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wulongti graciously sent me a file with a Kreon head...so, of course, I couldn't help but start fabricating some helmets.



Oh, wait...that one on the far left no helmet! It king!

Next to the super-d-formed t-rex is a helmet suitable for Reflector, followed by Air Raid, Slingshot, and Ultra Magnus. Relfector got a little messy, but keep in mind that those lines should pretty much disappear in the printed version. I built in Slingshot's sunnies just to make it a little more interesting. I might put some relief work in the sides of his helmet just so that they aren't plain blanks.

And I just realized there were artsy-fartsy shading tools in SketchUp, so I couldn't resist presenting these helmets in "cel-shaded" style. It's so very 2004.

EDIT: So a test batch of these helmets are up on Shapeways if anyone wants to give them a spin. Just send me a PM. They should fit, in theory...but I can't make any promises.

I'm contemplating releasing a version with built-in faceplates. Thoughts?

Those look Fantastic, But you going to have to stop soon as I'm running out of money.........

Dough-bot wrote:Those look Fantastic, But you going to have to stop soon as I'm running out of money.........

Not to mention they're going to need their own bloody weekly feature!

@Dough-bot: Hey, I can't even afford them myself! I need a rich patron of the arts to buy all of the prototypes and tell me how they turn out...I wonder if there are any NEA grants to support action figure customization...

@Burn: I'd run out of characters eventually and then...gasp...have to start coming up with original designs. Or start making Go-bots...hey...

And some Sunstreaker and Gears haberdashery for you...



I figured out why Gears is so grumpy all the time. He tried rendering a self-portrait using SketchUp.

Man, this one was not really much fun at all.

For instance, you might notice some really sloppy line work on Gears. That happened because SketchUp's "intersection" feature kept fracturing the planes whenever I tried to incorporate a new feature. This reduced me to manually re-inserting a lot of material...and, hence, all of those messy diagonals. There must be a better way to do this, but I couldn't find any useful tutorials. There's still all kinds of mess inside his head...Shapeways is probably not going to like that.

The consolation is that those edges are so small that they probably won't even be visible in the printed product. (Assuming the helmet passes Shapeways' tests.)

I'm not sure which was the worst part of this one...getting the curve of his face, intersecting the curve with the flat plane of this hood, or trying to build those two spokes that sit on top of it.

Of course, much of this could have been averted if I went with the more simple geometric rendition of Gears' face instead of this smooth, round version. But, no, I had to try to get fancy and show off.

I was pretty happy with Sunstreaker, though. He just gave me a little trouble on the inside of his helmet...but, I think I fixed the damage.

Anyway, I'm probably going to take a little breather after the Gears fiasco...

Tresob wrote:@Burn: I'd run out of characters eventually and then...gasp...have to start coming up with original designs. Or start making Go-bots...hey...

Consider yourself formally challenged.

Tresob wrote:And I just realized there were artsy-fartsy shading tools in SketchUp, so I couldn't resist presenting these helmets in "cel-shaded" style. It's so very 2004.

EDIT: So a test batch of these helmets are up on Shapeways if anyone wants to give them a spin. Just send me a PM. They should fit, in theory...but I can't make any promises.

I'm contemplating releasing a version with built-in faceplates. Thoughts?

Nicely done, I thought the one in the middle was Kupp though, to go w/ the vest you're working on. ^__^

Yeah, I use one of the styles when I export any images myself. BTW, for your images I assume you're just taking a screen shot? I recommend instead, setting up your angles and styles and resizing your window to how big you want your image to be. Then go to File>>Export>>2D Image. You'll end up w/ a file that's rendered a bit nicer and you don't have to worry about jumping into another program. Also, no axis lines.

Tresob wrote:I need a rich patron of the arts to buy all of the prototypes and tell me how they turn out...I wonder if there are any NEA grants to support action figure customization...

This would be freaking awesome.... I'd like to apply for that grant myself... lol

Tresob wrote:And some Sunstreaker and Gears haberdashery for you...

[snip]

For instance, you might notice some really sloppy line work on Gears. That happened because SketchUp's "intersection" feature kept fracturing the planes whenever I tried to incorporate a new feature. This reduced me to manually re-inserting a lot of material...and, hence, all of those messy diagonals. There must be a better way to do this, but I couldn't find any useful tutorials. There's still all kinds of mess inside his head...Shapeways is probably not going to like that.

Yeah, that's a major annoyance when sketchup decides to just remove faces when you merge rounded sections together. If you jump into "view hidden geometry" you'll see the lines are still there, you just lack the faces. redrawing an outside edge will bring them back, but sometimes you HAVE to redraw the line. In this case, right click on the line and select "soften" and the line will go away and the "rounded face" will be healed. I really like the Sunstreaker one, and Gears is none too bad either. Sadly I had like NO time to work on stuff... this Christmas week has been pretty busy for me

Two more helmets incoming...

Old-bot:




Fast-bot:

Looks good, I'm looking forward to seeing these printed out

Because Springer deserves better than a recolored generic Autobot head: