require a lot of paint. Steps to building them are the same as a typical resin kit, although it's not always necessary to pin them and some areas can be left unglued for swappable parts. I have the EVA 00 Pinky Mod from a previous WF and think I might start that soon.

How to get to Pinky Street? is an excellent collection of Pinky related sites, many of which deal with mods. Most of the sites are in Japanese however, but you can always look at the pictures! Anyway, looking at these has given me an idea for another Sculpey project. :)

Web Surfing

2008-08-02T12:48:00.000-07:00

Since 2008 Summer WonderFestival is this weekend, I've been surfing around the sculptor sites to find anything new that might be of interest. I'm still looking for a good Mikuru kit to go along with Haruhi and Yuki, but as much as I like the Bubba sculpts, I did't like the Mikuru bunny. There's a new Griffon Goth Mikuru, but I think it's only available as PVC.

A few others I liked from T's System and Kaoru..

Cerberus Project seems to have gone into the ball-joint-doll direction, and though I've never been interested in these, they are very detailed and fairly impressive.

[orig] Moyashimon

2008-07-20T12:35:00.000-07:00

[ 06.22.08 ]

I finished these today. This is my first attempt at making something out of Sculpey polymer clay. It's mostly a test to see how the material behaves through the sculpting and building phases. They're fairly simple and not even close to being "perfect", but I learned a lot about the properties of the clay to try making more complex things in the future.

I initially gave the oryzae-tans larger bases so they can stand on their own, but they're not very stable and knock over easily. So I embedded micro magnets in their bases and they happily cling to metal surfaces.

Medium: Acrylic on polymer clay (original sculpts). Non-scale @ 2.5cm tall. 3 photos.

Hangin' with the gals
Let's brew!

[ 07.20.08 ]

I ended up giving all of these away and kaien got a set of three. She shares with us some photos around the house:

Expandable Posts, Part 2

2008-07-08T23:07:00.000-07:00

I've re-ordered all the "work in progress" posts so they flow chronologically. It occurred to me that the excerpt code can be used to pull text out of anywhere in a post, so the "in progress" dilemma is solved. I tested this out on the Angel Rebirth wip and it works very well, so I've updated all older wips to follow.

So, what was the problem? The blogger platform necessarily places the most recent entries on top, so "in progress" posts which are frequently updated were done in reverse (i.e. the newest updates would be visible on top). With excerpts, I can simply pull out the last update to the front/index pages without needing to worry about its order. So now all the wip pages flow nicely from start to end, yet when the post is updated, the latest update will still show on the front page! Yeah!

While the Blogger expandable post page explains putting the "summary" text outside the span, the code itself doesn't care where the spans are nor how many there are. So, this little trick works for any frequently updated post. Just add multiple spans around any text you want to hide and what's left will be shown on the front/index pages, regardless of where it is in the post.

By default, the read more link jumps to the start of the post, but we can get it to jump to the excerpt by adding a navigation label "#more" to the template:

<a expr:href='data:post.url + "#more"'>read more</a>

If there's no "#more" label in the post, this still jumps to the start. Optionally, for really long posts, insert the label before the excerpt and we'll jump to it instead:

<a name="more"></a>

Excuse Our Mess

2008-07-04T22:52:00.001-07:00

I've been editing this blog's template today so things have been broken for a while. I wanted to fix some things that have been annoying me about Blogger. Since some of the posts can be quite lengthy, clicking on the labels generates huge pages that are too difficult to read. You'll notice many posts now will have a "... read more »" link, with only one or two paragraphs shown. Click the link to read the full post.

This is based on the Blogger hack for expandable posts, but that one lies by placing the "read more" on every post whether it is expandable or not. It seems to me that lying to your readers is generally not a good idea, such as telling them there's more to read when there isn't. I don't understand why the correct functionality isn't simply included in the Blogger platform, as I spent the day reading up on javascript programming and templates to get this to work right. This fix works by checking each post for a "fullpost" span and then only showing the link if one exists.

If you want to do this yourself, first implement the instructions on the Blogger Help in your template. When you're done, go to where you put the "Read More" link - we are going to replace it with another class and some code, like so:

    <span class='readmore' style='float:right'>
      ( <a expr:href='data:post.url'>read more</a> )
    </span>
    <script type='text/javascript'>
      var body=document.getElementById("<data:post.url/>");
      var spans=body.getElementsByTagName('span');
      for (var i=0; i<spans.length; i++) {
        if (spans[i].className == "fullpost") break;
        if (spans[i].className == "readmore")
          spans[i].style.display='none';
      }
    </script>

For the script to work, we just need to uniquely tag each post body with its url. Find the 'post-body' div, and add the post.url id to the end, like so:

<div class='post-body' expr:id='data:post.url'>

That's all there is to it. I think Blogger should be ashamed for leaving this as an "exercise for the reader". Your readers that are looking for help are typically bloggers, not programmers, and it's only one extra step from those described in the help page to tag the bodies.

