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Yes. Yes exactly!

Sci fi modeling is in these days. Everything from Gundam to Warhammer and Macross to Star Trek. Even the car guys are doing a lot of Mad Max style customs from standard car kits. The historical stuff is still there, but it’s almost a 50/50 thing to the Sci fi these days

Unfortunately times have changed. Used to be able to see knockers fairly commonly, now it’s nothing but sausage on the streaming sites.

Kawamori really is an incredible designer. It takes an astonishing amount of talent to come up with a transformation that's not only believable but can be translated to a physical toy or model with a reasonable level of fidelity. All the more impressive is that Kawamori is not alone in that regard when it comes to working on Macross. He has had the assistance of similarly talented designers like cockpit designer Junya Ishigaki (who also designed the Macross Zero destroids) and destroid, battle pod, and spaceship designer Kazutaka Miyatake. The Battle-class is Miyatake's work. There's a lovely section on its progression from the earliest concepts to the final design and transformation in Kazutaka Miyatake Design Works: Macross & Orguss that starts on page 47. He also has some commentary on the thought process behind Battle 13 in the VF-X section starting on page 81. There are a few references, but they're relatively low key compared to what's in the other media because the TV anime is meant to be maximally accessible with the bare minimum amount of continuity baggage. It is mostly on the level of sneaky fanservice there. Like Ernest Johnson and Grammier Neirich Windermere both having participated in the Second Unification Wars, though only Grammier's service is remarked on at any length. Its most profound impacts are in how it shaped the setting itself, which is more in the realm of the creator commentary track than the series proper. It's much more blatant in the novelizations, manga, games, etc. which are marketed more towards fans. The novelizations of Macross Frontier and Macross Delta practically have too many to name, like making Manfred Brando the sponsor of Mao Nome's expedition to Vajra space and the reason Ozma gets tossed out of the NUNS, Aegis Focker being Ozma's mentor and a student of Jeffrey Wilder, Manfred's Sound Jamming System using fold quartz, and an AI copy of Manfred's mind being an antagonist in its own right. Macross the Ride's antagonist faction, Fasces, is a literal Latence splinter fleet still fighting for the same goal. Macross 30 has a couple of 'em. The game's antagonists, Havamal, are a New UN Spacy VF-X Special Forces unit like the Ravens (the 815th Independent Squadron). Leon Sakaki's homeworld Sephira is the site of one of the Ravens missions in Macross VF-X2 as well. Two VF-X2 fighters are also available in game: the initial type VF-22 and the VF-19A Ravens type.

Good for those that want it, but PC delivers 99% of what I want to play and the rest is first party Nintendo stuff.

No offense taken. I was an even more ignorant beginner at the time than I am now. But much better modelers than me have tried and they end up with similar results - either a fatter spaceship or a too skinny robot. Also - it is mark of Kawamori's skill that his designs require so little anime magic to actually work. The man is an actual wizard, creating so many designs that can actually be turned into toys and perfectly transform without any magic. I'm having a big empty head moment here, because as far as I remember, none of the anime actually *does* directly reference the events of the VF-X2 game in any obvious way. I haven't had time to check all of Frontier because there's so many different political discussions spread out across the show, but I don't remember Vindirance or Lactence, or the 2050 coup attempt, being brought up at all, anywhere in any anime. If you know that it happened, you can see its *effects* everywhere, but if you didn't know about it you'd just gloss over it entirely so it feels almost like sneaky fanservice. (I did verify the one instance in Delta where it was likely to have come up in discussion, which was Berger's exposition in episode 19, but he goes from Macross 7 to Macross Frontier and entirely skips the 2050 coup attempt). And the only things I remember relating to VF-X2 in Macross 30 is that there were skins for the Ravens in there, for the VF-11 and VF-19 if I recall correctly. There may have been something in the descriptions for those skins, but I never bothered pulling up my camera to read those.

Too generic, I pass

@Papa Rat Shrink marks are just immature dents. I'm not terribly social at model shows, but I've never heard a bad word about our beloved Sci Fi.

I'm seeing too much man-booty cheeks!

I've seen several mentions of IPMS. I attended one meeting in the Chandler, AZ area in 2011, the year before I moved back to Japan. I found that the atmosphere there was not very friendly towards sci-fi modeling, as if it wasn't respected as a legitimate form of modeling. Do you guys get flack for being Macross modelers? I've heard that it's pretty hit-and-miss, depending on who's running the local chapter. Some are welcoming of SF modeling while others treat such subjects with disdain.

