I am a man of several oddly specific talents. This is my main portfolio for model kits and 3D prints; if you're interested, I am currently accepting commissions on Etsy at www.etsy.com/shop/TheArchitectMouse
I have some free time on my hands so I thought I'd try making some ominous little sculptures. Kinda just doodles, but in 3D. I painted them with Musou Black, one of those ultra-absorbant paints that absorbs 99% of all light. They look good in person, but they look even better on camera.
"Ominous Sex Toy" was not the plan, but... I mean...
Maybe I'll do more of these, but they feel oddly cheap. Like, if you saw these same shapes carved from wood, they'd be really impressive, but each of these only took like 10-20 minutes to model.
Kitbash with 3D-printed parts. Modeling, printing, and painting by me.
tl;dr: it's a lot!
This kit--the FigureRise Ultraman Frontal Assault v7.5, something like that--is honestly not very good in my books. The torso feels so solid that it feels like a brick with limbs.
But with the right color scheme it can easily pass for a knock-off Gray Fox.
That's basically the premise of this build: a mass-produced cyborg ninja and a MGS4-era version of the Walker Gear from MGSV.
Fun fact: I always assumed that Walker Gears had four wheels, but it wasn't until I was looking up references for this build, a decade after MGSV came out, that I realized that they only have two. The front points of contact with the ground are actually just flat panels, making Walker Gears more like snowmobiles than cars. I think my version makes a bit more sense. :P
Really does have a similar silhouette to a Metal Gear huh? I wonder how much the Bunyip Ginga's designer was taking notes from Shinkawa.
Making those guns/tanks/controls/whatever attach to the Ginga was the most important part of the build, because that's the connection point between the two kits.
The Ginga's impressively long legs and wide flat head with machine guns on the sides make it look a lot like the Gekkos in MGS4.
The footrest is just a spare piece of sprue. :P Did you know those fit perfectly into the 3mm holes that are all over kits nowadays?
My best attempt at an Akira slide.
I'm impressed that this thing can handle all that weight.
I suppose this Walker Gear offers less protection than the ones you see in MGSV. It does, however, have the advantage of having a chair.
I was considering modeling some kind of windshield or protective covering, but by the end of this build I was very ready for it to be over.
The Ginga has what looks like a big handhold right in the middle of the back of its head. I have no idea what it could actually be intended for, so I decided it was indeed a handhold to help the pilot mount up.
Kitbash with 3D-printed parts. Modeling, printing, and painting by me. Might be worth putting a little warning here for gore, btw.
A while back, I used parts from the 30MM Rosan Paladin and 30MM Liber Warrior to make my Black Knight custom, but then I had two half-cannibalized kits left over afterwards. I decided to get a little gruesome with things and embrace the horror of kitbashing.
The concept behind this build was a corpse that a mad AI had repurposed into a soldier by replacing the severed limbs with robot parts. Nothing fits together properly and it can barely move, but if it works, it works. Not sure what the medieval knight + mad AI concept implies about the setting, honestly. It was just the only way to make skull + knight + robot limbs fit together in my brain.
There's a shot from Star Trek First Contact that's always stuck with me, where a freshly assimilated Borg has had an arm cut off and is having borg implants jammed down the stump. That was kinda the inspiration for the left arm here.
I used hot glue to create the gross viscera in the hip and arm. I'm honestly surprised at how well it turned out.
The only 3D-printed pieces on this kit are the little circles with three holes on them, which are just there to cover up all the leftover connection points in the 30MM kits. Lorewise, I guess they're like, control points riveted into the skeleton to give the AI control over each area.
I've been experimenting with new weathering techniques lately, and I'm quite pleased at how they turned out.
Fun fact, the only reason this fella is left-handed is because the kit the arm came from doesn't have an open hand. :P
The fun part about the mismatched legs is that their height difference is significant enough that just making the thing stand naturally puts him in a zombie-shuffle-ish pose. He is physically incapable of standing in a way that isn't creepy.
