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Chronocidal

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  1. Chronocidal
    Well, I guess the question is, since the oil wash took the paint off down to the plastic already, would you be able to just do the same thing to the rest of the plane, and remove the paint that way, so you don't have to sand or rescribe much?
  2. Chronocidal
    Hey, it's better than battroid at least.
  3. Chronocidal
    For what it's worth, the original isn't bad in fighter mode with the super packs. I actually considered getting one, just because it was so much cheaper, and I'll probably only display it that way anyway. From what I remember, the only ones that really fell apart badly were the armored packs, because the design was half-assed, and was never built to hold those packs in the first place.
  4. Chronocidal
    Whoa.. they've got stuff in there about Edwards AFB. That's kind of amazing, I can't wait to see what the translations for those bits are.
  5. Chronocidal
    Well, when I think of what I'd want to see as a transformer, I don't think of the tiny vehicles where over half of the bulk is cockpit, I'm thinking more like the Night Raven, Hurricane, Skystriker, etc. Also, since I'm thinking purely in terms of Joe aircraft I'd want to see, that does make a bit of a difference.
  6. Chronocidal
    Really.. you know, I'd consider buying this a lot more if they would release a pic of the version without the full markings. The rainbow stripes aren't what bug me, it's all the logos and labels stamped all over the thing. Without all that overly-busy text, I think it wouldn't look bad.
  7. Chronocidal
    Can you imagine a Joe-scaled Transformer? We're talking a 1/18-ish scale vehicle, which is going to be massively expensive, even if it's something like a Volkswagen Beetle. Also, fun as it is to dream, poseable transforming figures get to be increasingly impractical as size goes up. The joint-strength to weight ratio can become a serious issue.
  8. Chronocidal
    Hah, I used 3D Exploration for years. Actually, it was extremely useful for a particular reason.. See, when I started doing CAD, I downloaded an early demo of Rhino.. I think 2.0. Well, back then, the demo wasn't limited by days, or uses. It was limited by save operations. You could save 25 times before the demo expired. At first, I just would save the clipboard data from copy/paste operations with windows's clipboad viewer (Rhino being the only CAD program I know of that uses Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V). But one day, I found out that trying to render an image at 9 million by 9 million pixels will crash the program (no kidding). In the process of doing so, it activated an "Emergency Save" feature... which didn't use the limited save operations. Coupled with 3D Exploration's ability to import Rhino models, I went on to happily develop dozens of mods for various games, all without using up that Rhino demo. If I ever find that demo, I could send it along to experiment with, but I'm not sure I still have the file.
  9. Chronocidal
    So, I had to facepalm a bit when I thought of this. That old MD3 format is a really popular format for polygon models, because it's so simple. I went to look up whether you can import them into Blender. Lo and behold, I do a google search, and yep. People have written import scripts for Blender that read MD3s. So, problem solved. There's a direct route from Gmax to Blender, if you want to use it. While it'll take some work to learn, the library of online tutorials for using it is absolutely massive, especially in the aircraft realm, where it was the go-to program for the MS Flight Sim series.
  10. Chronocidal
    Is it wrong that it's pretty much true? Maybe I should rephrase.. they're the worst printed decals I've seen compared with the shoebox full of other decals from all my other kits I've never actually put on, because I'm a lazy bum who can't make the effort to get my airbrush working to paint anything.
  11. Chronocidal
    Not if you like your decals to look like they were copied from a magazine article. The printing process they used on the decals resulted in basically the worst printed decals I've ever seen in any kit I've ever built. They look like newsprint, because they didn't use true colors, and made up the decals by printing dots of varying colors. From across the room you don't see it much, but up close, you see the speckles horribly. They didn't even bother to actually print orange on the SMS logo, it's a mix of reddish and yellow speckles. Also, they're terribly transparent, because there's no ink layer underneath. The yellow stripes on Ozma come out a sickly pale greenish yellow because you're seeing the gray through them.
