vsim

Slow but steady progress on the VF-0B that I've been working on for an embarrassingly long period of time (lol, don't ask). Almost done painting, I'm down to cleaning up a few small details and touching up. Then on to a gloss coat, decals and a final coat of either gloss or matte, I haven't decided yet.

The magnetically attached FAST pack works great, snaps perfectly into place and is easy to remove.

I've learned a lot on this kit since this is the most experience I have gotten with an airbrush in a LONG time..mostly through mistakes. The biggest thing I learned is that you can really thin Mr Color down quit a lot and use lower air pressure to have less issues with paint sneaking underneath the masking tape.

Hasegawa 65844 - 1/72 - VF-31F Siegfried Messer_Hayate w_Lilldraken Macross Delta the Movie

Hasegawa 65712 - Macross Display Stand

Hasegawa 65783 - 1/72 - YF-19 'Demonstrator'

Hasegawa 65870 - 1/72 - VF-19A SVF-440 Dullahans w_FAST PACK and High-maneuver missiles

Hasegawa 65785 - 1/72 - VF-0C VMFAT-203 Hawks

Hasegawa 65871 - 1/48 - VF-1A Valkyrie Low Visibility

Hasegaw 65866 - 1/72 - VF-11D Thunderbolt Test Pilot School

More kits coming, I finally got through the ones I have easy access to, so some older ones will be coming up soon!

On 9/6/2021 at 10:06 PM, TMBounty_Hunter said:

BEHOLD! NEW MOLDS!

 

 

What's interesting is that I saw the kit number is 30 instead of the usual 5 digit number? So presumable the full kit number will be 65730. I just find it interesting that some kits get a two digit number on the box and most of the rest just have the normal 5 digit. I see no particular rhyme or reason for it.

In any event, woot!

On 9/1/2021 at 8:25 PM, Chronocidal said:

Hmm.. more time to save.. but also closer to the holidays. 🤔

 

Yep ! I've been on the fence about keeping my pre-order cause these have gotten so expensive anymore, so I'll be glad for the delay :). It will be my first premium finish.

Some more, life's been a bit hectic lately so sorry for not many new kit pictures lately.

Hasegawa 65862 - 1/72 VF-31E Siegfried Reina Prowler Color Macross Delta the Movie

Hasegawa 65861 - 1/72 VF-31S Siegfried Arad Macross Delta

Hasegawa 65867 - 1/72 VF-31J Custom Siegfried Hayate Macross Delta

I've made some improvements to my scripts. Stitched images will hopefully not appear skewed anymore. It was a subtle issue but still drove me crazy enough to want to fix it.

Hasegawa 65850 - 1/72 VF-31F Siegfried Kaname Buccaneer Color Macross Delta the Movie

22 hours ago, kajnrig said:

Sorry, I meant to say that there are no new announcements, just showing off what they announced previously - ie Myung YF-19 and the repops. I was hoping against hope for a VF-171 reveal to compete against Wave, or maybe a Cheyenne II, or etc.

I think it's rather cool they are doing a Myung figure. If I didn't already have an eggplane YF-19, I'd probably go for it...but since I do.. and since I'm worse at painting figures than I am at the aircraft...lol 

Hasegawa 65864 - 1/72 VF-31S Siegfried Mikumo Guynemer Color Macross Delta the Movie

On 5/10/2021 at 2:47 PM, StarshipTrooper said:

The website Scalemates.com has a plethora of boxart!

Yep, they've got a lot of great info. (For anyone who doesn't have the link ,it's Scalemates, scale modeling database | stash manager). Maybe at some point I'll figure out how to add to the info on Scalemates (e.g. box sides, instructions, etc.).

I'm scanning everything for more of a preservation aspect. Scanner is calibrated to correct colors and I've got these at high res (including decals sheets at 2400 dpi). I started off with just decals but decided I might as well scan boxes, instructions, etc. while I'm at it because I apparently like having no free time :). If anyone needs a higher res version, just shoot me a message.

On 5/4/2021 at 1:23 PM, Shawn said:

Another great episode, but I did HATE you for saying ....lets save the BGI TOPIC for the end  haha 

 

Shhh, don't ruin it for me, I haven't gotten that far into the new podcast yet!  I wonder what it could be about! hehe.

Hasegawa 65849 - 1/72 VF-31E Siegfried Chuck Macross Delta

Hasegawa 65869 - 1/72 VF-11D Thunderbolt SVT-27 Bluetails

Hasegawa 65792 - 1/48 VF-1S/A Valkyrie "Skull Squadron"

Wave MC-073-8800 SDR-04-Mk.XII Destroid Phalanx

On 4/17/2021 at 12:53 AM, Shawn said:

1/20 VF-1...wow. I thought some of these pics were real.

done by Shuichi Hayashi who has his own modeling book

https://www.themodellingnews.com/2018/08/read-n-reviewed-air-modelling.html

 

 

Wow, that is absolutely fantastic!