Anubis, Jehuty, and now Vic Viper; I've finally finished making all the (good) designs from Zone of the Enders. Something about their only vaguely humanoid characteristics really appeals to me; they don't generally walk under their own gravity, so why bother having feet? (Don't ask why they have legs in the first place.)
I'm a little tired of giant mecha that are basically just giant people in terms of their proportions and designs. There's nothing really wrong with that, but I always gravitate toward the designs that embrace their own weirdness.
For instance, Viper's fingers can retract into the arm and turn it into a blade. Why? Why not!
Viper is definitely the weirdest of the ZoE kits. Jehuty and Anubis are two variations on the same design, so it makes sense for them to be similar, but Viper is completely different, with all its oddly placed barcode decals and knife-arms and flight mode.
I also have a spot for transforming mecha that aren't obviously just a person lying down with the legs dangling out the back. Viper is more like a collection of loosely connected shapes around a couple central pieces. The "shoulders" are just a pair of big triangles on their own little arms, separate from the arms proper, so once they fold back, there's no reason to see them as shoulders anymore.
Unfortunately, this is an absolutely wretched flight form to actually put together. Have fun putting dozens of joints at the exact right angles with no indication of when you've got it right other than a somewhat confusing set of instructions. Half of the joints are also fixed in weird angles to begin with, meaning nothing articulates as freely as it seems like it should.
Fun fact, according to the designer, the number 74 is there because he put together "nana" (seven) and "shi" (four) to make "nashi" (nothing). As in, there is nothing significant about the number.
The only personalized spin I put on this kit, other than a more metallic white for the primary color, was changing the lilac accents to metallic orange. Lilac just didn't jive with the rest of the color scheme IMO.
Overall though, this was just kind of a miserable build all along, and I scratched the hell out of everything while transforming it for the photos. This one ain't winning any awards.
Custom build with LED lighting kit and custom-made 3D-printed parts. Files available here.
There's always That Bitch at a modelmaking competition who comes with the ridiculously extra Gunpla build. Massive, detailed, LEDs, the whole nine yards. I decided that this year, I would be That Bitch.
I went through three or four different iterations on this build's color scheme; I ended up stripping the paint off and starting over at least twice. Fortunately not on the entire kit, just some of the first pieces I started painting and then decided, nah this ain't it. I ended up going with mostly Alclad paints, with Alclad Steel as the primary color. A lot of the interior, I actually left untouched; the kit comes with a lovely metallic blue and a lot of great silver and gold pieces that I didn't think I could improve on.
The pilot and cockpit in the Sky Defender are actually surprisingly low-effort compared to everything else. The pilot figure doesn't have much detail, and the walls of the interior are completely bare. I rectified that by covering the walls in some of the metallic stickers that I decided against putting on the kit for whatever reason. It's all pretty hard to see now, unfortunately.
I love how well these legs came together. I spent most of the build thinking about the wings and torso, but the legs are excellently designed.
The butt, too. Man, it's a shame this thing is mostly hidden by the stand.
This chunk of the back is actually a detachable drone. I thought the fin was a little too dramatic, so I made my own more low-key one.
On the right side, you can still see the wires going from piece to piece. Unfortunately, the wires are too short to be laid flat along the surface; they have to hang out like that.
The wings have a bunch of articulated sections, but oddly most of them just swing further up, until they start knocking into the other wing. I was surprised they couldn't swing downwards at all.
This is about as low as they go.
I am so, so happy with how well the 3D-printed clear parts came out. The amount of cool combinations of colors and patterns you can do with this kit is incredible once you're not held back by the neon green.
Custom build with LED lighting kit and custom-made 3D-printed parts. Thoughts on the base kit, lighting kit, and my modifications.
God, what a beast of a kit. I know some people don't care for the third-party Chinese "make EVERYTHING pointy" aesthetic, but I love it. It also doesn't hurt that they tend to be both high quality and cheap. Meet the Einta Industries Sky Defender: not quite the Hi-Nu Gundam, not quite the Strike Freedom Gundam, but a glorious mix of both.