  12. Chronocidal
    If you've got something similar in terms to "Boolean Operations," that's what you want. You might have something called union, subtraction, etc. It's basically all logical operations, but in model form. With a subtraction, you're taking a solid object out of another solid, so that's what you want. You want to subtract part of the sphere from the head. By the way, I won't say that Gmax is incredibly easy to learn either, since it's based off 3DSMax. It does have some tricks to the interface, but it's also extremely capable, and you can't go wrong with free software that powerful. It just takes time to learn the tricks to it, and fortunately, Gmax is a lot more forgiving than 3DSMax, since it's got such a simplified set of options. I just hope there's a way to export from it.
  13. Chronocidal
    That's... hilarious. It's like Jetfire had a baby with an F-14... which would probably be called aircraft incest to begin with.
  14. Chronocidal
    Not exactly. I think, in-universe, the entire reason for the crystals was that they act as Vajra jammers. They communicate through fold waves, and the crystals amplify signals to transmit on those same wavelengths (probably something resembling subspace transmissions in other universes). That's what Alto was doing during the entire scene with the YF-29. He was trying to disrupt the control over the Vajra by causing interference by way of amplifying Ranka and Sheryl's singing. Honestly, I always appreciated the slightly more scientific take Frontier took on why songs would work in battle that way. If you consider that fold waves were essentially a new communication frequency, and that Sheryl and Ranka could actually transmit white noise on those frequencies due to their infections, you essentially had a plot based on using human jammers against an enemy. Apparently though, due to the way those waves propagate through space nearly instantaneously, they're also the key to unlocking much faster space folds. Luca's family was researching how to utilize those crystals in various ways, which was where the enhanced fold booster Michael used came from.
  15. Chronocidal
    Oh, suppose it is, I'm just not that big a fan of Luca without the packs. The battroid is interesting though, so you're right about that. It feels a lot like displaying a VE-1 or VT-1 in battroid though.. it looks cool, but it never actually happened.
  16. Chronocidal
    Well, for something like Shapeways, the units can be whatever you want. It's just a proportional measurement. If you're building something that has dimensions in a particular unit (cm, in, ft, etc), you can set the units in 3DS Max to be whatever you like in the interface, but it has absolutely no effect on the model's geometry. The translation from a model to printing is the only time you actually apply real units. When you send something through Shapeways, they ask you what your units are. They offer two settings (cm, and in) and it's up to you to size your model correctly based on that. So, if you want to make a cube that's got 1 inch edges, you make a model that's one unit on an edge, and then select inches for units when you import the model into the printing software. STL files are VERY simple, and don't contain anything about what units you're using, it's just vertex data relative to whatever coordinate system you've got set up.
  17. Chronocidal
    If it comes through, it'll save me about $40 over NY, but NY will probably ship out before HobbyFan, so it's kind of a moot point. I can just say I got two for $160 each. Don't know if I will keep both, but given the recent tendency of Bandai stuff to have parts suddenly explode, having a spare for replacement parts is looking like a good idea. It's funny though. Despite my lack of any display space, I keep planning in my head how I'd want to display these. I definitely want a second VF-25G (with a crotch piece this time, thanks Bandai ) to pose in sniper mode, and the planets aligned somehow so I could get a re-release Alto from AmiAmi, so I can put one in armor to display next to the clean Gallia IV cruising pose. But I really have no idea how I'd display a second Luca or Ozma. A single armored Ozma battroid pose for the center of a display seems like plenty, and Luca was never that important to warrant double billing.
