I've used heat, but I worried boiling water may alter the colors. Perhaps even very quickly. Especially the clear plastic stuff... And don't own a heat gun or blow dryer.
One thing I don't like are "shields" made of car parts. Not only does it feel like lazy partsforming they don't even make effective looking shields.
Unless there's paint, I'm not worried, boiling water is a constant temperature and not enough to melt most plastics, and around 10 seconds let's the heat get through the part evenly, as opposed to air heat that isn't uniform, would melt, even burn the outside before the inside reaches a balanced temperature.
Even worse when the part was at least going to be some kind of weapon but at the last minute got neutered so now it's just a lump of parts that doesn't resemble anything. It's not much better when the "weapon" is an oversized awkward flat panel with maybe a swing-out barrel that makes it into an oversized awkward "gun" that looks like a rifle had a household solar panel attached on top. If a robot mode is going to be carrying a shield around, at least lean into it. Make it a riot police aesthetic, or something. Or have the character specifically noted as someone who carts the shield around all the time because they feel safer or they have the Captain America thing going on or they're anti-gun or whatever. Make it a feature, not a bug.
Stickers. It's 2021. We're way, way past this, folks. Pre-applied decals and paint apps, por favor. POTP was probably the lowest point Transformers has been in a while (see: Starscream, Optimus, Rodimus, etc).
i think stickers are fine if they are placed well in spaces where parts dont interact as much or at all . But yeah POTP's "stickers" that dont stick aint it .
Sword-wealding characters who don’t have wrist tilt or at least swivel. Holding the sword at a 90 degree angle to the arm looks awkward in dynamic poses.
That bazooka looks way better as a hammer. Stickers are my biggest pet peeve. paint apps can chip and thats annoying but every other sticker I apply usually falls off. Stickers are the main reason I won’t buy toy color Galvatron.
Here's a big one of mine- Incorrect beast mode anatomy. This encompasses beast mode joints that bend the wrong way (POTP rampage)razorclaw) and beast mode hind legs with the wrong structure, like ER Sky Lynx. His hind legs bend backwards with an inward facing joint, like most elbows. As is, his beast mode thighs are facing the wrong way, as they are basically a set of front legs in back, and not a set of hind legs like this Other offenders include Kingdom Dinobot, the POTP predacons, and POTP Hunn-Gurr. The only way a figure with these flaws will get a pass is if there is if it's just part of their design (trypticon's bot mode is more Godzilla than an actual dinosaur) there's an alternate transformation that circumvents it (SS 86 Grimlock) or the figure does something else really awesome (tlk Scorn)
Faux parts (typically only a problem with toys trying to cheat physics in order to look like a cartoon model) and parts forming (i.e. laziness) are my biggest design gripes.
Unpainted faces and eyes. Really killed Titans Return Megatron, Galvatron and the G1 Seekers. Animal heads that can't open and close their mouths like Titans Return Alpha Trion and every modern Ravage. "Masterpiece" my arse!! When the slavish devotion to the G1 cartoon gives us crappy paint jobs like the Rainmakers or a character's head design references the animation model instead of the superior G1 like Motormaster, Swindle, Snapdrsgon or Grapple. Of course the reverse can also be true.
I hate it when a figure is made much more complicated than it needs to be (and often less fun as a result) just to keep it from having to resort to parts forming.
At a certain point, partsforming gives you not a transformer, but a puzzle. My pet peeves. Well, unpainted eyes is one for me, too @Prime Noble . I am actually starting to think of "no light piping" as a pet peeve, but I understand it triples the parts count of head sculpt and requires another mold and another plastic color and thus really isn't that cheap to do. But that one mold gives you light piping for 20-50 copies of the figure, right? Idk, I really love light piping. A bigger one for me is the over-use of friction-fitted parts that pop off extremely easily (Siege Ironhide mold leg panels, Cyber Battalion Jetfire's arms, Kingdom Blackarachnia's limbs, Kingdom Paleotrex's mushroom pegs on his legs).
Faux parts. I think if the design is too complex to translate into a toy tweak the design. With the movies it's prob a lot of chicken and the egg with concepts evolving between teams of designers but I think everything should be filtered through the lens of "can we actually do this justice as a toy?" Honestly I'm also not really a fan of this trend of having wheels on mushroom pegs. If the peg is on the wheel and the socket on the body it can look ok (save for the gaps to release stress) But when the peg is on the body of the toy and you see this ugly stub poking out the wheel I just can't stand it I think it looks super cheap and all to save like 2 cents on every toy? do pins cost that much? I assume it's so that kids don't brake the wheels off but it just isn't my thing.
I have 3 major pet peeves. Two for all figures, and one for a certain character. 1) use of clear plastic. Its too fragile and unless you're gonna mold an interior or have a cockpit for a smaller figure I don't want it. Id rather u use sturdier plastic and paint the "windows" then having a clear view of jumbled up robot parts. 2) over engineering just for the sake of over engineering. If u can achieve the same articulation with fewer steps then do it in fewer steps. I didn't buy a bloody masterpiece! I don't need my deluxe's arm to take 12 steps to fold in when w bloody double elbow can do the same. Perfect example is ER double dealer. I hated transforming his lower half and the over engineering actually hindered his stability. 3) galavatron. Why can't we have one that has the ability to have his cannon pegged on the sides of his shoulder/forearm as well as the top? Its always one or the other but never both! He fired his cannon just as many times topside as he did sideways! granted Kingdom comes close as you can twist the shoulder part and wrist but now his elbow is pointing sideways, just throws it off.
Yep. I run into it a lot when I try to design toy-capable animal modes which are actually based on things. Quadruped legs in particular often need joints at fairly precise places, and front and back legs tend to have very different anatomy. Or trying to get invertebrate legs right - sometimes there are feet, or footlike structures, but in most kids' shows the legs will just end in points and the character scuttles about like a ballerina perpetually en pointe. The problem is that unless you're deliberately going for a deformed/mutant or 'cyber' version of something, getting it wrong just makes it look... wrong. Sometimes in ways you can't quite articulate. (Also things like cat paws. There are a LOT of joints in there.) And yes, I know that even official toys tended to take a heck of a lot of liberty with animal parts, especially when they actually transformed into something instead of just being molded plastic limbs that tucked away in robot mode, but that doesn't mean I want that on my own designs.
1: Unpainted eyes that look dead. Not even the MPM line is spared from this. 2: Untinted windows/100% clear plastic that exposed all the kibble on the inside of the vehicle. 3: Empty hollow plastic that isn't paneled off. ER Prime fixes this with arm panels that open and close. This should be the standard.
Simple for me. There’s no excuse for pieces to not hold together, such as the Rodimus Prime trailer from Kingdom.