Yeah, fair, it's a weird mix. I'm not sure what would look more natural, if you can even call it that.

No, I get that's accurate. I'm saying it makes Blue Booster's face look extra weird, is all. I think I'd prefer either more normal Sonic eyes, or a less normal Sonic head.

I mean, this is actually accurate. I'm not sure if you would prefer actual pupils though, or just something more like his normal eyes.

Looks far better than what it looked like from the start. Some little patch ups with the putty will definitely help

First round of primer to check my work. Going to have to do more putty work in spots, but the nose is not looking too bad. Also noticing lots of sink marks that need attention.

lol

I'm personally disappointed the airplane propeller doesn't become his butt, so he could spin his tails like a propeller.

Yeah, last year didn’t have much to offer other than Hundreds of Beavers.

This is true, but in all frankness I believe you're overthinking things here a bit. Personally, I don't buy the argument that dingy and desaturated means "realistic". I lived through the tyranny of "realistic means it looks like you're viewing it through a used coffee filter" in gaming and other entertainment and I want nothing further to do with it. In practice, it doesn't really matter if you paint your space warship bright and garish colors or flat gunship grey because without an external light source shining brightly on the hull you're only ever going to see it illuminated dimly by reflected light from large nearby objects (e.g. planets, moons) or illuminated only by its own running lights like the Macross at the very start of DYRL?. That's different in atmosphere, but in atmosphere people are going to notice the giant F-off kilometers and a half long super-carrier no matter what color it's painted. If realism were that important, Battle Galaxy wouldn't be painted magenta. Likewise, I don't think there's any concern with the Battle 7 potentially overshadowing other ships when it's on screen. It's going to do that no matter how you paint it, because it's simply the biggest damn thing in frame 99% of the time. It might be an issue if you had multiple Battle-class ships in frame, but only if it's not the "hero" one. I think there's a much simpler explanation that works on both Watsonian and Doylist levels: stylistic preferences change with time. Battle 7's comparatively bright and colorful design is representative of mid-90's anime, but can also be said to be the preference of the 37th Fleet at the time it launched in 2038. The Macross Gigasion was designed decades later in both Doylist and Watsonian terms, so naturally it more closely reflects the tastes of the period to which it belongs. My favorite example of this principle in action is the TNG episode "Relics" and the DS9 episode "Trials and Tribble-ations". They don't retcon the rather dated stylistic choices or bright, garish colors of Star Trek's Original Series from the 60's into something more in line with the more subdued neutral tones of the 90's shows, they simply acknowledge that (both in-universe and out) that was The Style At The Time and that stylistic preferences changed as time passed. Macross Frontier and Macross FB7 both flirt with the idea a bit, but not to the same extent. There is no reason for anyone to do that, though. Satelight's animators working on Macross Frontier and Macross Delta weren't superfans working on a fan film. They were professionals there to do a job. They have no reason at all to care about what was done in prior shows. They have a stack of animation model reference sheets, storyboards, and screenplays that spell out what to draw, how to draw it, and when. All the decisions about how things should look or what things should be in the story happen way before anything gets to them. That's the job of the various designers who work on development of the project. If an older design is being brought back and refreshed, they don't need to go back and look at the old animation because they have the animation model reference to work from. The master key to the art design. They can make any necessary tweaks using that as a starting point without the need to waste tens of hours trawling through old VHS tapes and DVDs. Not wishing to cause offense, but your results are not necessarily indicative of the outcomes that a professional animator would produce. And yes, many transforming designs involve a certain amount of "anime magic". It's just the cost of doing business. As far as I know, sales figures for Macross VF-X2 have not been made public. The game's events have been referenced so often by so many different Macross works from Macross Frontier onward that I can only assume it did pretty well for itself back in 1999 and in that limited 2002 re-release. Enough to justify Macross Frontier and Macross Delta and their spinoff works tying into it as heavily as they have. It's been referenced in anime, other games, light novels, audio dramas, and even model kits. Regardless, I don't think the measure of success of Macross VF-X2 necessarily means anything WRT the Doylist explanation... a simple desire to make the new Battle-class in the new story visually distinct. Macross VF-X2's dev team had a story that called for an "evil" Battle-class, so they took the basic design and made it bulkier, spikier, redesigned the bridge to look more menacing, and gave the whole thing a darker and more ominous-looking paintjob of purples and dark greys. Similarly, when the time came to make Macross Frontier in the mid-2000s, the story called for a "hero" Battle-class and a "villain" Battle-class, so they needed to update the Battle-class design to mesh with the 2000's visual aesthetic and to produce a single base design they could customize to make the heroic Battle Frontier and the villainous Battle Galaxy. Nope... and I am intensely annoyed about it. The obvious Doylist explanation is that it's CG model reuse and they forgot to remove or change the hull number while they were adding bits to it. When it comes to a Watsonian explanation, we're stuck with a lot of assumptions. The obvious answer is that the Battle Astraea is another ship from the same design generation as the Battle Galaxy and/or that it was upgraded with some of the same kind of technology used in Battle Galaxy when Cromwell's crew disappeared with it and had the Epsilon Foundation refit it. Why its hull number is the same as Battle Galaxy's... that's anyone's guess.