On to the other blog changes, which include new gallery quick links on the left, so people looking for a specific kit don't need to dig around. Labels and archives have moved to an additional column for site navigation. I've been testing the layout with FF3 and IE7, which I've found measure things quite differently but seems to be working now on both. *headache* If you notice any layout issues with your preferred browser, please let me know.

Finally, I know there are a lot of references to this blog from images.google.com which has crawled it recently and it's awful. Practically every image I've posted is linked to every keyword (even from RSS feed titles) having nothing to do with the image itself. My apologies if you've stumbled on this blog from there and can't find what you're looking for.

Diablo3

2008-06-28T09:51:00.000-07:00

Blizzard has been hosting teaser splash pages the last few days leading to the Worldwide Invitational and it's official - Diablo3 is coming:

Perhaps from some Wow influence, it seems more skill based with a recognizable skill hotbar. Does that mean UI mods will be allowed? Wow mechanics in a real game would be something to look forward to. It always seemed to me that they could easily take the Wow engine and build a game out of it - like, a real game.

Each character class gets a male and female version as well, look familiar?

Mold-making

2008-06-27T23:43:00.001-07:00

I gave away all but one of the moyashimon and have been thinking about learning to cast again. I bought this stuff called InstaMold at Michaels and experimented with it a little.

Don't let the "just add water" and "E" for easy fool you, this stuff does not work as advertised. I mixed the "strong" ratio which was supposed to set in 3 minutes and after 10 hours the mold still had not set. So far, absolute failure.

It is interesting to note that this stuff is endothermic. After 10 hours, it was still wet, but very cold to the touch and the surrounding air noticeably cooler. Perhaps hot water is needed to start a reaction, but cold tap water just didn't work at all. A quick google suggests this stuff is junk.

So now I'm thinking it might actually be easier to make a push mold out of sculpey itself. At least I know I can push an object into soft sculpey and bake it, so long as it doesn't have any undercuts (which none of these do) and the object can be removed. Not sure how much detail it will retain, but I think it's worth a try this weekend.

[wip] Fun with Sculpey

2008-06-21T12:36:00.000-07:00

[ 06.01.08 ]

I wanted to find out how Sculpey behaves when cured so decided to try something simple:

Rolled out the parts and baked them for 15 minutes. The result is something a bit softer than resin, but very workable - not tacky, easily sanded and drilled. I pinned the parts like a normal resin kit and found that the surface bond when tacky is very fragile when cured. Each of the blocks in the antennae broke apart with slight force and had to be glued. This is actually a good thing, since it means it should be easier to make parts fitted together and seperate them after curing.

Oryzae-tan, about 2.5cm tall. Finishing it from here on would be just like doing a regular resin kit.

After wet sanding, antennae rounded and mouth filled in with some putty. On top of a penny for size reference.

I need to wait for the putty to cure to work on the mouth and also cure the base. I'm going to finish painting him and set him on my monitor at work. :D

[ 06.03.08 ]

Let's brew!! I decided to make more oryzae-tans and thought about making a mould to cast them, but I've never done casting and they're so small I'm not sure how to layout the mould. It was easier to just sculpt more and each one is slightly different which gives them some character.

Fresh from the oven, here they are stuck to my work lamp. I embeded a 1/16" NdFeB magnet into each base so they will stick to any metal surface, at any angle, even upside down. I think these will do for now. I'll sand down the new ones and then start painting.

[ 06.05.08 ]

And some friends...

[ 06.08.08 ]

I accidentally let some paint dry in my airbrush for a few days. After painting Satsuki, I wanted to clean it in the ultrasonic, but got caught up in taking photos and left it on the counter. It took a few days of soaking in cleaner before I could dislodge the dried paint, but it's back in service now and the spray pattern looks about the same as before.

Base coat sprayed with white mixed in a sealer. It seems that paint adheres to sculpey slightly different than resin, so I had to spray in even thinner layers to avoid droplets beading up. This will get a light sanding when cured and then the actual colors will go on.