Absolutely massive in every dimension, and over 1,000 pieces. I'm actually amazed that I only lost two over the months it took to finish this build. (Thankfully one is mostly hidden and the other is hard to spot.)
There are very few outright flaws with this kit in terms of construction; the only major one is that the tightness of the parts makes it easy to accidentally break the pegs when you take it apart for painting. Thankfully nearly everything has more than one peg, so you can afford to lose a few.
Until this build, I never quite got why some people put so much work into painting the interior frames of kits when it would all be hidden in the end. Now I get it. There's something super satisfying about bringing all these details to life and knowing that they're there and that no one else will ever see them.
The Sky Defender comes with a pair of beam sabers, which aren't particularly special...
...and a pair of massive fuckoff rifle blades, which absolutely are.
So let's talk about the KOSMOS lighting kit. For $60, it's got a ton of options, almost all of the LEDs are RGB, there are dozens of sequences you can use to animate them, and the LEDs themselves fit perfectly into the kit with only a couple small modifications. There are, however, three huge catches.
Flaw #1: Get ready for a lot of untranslated Chinese. (Obviously this isn't a flaw if you actually speak Chinese, but hey.) The magic of Google Translate can help you with the instruction booklet, which isn't so bad.
However, the instructions on how to actually install the kit essentially say, "this is too complicated to describe in a booklet; go watch our videos." The videos in question are on bilibili, the Chinese video-hosting website. You don't need to know Chinese to follow along with them, but without an account, you're going to be stuck watching them in potato quality. Personally, I don't trust my personal information to any website made in a language I don't speak, so it was potato season for me.
Flaw #2: The wires are _not_ well hidden. Some parts are better than others--the wires inside the rifle and inside the arm are actually quite invisible--but more often than not, the terminals just hang out in the open air.
The back of the wings and the base of the stand are particularly egregious. Loose wires everywhere. "I bet I can fix that," I thought. I was... sorta right?
For the rifles, I added these large fuel tanks to the inner side. The tanks have internal cavities where you can hide those ugly terminals. There's still a loose wire going out of the gun, into the tank, and then into the arm, but it's a lot less noticeable now.
For the wings and stand, I made caps to cover the worst of it. Same problem as before, in that there are still lots of loose wires involved, but it could be worse.
Oddly, the instructions don't say anything about how to fit the wires inside the stand, but it's not very difficult to figure out.
Flaw #3: You can have it in any color you want, as long as it's green. All the clear pieces of the Sky Defender are cast in a neon green that in my opinion feels like the sort of thing you'd see on a Happy Meal toy. But even if you don't mind the color, it's extremely frustrating when you realize that the wings are all RGB lighting, but the clear parts are green, so making the LEDs any color other than white, green, blue, etc. clashes horribly. If you wanted the kit to light up red, orange, purple, etc, you're just out of luck.
Unless, of course, you're a stubborn jerk with a pair of calipers and way too much time on his hands. I recreated (admittedly, quite imperfectly) all the clear parts that have LEDs behind them in Blender, and printed them in clear resin. Some of them fit better than others, but the results, well...
Get that neon green nonsense outta here. You can't tell me what to do!
(I'm getting near the image limit so this is gonna have to be a two-parter.)
The client wanted to draw a racetrack on a whiteboard and then play a ttrpg race using magnetic game pieces. What a cool idea!
I love how the texture of my fridge makes it look like there are speed lines here.
The client wanted ten racers but didn't have any particular requests other than the original four, so filled out the ranks with some of my personal favorites. Well, the personal favorites that were wide enough to more or less hide a magnet, anyway.
Since they're only an inch long, these are just modified versions of the in-game models. No need for crazy amounts of detail, though I did thicken a few wings and fins to make them less fragile.
Modeling, printing, and painting by me. Files available here; prints available for purchase here.
I have mixed feelings about these new designs for the Beams--Ugh, sorry, shots--in Prime 4. The way the Arm Cannon articulates looks awesome and when they're fully charged, they each look very distinct. But in normal gameplay, they only transform small parts of the cannon instead of the whole thing, and since there are no longer any enemies that actually require a specific Shot to defeat, they feel just a little bit flaccid in execution IMO.
