Looking really brutal, I think I like the green the most so far. And the detail on the "belly" looks nice. Hopefully I can get some renders up tonight of what I have so far. The transformation is pretty unique, the tail/stinger are actually made from the entire length of the tape. It's getting pretty crazy, I'll be looking for tips surely. EDIT: Here is a bit of a render montage for the current progress. Need to work on the tail, add the stinger section, the face/head, and the claws/pincers, and a few other things. Getting there... the only thing I dislike is how close together the legs are, but I can't really do much else... meh...
Whoa Vic! THAT IS AWESOME!!! Your Stinger is looking great so far. Major props for the ambitious individually articulated legs! I'm curious to see your next rendering. I'm thinking that an add-on stinger-weapon for the tip of the tail might be a possibility; I don't know what you have planned there yet.
Well that is nothing like how I imagined it! Very inventive. So, if I'm seeing this right, the tail folds down the center, and then the body slides together. That's just darn clever. I'd be concerned about some of those wall thicknesses. You don't want to go much thinner than 1.5mm, but it looks like you should be pulling that off. I'm curious about your leg hinging mechanics. Is that Sketchup? Could you show an exploded view? Also, you might want to switch to "parallel projection" instead of perspective view, and turn off the shadows. Personally, I find it impossible to work like that. How do you get your parts to line up so perfectly like that? When I do test assemblies in SU, there's always some jitter. "Puppeting" objects like that is still not in my skill set. Ok, I guess fair's fair. I admit it, I'm working on a scorpion too. I'll show something soon.
My minimum wall thickness is 1mm, that's as possibly thin as you can get I've learned. The leg hinges are made from a little articulation "trick" I've come across. It's actually all 3mm hinges, just like they use on the official toys. Doing so makes it easier to work for me and I know it's safe to print. As for the shadows and projection, I actually only turned them on for taking the screencaps haha, makes it look more spiffy. As for lining up parts, such as fitting the male and female parts together on a 3mm clip, it's pretty easy actually. What I do is (yep, I'm a sketchup user to answer that question) go up to >View >Face Style >Xray. You'll see what it does then, it lets you see through your whole model, that way you can line up parts internally just the way you want to. Below are some more renders to help illustrate what I'm attempting to say haha. When I get home from school today I'll try and answer some more questions and give you some sketchup tips if you'd like. Hopefully I can get this thing a little closer to complete tonight. I still have just enough room to work in a stinger that doesn't have to detach, hopefully I can pull it off!
If you can fit 6 double-jointed legs on a cassette, I have faith that you can add a stinger to the tail as well. I'm really curious to see what you have planned for the claws and that chunky buttocks area in the back. I'm really excited by your design. Go! Go! Go! What's better than a scorpion cassette? Two scorpion cassettes! Go! Go! Go!
For the chunky butt I'm thinking of doing some fold-out weapons, sort of like MP Laserbeak and Ravage have. I think I have the perfect stinger idea in mind, as well. As for the claws, the only problem I can foresee is possibly extending the arms, though I have a trick in mind there as well. Then, it's off to the detailing stage! I kinda took something from the MP cassettes (and.. all cassettes kinda) and only have the top, displayable side, smooth and very "cassette-like", and the underside will be a bit less flush, showing some robot parts. I'll make my own thread for this soon, I feel like I've invaded Tom's area here a bit, my bad haha! Really excited to see where Tom's taking his as well, though... I'm willing to bet his engineering will be similar to my previous design, I just ran into one small problem with it and ditched it.
Yep, you're a total thread-jacker! Nah, it's handy having the whole discussion in one place for now. You are going to want to get your own thread started though, just so you can get the attention that design deserves. I do the same thing with lining things up in x ray. You're just a lot neater about it. Now I see what's going on in there. It's looks a lot more stable that I first thought. I'm a little concerned about all those little parts being too delicate, but one of the fun things about making your own toys is that they don't have to be child safe, and we're all adults here. I've been banging away at my leg design for the last few hours. I think I'll be ready to show it in a little bit.
And casseticons are always wonky on one side. It's just how they work. When I get into a rut, I remind myself that I really only need to work up to a G1 standard. Everything on top of that is cake.
Here's a little tease of that bug I was talking about. I'm nervous showing it, seeing as how built up it's gotten.
If it was me, I'd likely try moving the leg-assembly backwards instead of having some extra junk in the trunk; moving the extra bulk to the front to make a wicked set of articulated pincers & head. I'd have the weapons remain as optionally detachable clip-ons so it matches the G1 aesthetic. That's just me though; you seem to have a clear vision so best go with that. Yup. Gotta keep one side nice and smooth for some custom decals! Ooh! Ooh! Very very nice! Can't quite see what you've got going on for the legs, but the claws, tail & head are looking great! Go Go!
First off, your bug design is coming along very nicely, I really like the detail in the pincers and the head. As for stability, yeah, I'm a tad concerned, but at the same time, we're adults designing toys for ourselves and other adults, so we should be safe. Look at Fakebusker's good ol' Thugger twins, some tiny parts go into those! Really appreciate it, I'll be starting a thread for my stuff here shortly!
1st- This came out GREAT!! The transformation is seamless. 2nd- Can you help me out? I wish to make my oun tape but never had one befoer. What is the size(s)?
The thuggers are a real inspiration! Spinner- MP tapes are 50mm wide/ 32mm tall/ 8mm thick. I thought that they were the same size as G1s, but I was wrong and I've had to make a number of modifications to my current designs. The G1s are only about 48 or 49mm wide. The rest seem to be about the same. Usually 1 millimeter isn't that big of a deal, but at this scale it can be huge. One thing you can do to get a better handle on the size is to pick up a pack of real micro cassettes. Believe it or not, they really do still make them. They're a great way to fill up Soundwave's chest if you don't have any transforming tapes.
I work on a very similar scale, 50 mm x 32 mm x 10 mm. The extra two mm really help, you can find this exact measurement on generations Ravage. You can fit him and a G1 cassette snuggly in G1 Soundwave. Tom, I'm dying to see your progress on Stinger...
