Heavy/Scratch: Masterpiece Charlene (for Skids)

Discussion in 'Radicons Customs' started by Snaku, Jan 28, 2019.

  1. Snaku

    Snaku Primes Don't Party

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    That's brilliant! I've tried using pins and stuff but get frustrated at how they just don't hold paint and I can never seem to manage with fine detail brushes but the toothpick thing is genius!

    As for rubbing, it can be reduced. I don't need all that much friction in those areas so I could just increase the gap a little. Especially the shoulder joint - it's not a ball joint at all but rather a ball shaped joint. It's actually only the pegs that need any friction. I need to do that as well as simplify the elbow joint and then re-upload it to Shapeways. I just haven't gotten around to it because I've been caught up in my new project:

    IMG_20190320_063408_01.png

    It's a ways off from getting its own thread (especially now that I know you're not supposed to create threads in this section without some physical work to show) but I think she's looking pretty good. Modeled after a Nendoroid and will end up the same size as them. Should be much easier to print than a 2" action figure.
     
    Last edited: Feb 27, 2021
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  2. Erwin

    Erwin Well-Known Member

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    Wow, that Charlene looks amazing! I admit I did not meticulously read this whole thread, but scanning didn't get me any info on if and how it would be possible to buy a Charlene from you. Is that an option at all? And if so, where could I find that info or would you tell me please? I love the Savant and your Charlene is a work of art!
     
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  3. Snaku

    Snaku Primes Don't Party

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    Thanks! Yeah, I keep meaning to get back to that. Her elbows were too delicate as designed - I got the print from Shapeways and couldn't get her put together without them breaking (got around it on my copy by printing her elbows separately on my printer from a more durable plastic). I need to redesign them and then put her on Shapeways for sale. I have to warn you, though, that Shapeways is stupid expensive - including shipping she cost me $30 so even if I don't add a markup, she'll cost almost as half as much as a MP minibot and she'll still need painting. I don't currently have any plans to sell prepainted copies of her - I'm very slow at painting so there's no amount I could charge that would cover my time and that I'd feel comfortable making anybody pay for such a small and simple figure. Besides that, I have the damnedest time keeping myself motivated for art projects, like painting, and there's no way I could force myself to paint several copies of her.
     
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  4. Snaku

    Snaku Primes Don't Party

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    It's been a year and a half since my last post here, but I just wanted to say I've revived this project and I'm upsizing the figure. She was 44mm before and now she's going to be 58mm which puts her at about the same size as the 3P Warriors Workshop Spike and Carly figures. Makes her closer to scale with the carbots' alt modes though I'm pretty sure she'll still be to small to properly scale with them. Also brings her closer to how the humans in the cartoon were depicted. But the biggest benefit is it will make her less delicate and I can give her better proportions without compromising her joints.

    upload_2021-2-26_23-30-46.png upload_2021-2-26_23-31-18.png

    I've made her face more human proportioned with less exaggerated features since they aren't as necessary at the larger size. I've also refined pretty much every part of her body (I haven't touched her hair or feet but that's about it).

    I've made her arms more slender, shrunk her booty a little, remodeled her hips after observing how MP-51 Arcee's hips fit into their sockets, given her breasts a more natural droop, moved the bicep articulation up away from the elbow (should solve the problem with the peg snapping off), and I've started reshaping the legs. Still to do: adding the rest of the joints (I'm pretty much building them all from scratch) and resculpt her clothes to match her adjusted body shape.
    upload_2021-2-26_22-22-37.png upload_2021-2-26_22-23-12.png upload_2021-2-26_22-23-42.png upload_2021-2-26_22-24-12.png

    I don't actually work with her torso in that grey color but this site can be overly prudish and I don't want to risk getting in trouble for posting "nudes" even though she looks like a mannequin. :rolleyes: 

    Let me know if anybody has any feedback on the work so far. I'm probably still a ways out from completing her (building joints is kind of tedious so I don't make much progress in any given day and I keep getting distracted by trying to get her face just right) but I'm hopeful that this time she'll be good enough for an actual release. Also I'm once again hopeful that I'll be able to make some headway on Circuit Breaker once Charlene is finished (again). I'm just going to have to straight up sculpt her circuity costume but luckily I've gotten better at this since the last time I took a stab at her.
     
    Last edited: Feb 27, 2021
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  5. Necrobot

    Necrobot Mechanoid Vivisectionist

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    This is looking good!!

    The face sculpt is AMAZING!! And there are EYES!!

    Several people expressed disappointment about the Warriors Workshop Spike and Carly figures being 'eye-less'. Somehow you were able to include eyes on your previous Charlene... and it looks like you'll be doing so again.

    How did you paint your eyes onto such a small figure?

    Have you thought about rice paintings?