Despite the basic Power Beam looking very similar to the previous versions from the top, the whole thing has been completely redesigned this time around. The LEDs on the sides look a little unnecessary to me, but apart from that, I think this might be the best the Arm Cannon has ever looked. The basic shape is still the same, but all the extraneous details on the bottom have been removed, making it look very sleek by comparison.
In the past, I wanted to make my Figma arm cannons match the color scheme of the cannon that came with the Figma, which wasn't completely color accurate to the game. This time, since it's a brand new design that hasn't been made into a Figma (yet?), I decided to try something a little more accurate. I ended up using another color-shifting paint from TurboDork called Forrest Flux, which has a lovely green/teal/blue fade. It isn't perfect, but at least I don't have to mix the color myself the way I have to with the other ones.
The biggest bummer about this whole project is that I went a bit too far with the tiny details in the model; after it's been printed at ~2 inches long, they're basically impossible to see.
Commission; model by NerdMakerEngineer; printing and painting by me.
The original plan with this commission was for it to be another maglev build using the same kind of module as last time. Unfortunately, the module arrived with a broken piece, it was past the return date, and I couldn't find anywhere to replace that piece, so we ended up sticking it on one of my own bases instead.
Other than the hole for the base, I added one more modification: the registry numbers on the front and sides. I know they'd probably look better as decals, but I don't have a decal printer, so this was way easier.
NerdMakerEngineer's model is excellently designed, by the way. I'm glad he didn't include a cockpit interior, because at some point I'll no doubt be making my own Little Wyvern model, and hopefully mine having one will make it obvious that I didn't copy him. :P
Commission; model by TimeWingWorkshop, printing and painting by me.
I've never played Chrono Trigger, but I've heard nothing but good things about it. This is a pretty neat little ship, and the modeler did a great job with it. My only adjustment was, as per usual, a vacuum-formed cockpit instead of a printed one.
Commission; model by Chris Nichols, printing and painting by me.
I'd never seen The Last Starfighter before getting this commission, so it was kinda funny to watch it afterwards and realize that it did actually behave pretty much exactly the way I thought it might just based on putting the model together. The 360-degree gunner's chair and the wide range of motion for the turrets with a separate pilot's chair makes for a pretty cool justification for a ship that works like a rail shooter.
I made two small modifications to the model: a hole so it could be mounted on a 3mm stand, and vacuum-formed cockpits instead of printed ones.
I honestly wasn't expecting them to work, but these panels were still able to articulate more or less as intended, even at the scale the client wanted (about 2.5" long).
There's also some great detail work in the model under those vents, but unfortunately it's very hard to see.
Modeling, printing, and painting by me. Available for purchase here; files available here.
Been sitting on this one for a while, and the existence of a modelmaking competition this Saturday finally got me to get my butt in gear and finish it. About a year ago I got back into Homeworld for the first time since I was a literal child and holy crap, what a game.
Despite the dozens of types of big badass ships in the game, the humble Salvage Corvette is my favorite. If you haven't played the game, these little fellas can latch onto salvage as the name suggests, but they can also latch onto enemy ships and bring them back to your Mothership, whereupon they become part of your fleet.
This is, to put it mildly, both hilarious and immensely satisfying. Sending a half dozen of these little guys fly straight into a battle, having them grab the enemy's biggest baddest ship, and then tow it off the battlefield, is complete gremlin behavior. Yoink, you didn't pay your parking fee, your ship is mine now.
So naturally, I put magnets in mine, so it can actually hold stuff too.
Or, alternatively, you can just stick it to something metal.
"A Legitimate Salvage"
Did I print and paint an entire Rocinante just to make this joke? You bet I did.
I also scaled it to be more or less consistent with the Salvage Corvette, and added spaces to install magnets of its own so the connection would be secure.
The Rocinante model was made by JakkuSalvage; available here.
Customized kit with 3D printed additions. Modeling, printing, and painting (mostly) by me. Files available here.
