Mechmaster

You mean this one? Its the RMS-108 Marasai.

Er... now you're confusing me, surely a chamfer and a bevel are the same thing. I'm guessing you mean fillet, a multi step rounding rather than a single step. You're right about the lighting though, its not one of my strong points and for quick pics like these I generally just chuck in a single, distant, parallel light source with a dim omni light opposite it to relieve the shadows.

Rod... no matter how good I might think I am, I am always keen to learn new tricks from people who have spotted something I have missed. Reference for the small pods was Arii's 1/100 kit and box-art and Nichimo's 1/200 kit and box-art, refs for the big pods was Nichimo 1/200 kit and box-art. Plus a couple of not too clear pics in the This Is Animation Macross books. As the references were not terribly good and in some cases totally contradictory there is also an element of artistic license so these should be considered Ver. Mechmaster. Chrono... nearly all the external angles on these puppies do have a small 45° bevel, the internal angle which you mention, between the pods and the support arm, is in fact one of the few edges I didn't bevel, mainly because I built the pods as seperate objects so I could use the same support arm for both sets, rather than building everything as a single connected mesh. Expect to see a bevel on that junction next time I post pics of these, as for the other edges, do you think I was too subtle with the bevelling? The pic shows a close-up of the mesh for the small pod, I do try to avoid sharp 90° angles when I can, especially on larger parts.

Big missile launcher...

I've restarted work on my own battlepod but I didn't feel up to doing anything too complicated today so I settled for building a couple of optional accessory parts. Small missile launcher...

Same thing happened to me, except I had a bit more money and bought about 8 kits on the first day and then went back the following day and bought another 25 or 30. I ended up with 7 of the Zamac kits and the rest were from Macross. I guess a lot of us discovered Macross and through it anime in general, in this manner, makes you wonder what might have happened if Imai had hired a different artist to do their Macross box-art. Germany sounds an awful lot like England, even down to the blue skies (or lack of) though if anything the UK is even more of a black spot for anime. Awesome work on the Oberth, if you do produce a resin kit from it I think I will be there with the other resin-hounds. Keep up the great work.

Thats great Rod, it will help me loads, you make it sound straightforward enough but I'm not sure I would have figured it out on my own, many thanks. I'm gonna go dig out my battlepod model and give it a try and don't worry about boring everyone, I'm learning here. Thanks again.

If people remind me of this often enough I may just turn this damned computer off and go build some

I don't have them all and so far haven't built any, but then I did have over 500 unbuilt kits from other manufacturers when I bought my first Hasegawa and while I don't build on a first in, first out basis, just recently I haven't had time to build anything but when I do find time I will quite likely give priority to getting at least one of them built. So far I've not had time to do more than open the boxes and drool over the parts a bit.

I'm looking forward to seeing your battle scenes then and with the reverse articulation on the Regult legs I can see that animating it will be a challenge. I suspect that many of my models are just as 'cumbersome' as yours as I am a totaly over-the-top detail nut and I am sure most professionals would be appalled by my self-taught working practices but its result that count and though I may go the long way round I'm usually moderately happy with the results I get. I'm quite fond of dinosaurs myself, it was far more of an obsession when I was a kid but has been nudged into second place by anime over the last couple of decades. The pride of my collection was an 8 inch chunk of fossil rib-bone almost as thick as my wrist but I seem to have misplaced it sometime in recent years. Sadly my organic modelling skills are nowhere near good enough to attempt a CG dino, no Jurassic Park from me then. If its no trouble then I would certainly like to see some shots of how you did the Regult hatch, I have tried to get similar effects myself in the past, playing around with weighted hyper-nurbs and such but my efforts really sucked and I reverted to other methods. Anything you can show me will be greatly appreciated and may well lead to an improvement in my own work.

Just so long as you leave room for me I've played around with nurbs a bit but I still struggle to make it do what I really want it to do. I would love to see how you did the seam around the back hatch Rod, I wouldn't even know where to start on something like that, the best I can do is to rough out basic shapes and then convert to polys to add details. Anyway Rod, your model looks really good, what plans do you have for it now? Is that latest render done with Sketch and Toon? I am right in thinking that you're using Cinema4D aren't I? Whatever, it does look neat.

I will try to put together an interesting "how to" with a few pictures when I get the time but for now I will give a basic description of my technique. I work wet on wet which makes it a relatively fast method of painting a kit. Generally I apply an appropriately coloured base coat, although I have used the same method on bare plastic without any problems. Then I open 5 or 6 tins/pots of paint, one will be the main colour, a couple will be either darker and lighter shades of that colour or black and white and the others will be contrasting colours or browns. I apply the base colour to an area of the kit and then with the same brush dab on other colours, stippling or blending them to a greater or lesser degree depending on how strong I want the mottled effect to be. In essence I mix the paint on the kit rather than in a mixing dish, but do it in an uneven manner so that the colour varies while giving an overall impression of the particular colour that that part is supposed to be. For metallic areas I generally use gunmetal with black and brown to give the apppearance of aged steel, perhaps adding a dash of silver to the mix to highlight areas which would be shiny from wear. The technique is really a combination of colour coat, weathering and highlighting all rolled into a single coat of paint. I hope this description will tide folk over until I can put together a more formal explanation with a few illustrations and thank you all for your interest and kind words.

