Adventures with GSC’s Nendoroid Face Maker, Part 1
So, I’ve known about Good Smile Company’s website to make custom faceplates for quite a while now, probably almost a year. Any of my followers could tell you how much I lament my Nendos almost exclusively having smiles. I wanted a change, but I still had my reservations.
Mostly, I was concerned with the faces not looking close enough to the legitimate faces. Here’s an example. This photographer made Victor’s sparkly eyes with the Nendoroid Face Maker (NFM, from now on). It looks pretty good, but it’s still pretty obvious it’s not Victor’s official face.
Plus you have to create a profile even if you only want to play around. I’m too lazy for that.
Finally,I got off my butt and decided to try it anyway. It’s not that expensive. And now I’m going to share that experience with all of you! I’m splitting this into 2 posts, because I have a lot of feelings.
One daunting thing about the NFM: the entire website is in Japanese.
Happily, this isn’t a problem, because DeJapan, the middleman service that will ship your faceplates from Japan to your location, made an excellent blog post explaining exactly how to do things. It’s a lot of information, and I would recommend reading it very carefully as you go through your ordering process. It’s very easy, but there are a lot of blanks to fill in, so take your time and do it right.
I do want to address a few features that the blog post doesn’t cover, though. These are things I discovered that proved very valuable during my faceplate creation process. I want to talk about these buttons here:
The first one, “OFF” is the default. When you’re in “OFF”, you’re creating your faceplate like normal.
The second one will seem like a bit of a mystery, because if it’s your first time using the NFM, this section will be blank. It’s the tab that collects all your previously ordered faces. What a great tool! If you already have a faceplate that you like, you can easily bring it up again and tweak the eyebrows, change the mouth, or add a blush.
The third button was the most useful to me. It saves the work you’ve done so far. Say you’re pretty happy with your face. But wait, would this eye shape look better? Save your work, fiddle away... uh oh, now it’s completely different. Was it better before? Save your change, and now you can swap between the two. Make a third, totally new option and compare them all. You can even reorder them so you know what you like best. Or, make a bunch of faces if you’re bored, and then keep them for whenever you decide to buy.
It’s important to note that the website may log you out if you leave your computer for a day or so, and your work will be lost unless you save. Use that third button, guys.
The fourth button has a bunch of faces that other users have ordered. I didn’t use that button at all, so I don’t have anything to say about it.
One major note about the facemaker that I didn’t realize until after I ordered: the faceplates are noseless. This is so that they can print on any nose that you want. I didn’t immediately notice this the example pictures on the NFM website, and half the time, my nendo’s noses are invisible in pictures anyway, and so I thought it would be okay. In the future, I may use one of the tiny dot noses the NFM offers, but in this case, it slipped right past my attention until it was too late.
Okay, onto the good stuff! I have a bunch of ideas for faces I’d like to make, but I thought for my first go, I’d go easy. I decided on a slightly frowning face for both Victor and Yuuri, so that they don’t smile like idiots every time Yurio insults them in my comics. I want the same face as their slightly smiling faces, just with a frown instead. So I got to work.
Victor whipped up pretty quickly. I found an eye shape that was pretty close to the one on his smiling faceplate, and the rest fell into line. Take a look.
Bleh, sorry about the pixilation there. Tumblr blew it up bigger than it was supposed to be.
Okay, so right off the bat, you’ll probably notice my biggest problem with it. Those pupils. It really stuns me that, for all the customization the NFM offers, it has nothing for pupils. The pupil just gets to be a darker version of whatever color the iris is. It’s not as big of a problem on Yuuri’s face, as you’ll soon see, but with Victor’s light blue eyes? Cringe.
Some other differences: the eye shape isn’t exactly right. They’re angled more up than the real eyes, and I’m pretty sure they’re meant to suggest cat-eye eyeliner. But trust me, guys. It was by far the best choice they had. The eye color also isn’t quite right, but I thought it was close enough. And the eyebrows are thinner, but again, it was the best I could do.
I kind of like him. His face doesn’t look as relaxed as the smiling one. I can picture him focusing on Yuuri’s skating, or looking slightly nonplussed at Yurio’s antics. Cool, passable. Let’s move on to the next one.
Oh, boy, guys. Was Yuuri ever a headache. I had sooo much trouble getting a decent eye shape. I mean, look at the eyes on his smiling face.
(Wtf, Tumblr, you don’t blow that photo up?)
So you may notice that they’re pretty darn close to Victor’s shape. And there was only one possible eye choice for Victor. I could blow up or shrink down Victor’s eye shape, but I couldn’t elongate it, make the eyes taller to use on Yuuri. Making them bigger only emphasized the cat-eye makeup look. No, best to keep them small and on Victor only.
I fiddled with this for so long, I got frustrated and had to leave my computer. I was getting nowhere.
When I came back, I had a breakthrough. Instead of copying Yuuri’s slightly smiling face, I looked at his other faces for inspiration, and this is what I came up with.
Okay, not bad! I’ll tell you, it’s much better than anything I was coming up with before. He looks so innocent and vulnerable.
As you can see, the pupil is much less jarring in this version. The brown of his eyes isn’t exactly right, either. Yuuri’s real eye color is a little more red-brown.
And, I don’t know... it doesn’t look exactly like Yuuri. Like, looking at this faceplate wasn’t like looking at Yuuri. It was close, but missing something.
Then again, getting the face together with the hair and bodies might make all the difference. Context, you know?
I wouldn’t know until they arrived. But that’s in Part 2.
