For this figure, I originally intended to give the vehicle mode a little bit of grime, since I love a dirty military truck, but I ended up giving the whole figure a paint job. I didn't go about painstakingly adding all of the camo detail, but instead just added random patches of gunmetal gray and rust, but it ended up looking that way anyways haha. I also added some sand to the bottom portion of the vehicle and the wheels to mimic the look of it having been driving through the desert as it was in the film. Now for the robot mode: Now I loved what people did to remove the hand panels, so I tried my hand at it. As much as people may have said it was pretty easy, mine were superglued in there, so it took me about an hour and a half of wiggling and toying with it to remove them, and it didn't look pretty on the inside. It also left the troublesome gap in the hand, so I threw together some makeshift panels to fill those gaps out of some plastic packaging and painted it up. While I'm sure that someone will eventually make some filler panels on shapeways or something, but it does the job to fill the gap and it cost me nothing. For storing the pieces in vehicle mode, I put them in the hollow interior of the cab, but they kept falling out, so I made a little clear panel out of that same plastic to keep them in. Finally, the head holds that panel in place, ensuring the two small piece don't fall out. I gave the weapons a coat of gunmetal gray, then dry brushed silver over that. The paint also helps keep the shotguns from falling out of the ports on the sides of his torso, which has been my biggest battle with the figure thus far. The voyagers: He looks great with all of the others custom figures I did! As always, let me know what you think and feel free to leave some suggestions for future pieces!
VERY NICE! Hound seems to be ignored when it comes to people repainting/detailing figures, so it is nice to see someone go to work on him. Really love the tires and how you got a nice rust look on them
Thanks! When they released photos of the figure I knew I had to have him, plus he comes with an arsenal, which is always a plus. I just finally found him at a local Walmart about a week ago and I pulled off those hand panels and made the little fillers for the hands that night. After that I started adding some grunge to him, then the rust, then I added the sand detail to attempt to replicate that which we saw onscreen. The figure is just such a blast, really showcasing the simplified transformation done right, it easy enough to do it in under 45 seconds and you end up with a figure that didn't compromise much except it's alt mode size, so I had to do the figure justice! I also was rather surprised at all of the poses you can get this big lug into! The only thing I'm thinking of doing is giving that belt like I've seen some other Radicons do to fill out his figure a little bit.
That would be cool, especially if you could figure out how to make some grenades for him to have that would attach to it.
I think the grenades could be done easiest with 3D printing, but I don't have he technical prowess to learn a whole 3D modeling program for just a couple of grenades haha. I'm looking around some miscellaneous parts for a couple of cylindrical pieces that won't be too far out of scale to carve up. The search goes on! I liked what one person did with a strip of burlap for the belt, so I'm on the hunt for that as well haha.
Sculpty I find is great for little pieces. You need to teach yourself how to sculpt it properly but after a bit you can get pretty good at it and Testors should stick to it once dried.