Thanks Rod, I wish I could get on as well with the CG model as I did with the plastic, for now I think I will just sit and admire yours. Your latest version definitely looks better. On the Imai kit the side thrusters not only rotate but the grey part slides up and down allowing the nozzle to either point straight down or to angle outward to maybe 45 degrees off vertical.

I'd love it if someone released 1/72 kits of the Destroids, I have Imai's Defender and Spartan though the latter is in pretty bad shape and really needs rebuilding and a new paint job and like HWR MKII I'm on the lookout for a Tomahawk.

I think you've got me beat there, it appears to be a Nousjadeul-Ger shoulder cannon but its not the one from the Imai kit which is the only model of the suit I am familiar with. I'm quite a fan of the Citadel acrylics too, they cover really well and they have the best shelf life of any paint I've ever tried, I have a pot of Titilating Pink which must be 15 years old now and still perfectly useable.

Prior to discovering anime kits I had mainly built WWII AFVs and movie spacecraft (mostly Star Wars) so its safe to say that I carried that influence over into the Macross kits. I'm not a great fan of overly clean mecha and really enjoy building things that look like real down and dirty combat machines, the Destroids and stuff like Votoms are real favourites for me since they are ground pounding mecha that get muddy and beat up.

Those rule changes bite, they got me the same way, I had just finished building a huge Imperial Guard army, around 150 figures, four Rhinos, a Predator and a Land Raider. Then they revise the rules for IG and I could no longer use any of the armour and my squad configurations were suddenly all wrong. After that I pretty much gave up on the gaming side of the hobby but I still buy the vehicle kits from time to time, mainly as reference for building CG models. I've just been racking my brains trying to remember which anime kit that blue piece on the side of your battlewagon is from, its the magazine from the Bushman from the Takara Dougram range, or possibly the Roundfacer since they provide that particular weapon as a second, optional armament in that kit.

Sorry mate, I'm an optimist, I honestly believe that... a) I will find more time to build kits and b) I will live to be 500 years old

Well, I work in a saw-mill, operating a huge industrial planer/moulder and in 15 years have only had to make the hospital run twice and the worst of those was only a broken finger. In 30 years as a modeler I've had a few minor cuts from modeling knives but nothing worth boasting about. I use SGT quite a bit so I keep a botle of Loctite Detach on my workbench but I've only ever needed it a couple of times. As for bad karma in my models, I've had a few problems over the years but nothing so bad that it sticks in my memory, sure I've dropped wet painted parts on the carpet and broken small pins and even stuck bits on wrong way round and had to disassemble and redo but on the whole there has never been anything that made modeling other than a pleasure for me. I just wish I had more time to do it, my "build queue" must number nearly 600 kits now but if one of them has bad karma I haven't reached it yet.

Thanks, I mainly hand brush myself, I do have an airbrush but it is cheap and nasty and I'm not sufficiently skilled with it to use it for much more than basic coverage so all special effects are done with good old-fashioned bristles. Due to popular demand I will post a "how to" in this forum as soon as I get a chance to do some painting and take a few "in progress" pics. The Space Marine is one of my CG works, my actual GW figures rarely paint up so good in the real world.

Another angle...

Thanks for the positive response guys. The painting style was very much influenced by the box art which still ranks as some of my all time favourite box art, it was that which dragged me into the model shop by the eyeballs all those years ago and forced me to buy all those kits. Back then the box art was pretty much the only reference material I had and I'm pleased that you can see its influence. I certainly wouldn't mind doing a "how to" article, I just need to find (or make) more time for modeling, I have projects sitting on my bench right now which I haven't touched since February, in fact fetching these kits down to photograph was the first time in 3 weeks that I've even been into my workroom. I will try and put something together but it probably will not be soon. >EXO< Sadly many of my original Macross kits are in pretty shabby condition, some are broken, some have suffered because the varnish I used back then proved to be very prone to yellowing and my poor VF-1J battroid has even been attacked by black mould. I am however planning a major revamp of both my websites, if and when I get around to updating my model website (www.animenia.co.uk) I will certainly be putting up pics of such of my Macross collection as are still good enough for public display. At present there are a few of my Macross models on show but the current pictures are rather poor as my old digicam was nowhere near as good as my new one. Grayson72 Is this what you want to see..?

Personally I'm not to keen on transforming kits, not for actually transforming anyway, they all break in the end. Usually when I buy a transformable kit I buy as many copies as there are modes of transformation and build one kit in each mode and leave it that way. To echo what other people have said, if you want to play with it buy a toy, if you want to display it buy a model. I had a few of the Imai 1/72s and they weren't too bad, I had a couple of the Arii 1/100s and they were crap.

In some cases that discolouring was part of the original paint job, apart from a bit of yellowing on the white these kits haven't suffered too badly colour-wise despite their age. The 30+ kits I built and then searched for more, I now have over 500 built and more than that again unbuilt. I bought many different scales, those first ones were nearly all Macross kits from Imai and Arii with half a dozen of Imai's Megaro Zamac range too. I just became a total kit junky, I hardly have time to build them anymore but I just can't stop buying them.

Yes, they are handbrushed, they were done a couple of years before I got my first airbrush. A friend of mine dubbed my technique "designer mottling" as I usually had half a dozen different colours open and dabbed and blended them as I worked. Just to paint something white I would have white, black, brown and a couple of other colours of paint open, it could be hard work sometimes but it gave an interesting effect. Well I thought so anyway though I'm sure its not to everyones' taste.