First blank/naked (no detail work or anything since it'd be a waste of time at this stage... lol) test shot of my MP scale "disguisable" seeker. I just needed to test the mechanics of the transformation out first, and it succeeded, and also helped ID the areas that need to be reworked. Now that I know the concept works, I'll be going back to square one and remodeling every piece from scratch to try and make it look like my non-transforming V3 Seeker bot figure. This is not a fun project (all sorts of printer problems popped up, having to think of geometry for the first time since college, etc), but it IS an interesting one at least.
I watched the transformation in the youtube reviews. Repeatedly. Eventually muted the sound during the viewings, I can only handle so much of Optibotimus and his stammering lol. Then just mimicked it the best I could with some key changes.
Yeah. I needed to make sure everything worked out with all the moving parts involved, and now I can go back and actually focus on making a refined, fully detailed model based on what I learned from this test print. Tons of adjustments and revisions need to be made, and it'll probably look nothing like this guy when I'm done. I'm having fun with the jet mode though, he's very swooshable. =)
Ghetto? From the amount of time spent engineering and the physical costs of filament, this is far from a ghetto project. Looks awesome! One suggestion- split the skirt up so the entire piece doesn't lift when the leg is moved. It would make it look more dynamic.
That's the plan... I did that on my Seeker figure and prefer the moving panels. I made the test piece a solid skirt just to save on time.
Thats really impressive im surprised you were able to reverse the transformation, you might as well just move into making your own 3rd party figures! Any plans on a chug scale starscream something better than earthrise?
That'd be cool to do, but I'm not sure my printers can make all the small parts and sections strong enough at chug scale. Once you go down to that size, things get really tiny, so making something like a hinge assembly gets really dicey from a strength standpoint. I'd probably have to simplify things a lot more to scale things down and still maintain the integrity of the design so that it'd transform. If you look at a typical combiner wars figure, for example, a lot of areas in those bots are very thin, which is fine when injection molding, but just doesn't translate well to home 3D printing. This is my first transforming project though, so I'm hoping to learn more tricks as I go along.
I first saw this in the general discussion and was like "it transforms now!?". Looks like your goal of only printing non-transforming MP figures from now on didnt last long. At least its swooshable!
There's no way for me to replicate masterpiece style engineering with my printer setup at home, so even though I'm making this one off project for myself, I'm still not interested in transformation moving forward since I prefer making ideal bot modes of toys I can't afford without compromising the look to ham fist a watered down transformation into it. I saw a lowkey snide general comment from another custom designer who focuses on transforming toys on a different site a few weeks ago that bugged me, so I decided to do this one off to show that anyone can fking make these things transform if they want to, some of us just don't give enough of a sh*t to bother with it. I don't like folks who look at toy customizing/designing as some kind of competition or who feel like they're above other creators just because of their skill level or what they're into making.
That's pretty impressive you were able to make it transform. I've been debating following your lead on making non transforming figures. Have you been able to get full movement out of the ankles? Front/back, side to side?
With my default ankle joint design, every figure has full ankle rocker articulation and limited forward and back. It's just a matter of how much of your "sculpt" you want to compromise to get the range you want. I prioritize rocker motion above forward and back personally.
The fact that it is designed so well and transforms into two clean modes is sick anyway. Do you have any plans of making the canopy look different in robot mode like the MP? If so I have a suggestion that you could make the top half of a robot mode accurate canopy underneath the actual one that fold onto the back. And then have the whole canopy on an armature that slides down. I attatched a very basic sketch because its kinda confusong to explain. Also I dont really know how all of this is engineered in those areas so it might be more difficult/ practically impossible to do it.
I already looked into that. It would require very thin walls to create a cavity that would fit the nose cone inside the cockpit section, and I didn't want to deal with the compromise to print strength that it'd result in.