    00b17ac084d99b2024a837fd202c524aff68a4e7_800.jpg
    unnamed (2).jpg

    I don't have my 'Grays Anatomy' book out in front of me, but I think that proportion wise, everything looks good. I don't detect any 'Rob Liefeld' proportions... that's for sure!

    I think I can see where the ball-joints will be for the hips/thighs and the shoulders... but you noted that there is a level of tedium in building joints... do these come later and get 'pegged' in later?

    So my wife has started her way down the GI Joe Classified rabbit hole... and that led her to acquire the two ToyBox Customs - Cobra Commander heads.

    (How great would it be to have GI Joe, Cobra, Spider-Man, Circuit Breaker figures all at the scale of the Warriors Workshop figures!! Shit.. why stop there? Someone should do a Magneto figure at that scale!! I always wanted to have Magneto destroy all the Cybertronians.)

    So, after trying to get the custom heads to 'pop' onto the ball-joint, we sorta gave up... those custom heads are never going to be securely 'pop' either head onto the ball-joint.

    I remember that I also had a 'pickle-of-a-time' trying to get the legs of the 'Chip' figure that came with Sunsurge, to stay attached to the torso. They kept falling off.

    Coincidentally, you posted this on the same night that we received the custom Cobra Commander heads... thus prompting the question: How are you able to get your limbs to stay securely on the pegs of the torso?

    There's so much I don't understand about 3D printing a figure.. and then trying to assemble the figure from the printed parts.

    But, your model is looking fantastic!! I assume the dimensions and proportions are scaleable... so if you wanted a 6" Charlene, you could have this from the same model... but again... i don't really know.

    As you know, I've bern waiting on seeing your Circuit Breaker for easily a year now... I can wait a bit longer!!

    But with all the circuitry on Circuit Breaker... will you include that directly in the model that you 3D print.. or apply it later by use of paints and plastic puddy applications?!

    Anyhoo... this is looking great!!

    One last question: Do you have any plans on making a cowgirl hat to go with your Charlene?

    Cheers @Snaku
     
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  6. betsuni

    betsuni I'm just here for the robots

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    I think the model looks fine. Although I do have to go look at the comic for reference to see if there are parts that are different (I know that is daunting since she can be drawn differently throughout). Great job with her face. It really looks great!
     
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  7. Snaku

    Snaku Primes Don't Party

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    Yes, she could be upscaled to pretty much any size. I wouldn't necessarily have to change the design at larger scales but I'd probably want to at least a little as I'm doing now for the jump from 44 to 58mm. I've done here shoulder joint (only her left shoulder is done in the pics - I just mirror the parts when I print them so the right arm and leg are only in the model to make her look right while I work on her). I've also done the bicep swivel. Next up is the elbow which is going to be a pain, followed by the hips, knees, and waist. Once I've got the "buck" finished, I'll build her clothes (probably mostly use what I already have from the existing designs and just refine it to fit my adjustments and maybe add more detail). That way I can take the same buck and use it for Circuit Breaker. And to answer your question there, yeah, I'll be modeling her circuitry and yes it's going to be a huge damned pain but every shortcut I've tried to take hasn't worked - she probably won't be completed quickly.

    As for fitting together, it depends on the material she's printed in. The resin I use has very little flex so the joints have to be designed such that they can be assembled without needing anything to flex. This is mostly fine for peg joints, although they will wear way too easily. The hip ball joints will be more problematic and I'm going to need to switch to a better resin if I want her to have any sort of durability. This either means a nylon-like printing resin or I could create molds and use a casting resin. I've been planning on doing some casting but the upfront investment is a little expensive (not monstrously - maybe $200 to $300 to get the silicone, resins, dyes, and the stuff to build a pressure chamber) and I have a limited amount of "fun budget" each month that mostly goes to toys, but I'll get to it eventually.

    If your 1/18 scale custom head wouldn't fit the figure, it probably means the ball socket wasn't toleranced correctly. I did a custom 1/18 head to turn a Zombie Lab Hacks figure into Charlie from the Bumblebee movie and was able to install it (iirc, I had to try a couple times to get the tolerance right) though, due to the lack of flex, it's never locked on as securely as I'd like (doesn't fall off or anything but it's much easier to remove than a standard figure's head would be).

    [Edit] Oh and yes, she'll still have her hat. I might try to take a crack at her other outfit she wore earlier in the issue as well- we'll see how I'm feeling when I get there.

    [Edit again] Sorry I keep missing questions. How I painted her eyes: the answer is badly. I'm hoping I can do a better job this time but the larger scale won't help much there - her eyes were disproportionately large in the old version while they're closer to realistic now which makes them about the same size in the larger print as they were in the smaller one. I'm going to crank up the resolution on my printer when I print her, though, so maybe that'll help.