Could be good, need a good comedy.

OK, so this whole post you're mostly making Watsonian, in-universe, arguments for why things were changed. I have been and will be making Doylist, out-of-universe ones. Both can be true at the same time. To start off - I did point out that Gigasion *is* referencing Battle 7 directly. It's just the *original palette* version of Battle 7 from episodes 1 through 15, where the ship was still just a big ship. I can think of several Doylist reasons to do this. One is that the 3D-era ships across the board have been trying look more realistic, and the bright Gundam colors aren't especially realistic on a warship, especially when every other warship seen across two TV shows and four movies have been more subdued in color. Also, for a good long while, we had both Hollywood and video games going "the less saturated it is the more realistic it is", and this era overlaps with Frontier and Delta. One is that there is a concept called scale effect - a visual psychology trick that makes the brain more accepting of something being much larger based on the palette. Basically, the human brain doesn't want to accept that something that big can be that saturated in color, so you mix some white or gray into the color it's actually supposed to be to trick the brain. I learned of the concept from plastic modelling forums, where all the really advanced modelers swear by it, and I think because digital VFX evolved from physical VFX, the same trick may be taught in formal schooling for that, but I don't have any so I can't say for certain. One is that a bright white giant robot would overshadow any scene it's in in the movie, even if it's far in the background. As animated, Gigasion is obviously bright enough to be the main character of the scenes where it's supposed to be, but with the even brighter colors from Macross 7, it would be hard to focus on the VFs because of the great big flashbang of white in the background. (I think this is the same reason why the Battle 7 was gray for the first 15 episodes - a lot of the time, we were mostly seeing Diamond Force launching from it, and if the ship had been white it would have been overpowering. I will have to look at later episodes of Macross 7 to see if they actually updated the launching scenes with the brighter palette later). Also, in 3D it's much more difficult to change the palette between shots without people noticing, so pulling the trick of "gray up close, white from afar" is not as viable as it was in the cel animation days. As for the VFs - I can easily justify in a Doylist manner why very brightly colored Variable Fighters are still perfectly realistic, by pointing out that real life fighter aircraft since Manfred von Richthofen's Fokker Dreidecker, all the way to the JSDF's Itasha F-15s, have indeed been painted in basically every color imaginable, and even to this day, the US Navy's "Wing King" fighters fly combat missions painted up in high visibility throwback schemes when the carrier's command staff allows them. (VFs also aren't big enough to be affected by the Scale Effect, not by comparison, but they're also so large that they're going to be mostly out of frame or self-shadowing in any scene where you have a *character* needing the focus, so they also won't be as big of a visual flashbang as a bright white ship against a black background is). I can buy this for Macross 7, because unless the animators were super fans who owned the original show on physical media, or the physical media was provided to them by the production company for research, it would be really quite difficult in 1994 to find the original show to research. Not that it was even relevant because about the only thing reused from previous productions on a regular basis was Exsedol's character design. Basically no point to go back and rewatch the old show to see how things were supposed to work if you're not using anything from it. For Macross Frontier, the situation is different. Aside from physical media being more available, by this point not only did you have digital distribution, but you could find whole episodes on Youtube, and I'm fairly certain there was a decent selection of clips on Nico-Nico as well. Could, did, or should the animators have done any research on Macross 7 this way? I have no idea. But it was a vastly simpler proposition to do so than when Macross 7 was made. Also, in the 3D era, instead of "stock footage" where they just toss a ready made clip that was hand drawn with all sorts of wonky proportions every couple of minutes, what happens is that you use a scene script and then re-render it with relevant changes. This scene script will have the relative scales of all the models used available (just click on a fighter or ship to see what scale it is), and if the modelers are smart, everything will be in "true" scale all along so you