When I first saw the AMAIM Ghost, my only thought was, "that's literally just an Elite from Halo holy crap." Two opposable thumbs, digitigrade legs with three-toed feet, even the color scheme looks like it would be at home with the Banished.
The asymmetry, however, wasn't super compatible with most Elites. It did, however, remind me of Jega 'Rdomnai, the "you can tell the devs really liked Doom Eternal" boss from Halo Infinite. 'Rdomnai has a robotic left arm with a weapon built in, so I thought my custom could have a similar story.
The backstory for my dude is that he's essentially a Sangheili Darth Vader. The torso, right arm, and some of the head are still organic, but everything else is robotic. (This was mostly just a way to handwave the proportions not perfectly matching up with an actual Sangheili.)
The left eye is still organic...
...but the right one is cybernetic now.
Also yes, I modeled/printed/painted those mandibles to bring the whole thing together.
His left hand is essentially a bear trap, perfectly sized to smush human heads.
I borrowed someone's model of an Energy Sword hilt (sorry, I don't remember whose it was, it was like a year ago, my bad!) and modeled a hand and blades to go with it. The Ghost's normal hand is all just blocks and straight lines so a caliper was all I needed to make a convincing replica.
I modeled a Jackal-style shield for the left arm, but I never got it to print right and I kinda just gave up. It wasn't that important a part of the look of the kit.
I didn't watch much of the AMAIM show (it wasn't very good IMO) but I think those big things on the Ghost's back are ECM jammers or something. In my build however, they're thrusters.
Vesper's feet can generate little force fields that let him slide around with minimal friction, and the the thrusters let him move a bit like an Armored Core, skidding along the ground at high speeds. Normally he keeps his shield up, but if you dodge him enough he becomes enraged and lowers his guard to charge recklessly, giving you an opening.
He also carries a Plasma Rifle, but it's just a regular one. Wouldn't want to make the boss fight too overpowered. :P
I used Turbo Dork Blue Raspberry to get that blue-to-purple Covenant sheen. I'm really happy with how it turned out.
The Plasma Rifle was by far the hardest thing to make, because I'm a perfectionist and I really wanted to have that hexagonal pattern molded directly into it.
The solution I ended up with was using the Blender plugin HardOps to create a plate for each piece, then shrinkwrapping a honeycomb around it and using a Boolean Intersect to turn the plate into a honeycomb-shaped cutter that a Boolean Difference could use to cut into the actual model. It's basically this technique with a few extra steps. The results aren't perfect--you can see plenty of places where the pattern gets a little stretched, particularly down the middle of each piece--but when the end result is only going to be two inches long, I think it's more than sufficient.
About ten years ago I made this desert camo trio of a Mobile Worker, a heavy artillery suit, and a more mobile, er, mobile suit. It actually won first place in the 1/144 category at OMS 2019. I recently discovered that there's another competition happening next month, so I thought it was time to resurrect the stalled sequel project.
Making camouflage patterns is something I really should do more often, because it's a lot of fun, trying to make sure that a shape continues across multiple surfaces at multiple angles.
For instance, the way the shoulder merges with the body, or the gun merges with the arm and shoulder...
...while the same gun also lines up with the butt plate when it's holstered...
...and with a different part of the torso when raised.
Despite being a literal tank, I imagine the Mobile Worker as being a light and maneuverable spotter for the mobile suits.
By far the most interesting piece of the trio, however, is this fella. He's a kitbash of the Astaroth Origin, Kampfer, Gaplant Hrairoo, Barbatos Lupus, and Beguir-Beu. Blimey that's a lot of words my spellchecker doesn't like.
I really like the amount of different things the Astaroth Origin's shoulder thingies can do. They can be used as extra guns...
...or as a shield.
I'm not sure this was intended, but I really like it.
Especially once you add the rifle's sniper extension; the whole thing looks like a massive turret, or an MT from Armored Core.
It's also not intentional, but that rifle extension lends itself very easily to looking like a sword, too.