You might have noticed I bought a new cutting mat. I left some uncured sculpey on my old mat (the purple one) and it reacted with the mat surface. There are warnings on sculpey to not place it uncured on fine furniture, but it seems to react to a lot of surfaces. The warning should probably be don't place uncured sculpey on anything you don't want damaged. It doesn't react to aluminum foil, so I've been placing it on foil since.

[ 06.19.08 ]

I've been testing out the new PC by playing Orange Box, which had been sitting in my steam account for ages, thus neglecting these little guys. I finally sprayed on the colors tonight:

I don't think I'll shade them as they look like claymation figures, which is the idea - plus this little project was just for me to figure out how to work with sculpey.

[ 06.21.08 ]

Eyes painted, assembled and sprayed with Future to seal. Too glossy though, so they'll get a flat finish later and be done. They like hanging around my work lamp.. shoo!

If you are wondering what these things are, they are micro-organisms from Moyashimon.

[ complete ]

They're finished here. Kaien wins one of the oryzae-tans for commenting on my blog. ^o^

New Gaming PC

2008-06-14T11:07:00.000-07:00

I had the opportunity to acquire a new wolfdale CPU at discount and decided it was time to build a new PC. It's been about 7 years since I stopped building computers and my last two were pre-built from Dell over 5 years ago (hyperthreaded P4s!). They still work great, but are slow by current standards and won't keep up with the latest games. So here's what I've put together:

Intel C2D E8400 3GHz
Asus P5KC
Nvidia 8800GT 512
Geil Ultra 1066 PC8500 2x1G
CM 80+ RS-650W

Recycled an old ATX mini tower case and it booted first try. The Geils, however, don't run at the rated speed - the SPD is 800MHz cas5 and they will run at 950MHz, but not stable and they won't POST past 1GHz no matter what (even bumping to 2.4v with looser timings as Geil claims will work). They simply do not, so could have saved some money with cheaper PC6400 (since that's what they really are) or a more compatible brand.

During this exercise, I found what I really miss is the simplicity of the Dell clamshell cases. Too bad Dell uses all proprietary parts, so the cases can't be re-used. I've never felt cramped installing parts into the Dells, which are even smaller than the standard ATX mini tower, yet they feel so roomy when opened. Meanwhile, I swear up and down at the crappy ATX cases - if Dell would only design a clamshell that takes standard ATX parts.

The E8400 is a overclocking beast. It will run at 4GHz on air, but the cores run too hot for comfort without a better cooler. With just the stock cooler, 3.6GHz seems to be the sweet spot - the cores hit 65C under 100% load at 1.2v and passes Prime95 overnight. While in acceptable range, that's still a bit hot to me, so I'm going to try an Arctic Freezer cooler.

I'm already happy with the performance so far and total cost was $465. Now, off to re-install all the software..... ^^;;;;

Installed an Arctic Freezer 7 Pro and bumped it up to 3.8GHz at 1.25v - the cores max at 60C on prime torture test overnight. Typical gaming load sits between 50-55C and it is very stable.

I was sad to see the PowerEdge 400SC get gutted though, so I decided to experiment with Ubuntu XBMC. I put the original 256MB and 40GB drive back into the box and installed Xubuntu and LXBMC. It streams up to 720p content at about 70% on both "cores" (hyper-threaded), but can't keep up with 1080p content. It also lags on some mkv subtitles with lots of text, but at this stage, it's quite usable as an extra network media player. I needs to get a little more stable though before I replace the xbox, as I can crash it pretty easily.

Hobby Supplies

2008-05-31T22:27:00.000-07:00

I picked up a bunch of these wood plaques at Michaels when I went to look for something suitable as a base for Satsuki. These were $1 each, roughly 5"x7" in varying shapes, and are made up of 7 wood veneers sandwiched together with beveled edges. It worked great painted, leaving one veneer of wood showing, though the rough surface is still visible after painting. I think something like gesso, then sanded down might give an absolutely smooth surface to get rid of the grain under paint. I also looked at solid wood boards, but it was impossible to find one that wasn't warped. These veneered plaques were cheaper and perfectly flat. I'm going to use the oval one to make a proper base for Yuki.

I also picked up a block of Sculpey III after watching that Plamo scratchbuild video. This stuff is a bit strange to work with though. It starts out hard and crumbly, but after kneading it for a while, it becomes soft and slightly sticky. I played around with a small ball of it and came up with this after 10 minutes, something similar to a Pinky head.

At this point, it was really too soft to continue working with. Any pressure would deform it, so I let it rest hoping it would harden again, which it did overnight. Michaels has one of their rare 25% off entire purchase coupons tomorrow, so I think I'll grab some more stuff.