    Thank you! Yeah, I pretty much just went with that one pic of her smiling at Wendell when he was giving her a ride and disregarded all the rest of the pics of her face cuz she looks a little different in each. I'm pretty happy with the face now but I will keep making minor tweaks. Did probably half a dozen more last night after posting and if I put a pic up, you probably couldn't see much difference if at all - it's mostly pointless since she'll be so small but I'm compulsive :p 
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Mar 15, 2021
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  8. betsuni

    betsuni I'm just here for the robots

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    I actually figure it is less of being compulsive and more being artistic. We always are our own worst critics.
     
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  9. NOCV

    NOCV Cretin of Kaon

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    What is this witchcraft?! I'm amazed by the face sculpt. Did you do it all yourself, or did you have an imported model as a starting point?

    Faces are where I'm struggling the most with the figures I'm designing for New Age. I hate doing them because I can't get a good rhythm to it. We aren't magicians. We can share our secrets, right? Right? :oops: 
     
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  10. Snaku

    Snaku Primes Don't Party

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    Thank you! Just lots and lots of time, lots of photo reference, plus showing it to people so they can point out where I messed up. I actually kinda suck at it which is why it takes me so long.
     
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  11. Bee427

    Bee427 Still here and queer

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    She's back!! I think the only thing I'd change about the body would be to give her a liiittle bit more of a tummy, but other than that, she looks incredible! I hope all those details on the face come out okay on a larger scale.
     
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  12. Ellamin

    Ellamin Freedom is the Right of ALL Sentient beings.

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    I am impressed! I think you could have a great design here if you would perhaps have her hair and clothes be more varied (one option comes with default design, and another has other hair styles) so people can make a handful of female figures to go with their transformers/model cars.


    She looks great for a skids accessory so far!
     
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  13. NOCV

    NOCV Cretin of Kaon

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    Well it is insanely good. Great work! What software did you model her face in? The way you've done all of the facial features and bone structure is just astounding. I couldn't imagine pulling something this organic off so well in Fusion.
     
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  14. Snaku

    Snaku Primes Don't Party

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    Thanks! I use Blender. I thought Fusion was sort of three modelling programs in one (a fusion if you will) and one of those was more organic modelling a la Blender.

    If it helps at all, this is what the actual vertices I work with look like (I left out her hair because the deep seams and creases make it look really chaotic without the subdivision turned on):
    upload_2021-2-28_15-51-38.png

    I use what's called a subdivision modifier to divide each of those polygons into smaller ones. Each subdivision divides each square into four smaller squares and I use four levels of subdivision while working so I end up with each square being divided into 256 smaller ones - though I actually print at three levels of subdivision since it's small enough that the extra level makes no difference on the printed model. Here it is with one level.

    upload_2021-2-28_15-55-39.png

    Already you can see it's much more lifelike.

    upload_2021-2-28_15-57-1.png

    At two levels, it'd probably be good enough to print - the head is like 8mm which means the largest polygons are somewhere around 50 microns.

    upload_2021-2-28_15-58-34.png

    This is the resolution I print at. Most of these polygons are under 10 microns and there's no discernable difference between a print at this resolution and one at higher resolution. I only turn it higher while working so she looks more real, since I'm working at a much larger size than the actual product.

    upload_2021-2-28_16-1-2.png

    This is what it looks like when I'm actually editing her face. The thicker and pink lines show where I want the subdivision algorithm to keep edges sharper (pink means 100% while the thicker black lines with pink tint indicate a lesser sharpness). Also note that the ears, eyebrows, and eyeballs are separate meshes that I will combine into her face before finalizing (it actually happens automatically at export so I don't have to actually do anything). By moving one vertex it actually affects thousands of vertices in the smoothed model, which is definitely much easier than trying to edit all the smaller polygons. The downside to working this way is the subdivision algorithm can be funny about it it interprets some things - it gets weird with triangles and/or vertices that intersect more than four lines and I sometimes have to get creative in how I do the geometry which is why you see the somewhat nonsensical shape to the left of her dimple - there really should be a line cutting that triangular section at the bottom into its own polygon but if I did that, I'd get a seam from her dimple to her mouth. The other downside is I'll sometimes go about it the wrong way, moving a vertex to a crazy extreme for example, because it produces an effect that looks like what I want, but this usually backfires later when I'm working on surrounding areas. Occasionally I have to turn off the subdivision to see where I've done that and correct it (for example, in that first pic, you can see that her face sticks out through her eyebrows in a couple spots - that's a no-no that I should correct but there really isn't all that much to the eyebrows so I don't bother).