  18. Chronocidal
    I'm still trying to think of how you could go about converting Gmax exports into STL format. Last I checked, Gmax is still free, and still available from TurboSquid.com. It's possibly the most capable free 3D modeling program on the market, since it's essentially 3D Studio Max with the rendering and fancy production tools removed. The trick is finding a format you can export in. Basically, the people behind 3DSMax at the time were banking on a business model that depended on developers buying into Gmax for free-use mod developers. So, essentially, the only official export plugins you can get for it are the ones provided by companies who decided to pony up the cash to bundle Gmax with their games. For most cases, like Microsoft Flight Sim, the plugins only export in proprietary formats that were only useful in the games they were intended for. BUT. Gmax also has native support to export in Quake 3 .md3 format. It was one of the earliest formats built into Gmax, and has always been the go-to when someone needed to use Gmax to build something that needed to be converted to something else. Granted .md3 is an old format, but I think it's also very simple, and very easy to convert into other formats. People have used that format as a way to work around Gmax's export limitations, and share files between programs. Assuming Blender can import models well enough, and you can find a way to convert .md3 files into .3ds, or even directly to .stl, you might be able to bypass the interface frustration, and just use Gmax to make the models. Given the nature of game developers, it wouldn't surprise me if people have dug down into the Gmax plugin format, and learned to make their own, so you might find a ready-made .stl exporter somewhere. I think that might go against something about the original Gmax license (they only wanted game developers paying them to make any plugins), but when have software licenses stopped people from developing their own tweaks to the program? You know.. honestly. I've been dealing with a few very basic file formats lately, and I have to wonder how hard it would be to write a converter, and just take a Gmax project file, and spit out an STL. STL is literally just a list of triangle vertices with a header and footer, while md3 looks like is has a section that is exactly that. Anyone with a little experience scripting could probably do it.
  19. Chronocidal
    I still have my pre-order with them, but I haven't heard anything yet. I'd actually forgotten I even made that order until last week.
  20. Chronocidal
    Honestly, I'd kind of say to ditch both the decals and stickers entirely, and paint everything. They're terrible. They're printed like newspaper, horribly transparent, not the correct shapes, and don't conform well at all using standard decal techniques. Not a huge deal if you're just applying them for fun, and intend to strip them down later though. When you do need to use markings like text and logos, get some pure white decal film, and cut out a duplicate to put under the decals so they appear the right colors. Either that, or paint the areas white first so you don't see the plain plastic showing through the markings. If you're just decorating it to be done with it without much painting, I'd go with the stickers though, just because they'll probably work better if you aren't planning on painting.
  21. Chronocidal
    It's not that the crotch armor is bad exactly.. they just went el-cheapo on it, and didn't paint any of it. The outer edge is supposed to be a darker color, like the originals. It's like they flat out forgot it was actually supposed to have a color other than "plain plastic gray."
  22. Chronocidal
    Oh, sorry about the Rhinoceros thing, I was actually a fan of it back when it was new, and you could get a license for around $200. I'd say it's still worth looking into if you can find an old used copy or something, it's an extremely capable program, and I always loved the interface design. It's basically designed to be used for concept design work, so while you can do mathematical operations and things with it, it's meant to be very free-form, and let you design whatever you want. Really good for organic shapes. At the time I used it, I was working from a demo, and I was severely underusing it because I only needed polygon models.
  23. Chronocidal
    Considering the rarity, possibly, though raw-value-wise, I think the 27 is higher priced, and people may balk at that retail value difference. Throwing in the YF-29 super packs on the other hand would actually make it over-valued for a trade I think, considering how hard those are to come by now.
  24. Chronocidal
    Whoa, I went and checked out the site for the Up Plus 2. Not sure if those models on the site are in raw printed form, but some of them look like they'd blow the quality of the Cube 3D out of the water. I imagine a lot of it is in the software used, but the fine detail on some of those objects looks pretty impressive.
  25. Chronocidal
    I don't know much at all about the 3D scanner market, though I'm pretty sure I saw a reference to a simple and compact one during my browsing through 3D printers. Nice find on that new printer by the way, that looks like it would be a bit more cost effective than the Cube-3D ones, from the materials standpoint. How's the layer thickness on that one? As far as CAD programs go, I actually use 3D Studio Max, since it'll export STL files, and I'm used to the interface, but an actual mechanical CAD program might be better. Blender I hear a lot about as well, though I wonder if GMax is capable of STL file output. GMax is basically just a chopped down version of 3D Studio Max meant to be used for game mod development, and uses the same basic interface. It's mostly limited by what export plug-ins you can find for it, but someone may have made an STL one for it. If you're thinking of buying a program though, I'd look up Rhinoceros 3D. One of the cheapest full-function CAD programs I know of, and I think it has quite a few useful features for 3D printing and machining.
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