The Musings of Sir Fondlebottom

Model building in most forms, from my hobbies building model kits to my professional work in the games industry.

[sirfondlebottom]

Maschinen Krieger Kröte ausf PaK

A work in progress I though I’d post to fill the gap in my postings. I’ve finally gotten most of the stuff down for perspective and placement, now I’m mainly aligning nuts and bolts before moving on with rendering fully.

Software: Photoshop

Still waiting on all decals to arrive for the Platinum Doll Trophy statue so painting is currently halted.

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Felt like firing up Photoshop so after about 3h this is very much a "speed painting" considering my usual pace :D

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A fun little project I remembered I had in my bookshelf all forgotten! I scratched a bit, scribed some extra detail into the base and now I have some sanding to go, cleaning up the wheel hub and some scruffy surfaces which I'm leaving for tomorrow. I ordered some 1/12 bike kit decals for sponsorship decals so I'll prime her and get some ground colours on, a dark dark gray together with fiery orange will be the scheme I think, reminiscent of some Repsol sponsored race bikes.

The original sculptor is Marcus Deleo and it's made by World of Resin. It's sold directly on Ebay by World of Resin, which is where I bought it. Pictures of their specimen built and painted can be seen here http://myanimeshelf.com/figures/1048857_Platinum_Doll:_Trophy or by searching Ebay for "Platinum Doll Trophy"

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An old bust sculpt I've decided to brush off and build into a full game character as a sort of fan art venture. It's based on Punisher War Zone but I've taken many liberties in making him both older and grimmer than the Punisher played by Ray Stevenson because extremes are fun I guess :D

I'm currently on the front of his vest, the collar and backplate being placeholders still.

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Sides attached, hangar attached. I've started the massive cleanup job, it will include cleaning up all the joints and air holes, side trenches and any details that are badly out of shape. There was a fairly large fit problem behind the hangar where the 4 pieces meet and you can see how I've applied filler to that area, it's about a 1 cm gap. To keep my sanity I'm rough with the filler and bulldoze over detail when sanding. I then add it back with styrene and re-scribing which is way quicker than working around every detail.

Once this is done it's time to start drilling the myriad of holes for the fiber optic strands and start seeing a therapist regularly!

[sirfondlebottom]

I think I'll name my clamps, they're total bros.

I used styrene strip as spacers to get the trenches level, afterwards I filled the gap left below with Plastic Padding "Finspackel" which is a very fine, very hard, non-shrinking and well gripping filler. It adds very nice rigidity and will help the internal structure to keep the shape and combat warping.

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The side trenches have a myriad of air bubbles and what I guess is damaged moulds from previous castings of the kit. There's even pieces of rubber left in mine, so the next one would be worse and so on. There's also slight warping but that will be hidden when it's in place.

Three pieces make up each side and as always, clamp and glue. I'm using frames meant to hold shelves to clamp to, which I found cheaply at the local DIY store.

[sirfondlebottom]

All put together, the 4 pieces making up the belly are clamped together as per the instructions. Tons and tons of clamps are needed for this build. I also bought a belt sander to take care of the clean-up on these parts and I can only recommend doing so.

[sirfondlebottom]

Slight warping taken care of via clamping to flat surface and then blowing with a hair dryer to make the resin stay in the flat shape.

After making sure they're flat, the pieces are epoxied together. Although I did use some styrene strips as spacers there’s a wee difference between the two I’ll have to address later with some sanding and filler.

[sirfondlebottom]

Randy Cooper Avenger Star Destroyer

Mr. Cooper himself... this is a just perfectly sized model <3

I acquired this kit second hand on ebay. I had read on forums (and seen pictures) of kits in horrible shape so I was very apprehensive about buying one with the sheer amount of work that would go into it even if it was in good shape. The seller said this is one of the first batches made by Randy and sent pictures showing good parts not close to the pictures I'd seen of later kits, like here: http://www.therpf.com/f11/randy-cooper-blockade-runner-buy-not-buy-97635/#post2672485

After receiving the kit I can say it is in very good shape and not even close to the pictures in the link above.

Parts have slight warping on the larger pieces, which I've this far solved with clamping to a flat surface and a hair dryer. After seeing other builds online I also decided to throw together a simple "dock" for the kit to rest on when working. Other than that, there seems to be pretty bad fit between the larger parts, but nothing some filler and sanding haven't solved this far.

Some parts have air bubbles everywhere which will take a while to hunt down, but they're not much of an issue, just point applications of filler and minor sanding. On the flip side, some parts are squeaky clean and present awesome detail with only minor clean up.

I intend to light it which will be a first for me, but with the model being what it is anything else would be half-assed :D I'm also planning to add internal wooden structure in addition to the resin bulkheads, if not replacing the resin bulkheads completely to prevent warping.

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A promo illustration of the "Intitiator" class in ProjectO, the prototype that later would lead to Dead Island: Epidemic. Late 2011

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Taking about a day's work, this kit was made for a top down dungeon crawler affair we were asked to pitch back in 2010. We threw together a playable demo over a weekend and this were the props I contributed to the small game world.

It is all hand painted and was really fun to make. It is intended for more or less flat shading so material attributes such as specularity are worked into the diffuse and the pictures above are rendered using completely flat lighting.

[sirfondlebottom]

Armoured Warden

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Armoured Dryad

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Armoured Engineer