    [Edit] And a shot with her hair cuz why not. I've done a bit more tweaking to her face since the last time I showed her (of course I have) so this is a nice update.

    upload_2021-2-28_16-20-24.png
    upload_2021-2-28_16-23-0.png

    I think I might finally be happy with her (gotta' fix those ears, though - haven't touched them in a while and her face got skinnier while leaving them behind).

    upload_2021-2-28_16-47-9.png upload_2021-2-28_16-47-33.png

    How's that?
     
    Last edited: Feb 28, 2021
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  15. Bee427

    Bee427 Still here and queer

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    Looks great!
     
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  16. NOCV

    NOCV Cretin of Kaon

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    It is, and you can do smooth organic forms with the Form modelling workspace it has. However, doing anything to the degree that you detailed in the remainder of your post either isn't possible, or it's just not yet known to me how to edit and sculpt so precisely with vertices. If I tried it now it would be a very convoluted and complicated process of sketching out the geometry of each plane of the facial features to make a geometric face surface, and then joining them all together to form one "body" for the head, in order to do something as detailed and lifelike as you've done here.

    The face and head you've done is just a whole lot of wow. Just wow.
     
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  17. Snaku

    Snaku Primes Don't Party

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    Thanks! I really appreciate the feedback.

    Thanks again! I feel like that plane sketching thing would be obnoxiously difficult. What I do is just start with a rough shape and start subdividing it and moving vertices as I go until it's a roughly humanoid head shape. Then I start going in and cutting polygons into the shapes I need and doing more vertex moving. Extrude here for a nose, extrude inward for eye sockets, and so on. Once I've gotten that far, I start trying to make it look like the specific person I'm going for. Or rather that's what I did the first time - now I just build off my existing headsculpt and change it into whoever I need it to be. My old Charlene headsculpt got reshaped into Charlie from the Bumblebee movie, and then I tried changing the now more detailed sculpt back into Charlene before I concluded it'd be easier to just start back at the old Charlene and update it instead. And I had an old Arcee facesculpt that became faces for MP51 Arcee, my Nendoroid Arcee, and XTB Savant (which I ended up abandoning because they released a fixed face for him).

    Minor update today. She's not naked anymore! Also I learned where the antialiasing setting is in Blender. Still need to sculpt the rest of her pants - it's mostly just a belt and her lower body painted blue and I need to sculpt the pant legs.

    upload_2021-3-1_1-10-12.png upload_2021-3-1_1-14-18.png

    What's that? Elbow joints? No, I'm totally not sculpting her clothes as a way to procrastinate doing the joints because they're going to be tedious and annoying.
     
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  18. Snaku

    Snaku Primes Don't Party

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    Popping in for a quick minor update. I've been dividing my time between this and another project to keep either from getting stale, and I'm obsessing over every detail which is why it's slowed down a bit. Still haven't done those elbows. I took a stab at double jointed knees the other day and the results were promising though I'm going to need a couple more attempts to get them looking right.

    I was looking at the old version and decided to see out of curiosity how much bigger the new one is side by side (58mm vs 44mm if I didn't mention it before).

    upload_2021-3-8_8-59-37.png

    Anyway, I've started on her jeans. Sculpted in the seams and such and now just need to do the front pockets, the wrinkles (gonna' do better than last time), and I'm going to try to add the little danglies that cutoff jeans get.

    upload_2021-3-8_9-6-30.png upload_2021-3-8_9-6-56.png

    You may notice her abdomen is a little more detailed than before. Also did some more detail on her neck and collarbone area and I sculpted in her shoulderblades (not that it matters with her tanktop covering them, but they'll be showing when I repurpose this sculpt for Circuit Breaker and who knows what else I may do with it down the line - I don't have any plans to make 6" figures but if I did, I could scale this mold up - have to redo all the joints again though).

    upload_2021-3-8_9-7-52.png +
    upload_2021-3-8_9-10-46.png

    Also moved that shoulder pin to the back so her arms look a little cleaner from the front (left shoulder. The right shoulder isn't cut up for articulation and is only there to make her look complete while I work on her).
     
    Last edited: Mar 8, 2021
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  19. GAUGE

    GAUGE Wargod ARTS

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    @Snaku,

    I'd love to see a Charline based on my edit below. :) 

    yours looks fucking phenomenal dude!

    (Did this one a few years ago heh)
    FullSizeRender_4.jpg
     
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  20. Snaku

    Snaku Primes Don't Party

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    Wouldn't be hard. Just have to sculpt a seam around the waist and fill in the area across her butt so it looks like there's fabric there. I can include it as an option when I get her finished and upload her for printing.

    upload_2021-3-8_16-7-56.png upload_2021-3-8_16-9-52.png

    I'd probably adjust the placement of the waistline a little but I'd have to keep it straight across (no high hips) since it'd also be where the cut for waist articulation goes.

    I'm sure my wife wouldn't be thrilled if I printed one for myself, though :D 
     
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