On 4/16/2021 at 2:36 PM, pafy6285 said:

Good news, looks like EMS will be resuming for US / North America this June or summer. The bad news, it's more expensive with the introduction of a "temporary" surcharge. Less than 1.5kg, the rate is somewhat acceptable but more than that, courier shipping will look like a better option. For example, for 2kg EMS will cost 6100 yen. For 5 kg, 12700 yen. Also the surcharge is not flat, the higher the base rate (or weight), the higher the surcharge. Link to the table (in Japanese): https://www.post.japanpost.jp/notification/pressrelease/2021/00_honsha/0415_01_02.pdf

Other details (in Japanese PDF): https://www.post.japanpost.jp/notification/pressrelease/2021/00_honsha/0415_01.html

Well, still glad to see it returning even with the surcharge. Hopefully that will go away before long. Thanks for the info!

On 4/5/2021 at 10:24 PM, Jasonc said:

I managed to get most of the left leg done, as well as the most intensive part of the left arm. So far, I'm happy with what it is looking like.

Nice! That's awesome!

I saw that we have a decal library, so I figured I'd start a box art library thread. Someone let me know if I missed one that already exists.

I'm in the process of scanning my kits/decals/instructions so if anyone needs higher res images that have been color calibrated let me know. I also have scans of the side of the boxes. I'm only going at a rate of about 1 scan per week at the moment, so...this could take a while, :D. If you spot any errors, let me know, the process for merging scans is not perfect and although I try to look for artifacts and fix them I don't always see them.

Box art:

Hasegawa 65770 - VF-0B "Macross Zero"

Hasegawa 65784 - SVF-124 Moon Shooters

Hasegawa 65789 - Eggplane DYRL VF-1A/J Valkyrie

Hasegawa 65796 - Eggplane YF-19 Advanced Variable Fighter Macross Plus

Hasegawa 65865 - Sv-262Hs Draken III Roid Macross Delta

On 4/6/2021 at 12:30 PM, Bolt said:

Has anyone scored this set? I missed it by a few hours on Mandrake..

I didn't score them off Mandrake but I might have them laying around. The odd thing is my notes say that is MC-10-650 for  "Wave Macross Model Support System Decals 2" yet your picture is MC-17-650. I might have a different set. I've started scanning my kits and decal sets, shoot me a message if you want me to try to dig it up a take a good scan.

On 4/3/2021 at 5:32 PM, Anasazi37 said:

Oh good, I was thinking that it would be pretty easy to remove the alpha channel in ImageMagick, but hadn't looked into it. Graphic design, computer vision, photogrammetry, and remote sensing people all use different terms for pretty much the same stuff. You basically have to speak four different technical languages to find useful information online. Only 1 bit for the alpha channel? Interesting. Really must have been a binary mask (1 = use, 0 = don't use). You don't see that very often. Usually it's a gradient value between 0 and 1 or 0 and 255. I don't see a need to go beyond 24-bit for this kind of project. 16 bits per color channel is excessive and printers aren't really set up to deal with it. Keeping more raw scans that you can then postprocess in different ways is a good idea. I love that you're building enough flexibility into your scripts that you won't have to make changes each time you run. Command line options FTW. Bash, PowerShell, or something else?

Working in Windows, I don't have time to setup a Linux box at home, although I've been using Linux since 1993 so I'm one of the old timers on it, lol. So no bash for me unless I setup Mingw or something similar. Batch and Powershell seem to be working well for me so far. The merging script it just a batch script that I edit the filenames in each time, could easily be converted to take them as command line args. My powershell script is one I use to convert all tifs in a directory to have LZW compression so that I can get the decal scans down in side and not have 0.5 - 1 Gig per scan, lol.

On 3/29/2021 at 12:38 PM, TMBounty_Hunter said:

You know, stitching scans together manually really isn't that hard or time consuming. I've spent my teen years doing that with a lot of my kit boxes as well as magazines. Newtype being too wide for a standard scanner was infuriating. But after a bit of practice whether it's x4 scans for large box, or x8 scans for a REALLY large box like a PG, it's really not too bad. Now I just have an A3 scanned and life is twice as good. Maybe I'm just prejudiced against automation because every time I've tried it the results needed more fixing than just starting manually from scratch. That plus when working manually I know that the mistakes would be my own and it motives me to avoid them since once you put it on the internet it's there forever and every time someone reposts the image that mistake will scream back at you. Plus you never know how those built up photoshop skills might be useful for other things.

Here's 3 samples of large boxes that all needed x4 scans on my old HP scanner that maxed out at 600dpi. About 10-25min of manual work each, filtered and 25% resolution for easy upload.

 

This PG Eva box was x8 scans and maybe an hour of work but most of that was dust and scratch removal because this box was far from new when I got it. Again 600dpi, filtered and 33% res to keep size down.

The most important part is getting good raw scans without distortion and with plenty of overlap because regardless if you're going it manually or using a software black box GIGO law is absolute. When scanning Hasegawa boxes too long for a standard scanner I highly recommend a stack of the old format Hobby Japan magazines, they are the absolutely perfect size to put inside the box to flatten it against the scanner glass and minimize distortion from one edge being elevated off the edge of the bed.