The original plan for this build was for the melee weapon to be this lance, but the sword/sniper rifle works a lot better IMO.
I drilled some holes to install wires in the kit, to keep the flight form from getting out of alignment. After years of messing around with the idea of making this build but never actually starting on it, the Astaroth's joints got a little droopy.
There's something really elegant about this flight form; I'm a little surprised there's never been anything else like it.
The many thrusters also give you a really clear mental image of how this thing would maneuver.
In retrospect, it's kinda funny that the Gusion and worker are straight builds with limited functions and poses, while the Astaroth has pieces from half a dozen kits and an absolute mountain of different things going on.
A fun demonstration of camouflage patterns lining up over multiple pieces. All of this is focused on the right shoulder pylon, and every shape outlined in red is made by multiple overlapping pieces. Yes, these were all intentional.
A few months ago, fellow F-Zero-racer-creator alphaej turned me on to this excellent new means of creating clear canopies for scale models, and I figured I should lay out my process somewhere in case folks were curious.
This chonky piece of equipment is a vacuum-forming machine. You know how lots of products come in hard plastic packaging that's formed in a specific shape around them, like pills or batteries? This is how those are made.
The top bit with the red knob is a heating element, which softens and melts a thin piece of plastic sandwiched together by the two pieces of metal below it. Below all that is where you put the molds--properly called "bucks"--of what you're trying to make.
After a minute or two of being heated, the plastic starts to droop like this. Then you use the red handle to bring the whole apparatus crashing down onto the bucks and simultaneously hit a switch that starts sucking air down into the machine.
This is a different kind of vacuum-forming machine but the process is more or less the same. The air between the buck and the plastic is sucked out, making the soft plastic conform to the edges of the buck, creating a mold.
Before and after.
For modeling purposes, this technique is not always ideal, because the mold it creates will never be as sharply defined as a 3D-printed piece. See how all the edges are a little softer and more rounded?
However, it is INCREDIBLY useful when it comes to making clear pieces. 3D printing clear pieces is often a labor-intensive process. Without going into it too deeply, resin printing always has small imperfections like layer lines and divots left behind by supports. Usually, sanding and priming is enough to hide them, but when the piece is meant to represent a glass canopy, every flaw is magnified a hundredfold and takes a great deal of effort to hide.
A vacuum-formed piece, on the other hand, will be crystal-clear every time, and only requires a couple minutes to make.
And if you have a printer available, making a buck for your canopies is pretty simple: just take your canopy and scale it down a little bit to account for the thickness of the plastic.
The pieces on the right took a fraction of the time to make as the ones on the left, and look 100x better to boot.
If you, like me, have been frustrated by the process of printing clear pieces, I highly recommend giving vacuum-forming a try. A machine like mine is less than $100 on Amazon. :)
Commission; modeling, printing, and painting by me. Files available here; prints available here.
This is as good a time as any to talk about my thought process when making something like this. It's probably due to the number of Bandai model kits I've made, but I always try to make separate colors separate pieces. It saves an enormous amount of time when I don't have to repeatedly paint, mask, paint, mask a single piece, and then I butterfingers it off the desk and have to make a new one. So for the most part, every color in this thing is a separate piece.
Some stuff obviously needs to be hand-painted, like the number registry and black trim outlining the cockpit, but keeping everything as separate pieces makes it go together way faster.
Fun fact: since the Sonic Phantom is piloted by a magically reincarnated skeleton (or something?), it has no controls in its cockpit. It's even like that in-game.
This is the first thing I designed with vacuum-formed plastic in mind from the get-go. I'm still getting the hang of it.
Oh, here's another fun fact: despite only having one engine, for some reason the Sonic Phantom has two engine FX pieces side by side in-game. There are other single-engine racers with the correct number of engine glows, so I'm guessing someone made a typo in the code and assigned it the wrong one. Or maybe this too is Skeleton Magic.
With these and the Blue Falcon and Black Bull, I've now made a little over 1/10 of all the racers in F-Zero GX. At the rate I'm going (about one a month) I'll be done in about three years. :P
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