don't have to worry about it. These scene files were kept around for a long, long time, because some of the ones from Frontier are re-used in Delta, with changes making it obvious that they're not just composited but actually re-rendered. As for 2D animation errors, I don't really bother thinking about most of them. It's only when they're so big that there's something in my brain that goes "that can't be right", like shooting fighters out of the torpedo tubes of a 250 meter ship... To me, animation errors are wonky proportions or visual glitches that I can gloss over as unimportant. That one had an entire episode based around it... (but we were done with this particular conversation a week ago). OK. Here's the thing - I tried to do this, a long time ago. I tried to build a Macross 7 based on the animation reference drawings. It didn't go well, because there's a lot of parts that the drawings we have available do not cover (there's probably more drawings available to the actual animators though); but also because, as drawings, they turned out not to be completely proportional to each other. Notably, the ship form of Battle 7 is thinner than the robot form. Build the robot like the ship, and you get very skinny legs and arms. Build the ship like the robot, and you get something with proportions much more like Battle Frontier. This is why I was saying that I'm thinking they tried, and gave it up as impossible and started over, using only the transformation skeleton. Note that even then, the Battle Frontier doesn't actually have a perfect transformation - the gun is too long, and even with the stock collapsed, it clips into the pelvis while in ship form. This may be one of the reasons why they've never made a ship-form Battle class model kit - it's fairly obvious if you flip it upside down that there's clipping going on. (This goes for the game model used in the Frontier games, but it's very obvious that the game studio had access to the shooting models because as mentioned, they repeat some of the weirder animator's choices verbatim, like the ship name "Maiduru" being hard-painted into the texture for the Guantanamo model) (This is not a complaint or a demand that anyone fix the problem, just an observation that the model is not perfect). This is an argument that makes a lot of sense from the Watsonian perspective, and from the perspective of a superfan who owns or at least has access to all the reference books. Remember that the Macross Chronicle did not exist at this time, so information relating to VF-X2 was *legally* available only to people who had the game and the reference book for it. Here in the West, information relevant to Macross 13 and VF-X2 was circulated by fans who bought the game and book, then translated the information, and shared it online. Because many of us western fans had no access to *any* of the books, we went to the fan-created indexes like M3 or Sketchley's, and absorbed this information along with everything else. But... did it work the same way in Japan? I'm thinking that it is way more common for the "average" western Macross fan to have found out about Macross 13, because there basically aren't any "casual" Macross fans due to what a PITA it is to get the anime; than it is for an average Japanese Macross fan, ca 2008, to know much about it. Honest question, by the way. I know there were obviously hardcore Macross fans in Japan that were at least as well informed as us (probably more, given that they can read the books without help), but there's something that gets me thinking that VF-X2 was paradoxically more obscure in Japan. My Doylist reasoning, to re-iterate, is that even if you wanted to make an accurate transforming 3D model of the Battle 7 you wouldn't be able to without just as much pixie dust as in Macross 7, and in textured 3D due to having textures on all the parts, the pixie dust would be more obvious. And the Battle Frontier looks a lot more like someone *tried* to do a Battle 7 first, than someone who started making a design evolved from Battle 7 through Battle 13. (Also, did we ever get a Watsonian explanation for the very obvious model reuse where Astrea is literally Galaxy with added parts? Someone explained that in one of the Another Century's Episode games, they basically flat out went "yeah, it's actually the same ship", but that's not Macross canon. The Doylist reason is obviously "crap, we forgot to make new textures!")

Yeah, but I still want to at least see the trailer, even though I’m expecting disappointment

The Man’s Laughter joke has been a dad joke for a few decades, but it still sounds funny delivered by Liam Neeson

That’s possible as well. Not sure though, but Pg these days are fairly tame compared to pg-13 and R these days can go far beyond Robocop which was the benchmark for R for a long time. Don’t forget about the booty cheeks