I've got a 1 year old in the house, I don't usually get time to stitch images together, lol.

I think I discovered what you just said above. I've started putting manga, etc. inside the box to keep it flat on the scanner. That seems to help the images stitch together automatically better. Although I still had 1 or 2 where I needed to go in and manually futz with it some. Hugin seems to not be happy sometimes if it needs to stretch the image, so I think I need to put more effort into making sure the box is completely flat and not scan near the edge where it is riding up on the lip of the scanner. Sometimes Hugin does great with the automation I've set up, other times it does weird things....still figuring the tool out and all the command line arguments; but slowly getting better at figuring out exactly what it's doing. If I ever get it where it works very reliably I'd happily share my scripts.

I'm only doing the boxes at 400 dpi for now as it seems to give a nice image without taking up nearly as much space as the 2400 dpi decals, lol.

I discovered an issue with the VF-0B scans, if you look, you can see in the "Macross Zero" lettering in the older image above where it didn't stitch together correctly, although I don't know why.

Here's a better one

I've also fixed my scans of the side of the box which had similar issues. I'm not sure if too much overlap is causing the issues, or what exactly Hugin's issue is. I've started scanning black space around the box to try to give it a better defined border to adjust to, but that may make things worse.

Here's the Sv-262 that I fixed today as well:

@TMBounty_Hunter, what software did you use to stitch yours together? Gimp or something similar? 

Did some more testing and tweaking this morning, scanned in the VF-0B kit I'm mid progress on. Unfortunately it means I've already but some of the decals out..oh well 

VF-0B Box Cover stitched together with Hugin (and shrunk down for posting).

18 hours ago, Photogirl said:

I'm looking for an actual copy of this sheet.
I know i can scan it and print it out on printer slide paper, but if i can find the original, id prefer it. 

That looks like it's from the Hasegawa kit 65763 Macross VF-1J Max & Miria. I have it and could scan it for you but it doesn't sound like you want a scan.

On 3/21/2021 at 9:46 PM, jvmacross said:

Anyone here snag this one?

Looks awesome!  It was a bit north of what I wanted to pay for it....congrats if anyone here nabbed it!

Macross 7 Battle 7 cel......52,499 JPY

https://page.auctions.yahoo.co.jp/jp/auction/o464848924

That is a beautiful cel! Hopefully it found a good home!

2 hours ago, Anasazi37 said:

You're using hugin, eh? It's one of many photogrammetry-inspired applications out there that can stitch (mosaic) images together. They all pretty much do the same thing. Their automated workflows tend to a do a decent job, but not always a perfect one, so long as there is decent overlap between the images, the images were collected under similar conditions, and the images contain enough "interesting" stuff for the underlying computer vision routines to find and link across them. This kind of image processing is a subset of what I do for a living, so I can geek out over it in a big way if I'm not careful.

I think you're right about hugin using the alpha channel (RGBA). My best guess as to why it's doing so is that it needs to know which pixels contain useful information and which pixels are just background fill that can be ignored. This is important during mosaicking because the software might have to subtly warp the images to make them fit together well and when it does that, background fill is introduced. If you don't ignore that stuff, you end up with lots of useless and annoying black areas in the end result instead of something seamless. The alpha channel is where the software keeps track of that, where a pixel value of 0 means "ignore" and a value of 255 means "keep." The software, after mosaicking, likely just spits out the RGBA version because the end result is going to have some background fill around the edges. My advice is to let hugin do its thing, then use another application to remove the alpha channel (convert from RGBA to RGB). You'll have larger files in the interim, but once the RGB version is created, you can delete the interim stuff.

Yeah, that makes sense. Thanks! I figured out how to get Image Magick to remove the alpha channel and get rid of the extraneous virtual canvas that hugin had created as well. So that's all automated now as well. Thanks for the info, it was just enough so that I could squeak by with google searches and experimenting with different options. Half the time I don't know the terminology used for graphics programs all that well so I'm not always certain what to search for to solve my issue.

What you said about the alpha channel makes sense, thanks for explaining, I was wondering why it had 1 bit for the alpha channel, lol.

So my scanning software goes straight from 24-bit to 48-bit for colors so I think I will keep it at 24-bit color scans. And so far I have been disabling any descreening or anything else like that in the scans. I figure that can always be done postprocess, but if I lose the data during the original scans I can't get it back. I'm mostly scanning the boxes just because they have nice art. The decals are more to try and preserve.

Now I just need to automate things a little bit more so I don't have to edit scripts every time I run. And then see if the final scans from hugin are the approximate correct physical dimensions of the original boxes, etc. as it seems to mess that up some. I got it set for the test images I did but I'm not sure it will be correct for other images. It's not super important as it will only affect box art scans, but I'd still like it to match if I can get it to.

And then I need to get back to building my VF-0B kit! lol

On 3/21/2021 at 5:00 PM, Gabe Q said:

Looks like HLJ's not taking any more orders for the Low Vis.

 

They are taking them right now on HLJ. Must have been temporary. I'm sure they'll have more when the kit is released.