The Energon Pub

So a few months ago I ordered a few things from Shapeways, I ordered the following:

• Thugger 3.0 (WFC Rumble/Frenzy, tfw thread)
• Pile-drivers for Thugger
• Superion filler 4 (a filler piece to make Energon/ROTF/Universe 2008 Superion suck less)

So, when I looked at the price of my cart I realised I couldn't afford to ship it just yet (I had a lot of stuff to pay at the time) and decided to wait a bit till I could. Needless to say, I completely forgot about my cart till a few days after Christmas, when I browsed the site again. I saw that my cart still had my stuff in it and decided to ship it.

I received my order in under a week, and was totally exited to open it up and start work on my models. I also planned on reviewing them the next day, but decided not to. The reasons behind not reviewing them immediately, was partly due to a lack of time and, well I wanted to do a fair and good review.
Had I done it too early I might make it too positive simply due to the hype, or to negative due to my discoveries after the euphoria. I think enough time has passed to allow me to put down an honest review.

(Crapy) Photos are on the bottom of the review.

Firstly the Thuggers.

I ordered two of these little guys, both in the "Strong and Flexible" material, one in red and one in indigo.
Now whne I originally put this in my basket it was still version 3.0, however when I had it shipped it was updated to version 4.0, which I didn't notice. The 4.0 version is different in the way that the original piledrivers no-longer work with it, but it's now Cyberverse compatible, yay? So yea the pieledrivers I bought are useless to me.

Now the awesome things about this kit is, well assembling it, the detail, the articulation, and the fact that it's compatible with WFC Soundwave. Seriously, if this is what Legends Class by Hasbro where like, I would buy them all.

But here comes the big but.

I wanted to by lazy and not have to paint too much, since I'm impatient and I'm not exactly skilled nor do I have the proper tools to paint stuff. So I ordered one in red and one in blue, which was perfect, due to having to just ad a little paint here and there, best off all I had all the necessary colours. However, the material just sucks.

Yea there is no nice way to say this, the White Strong and Flexible material, and all it's different colour versions just sucks. Oh it is strong, but:

• it washed out the detail
• it feels horrible and looks horrible, especially up close
• it drinks paint like a sponge

When you get the models you will have to do some cleaning, get out all the unnecessary dust out of all the details and holes in the parts. The only models I didn't have to do any cleaning where the useless piledrivers (dark gray and flexible), Frenzy (red strong and flexible) needed just a bit of cleaning), the Superion Filler (White Strong and Flexible) needed just a tiny bit of cleaning, and Rumble (Indigo Strong and Flexible) is f**king impossible to get clean. Seriously, there are parts of Rumble that are still covered in dust, which is much brighter than the rest of him, and he just looks sloppy.

The figures look good in the dark, but once the light shines on them and you look at them closely, you see the horrible texture of the material, and then you think you're holding something made of ruff coloured cardboard.

What makes it suck even more is the fact that in order to let the hand full of paint apps I want to ad to them look good, I will first have to cover them in a base paint to the paint that the material is socked in enough paint to no-longer suck it up and let it bleed everywhere and then paint them in all of their colours, including the ones I bought them in.
Which defeats the whole point of buying them in their main colours.

Best you buy them in the clear, "Frosted Ultra Detail", which is translucent and brittle, but delivers more detail and a (hopefully) better feeling material with a nicer surface. Because hey, you'll have to completely paint the kits anyway, so why settle with an inferior material?


Superion Filler 4

There are 4 different kinds of Superion Fillers, the one I have is basically the deluxe version, because it fills the stupid stomach, fixes the problem of the torso not staying together, allows for leg articulation (in hindsight that's kinda unnecessary, I mean the figure can barely move it's legs into a decent pose anyway), and it has extra detailing so it can be used as part of Silverbolt's jet-mode (again useless now that I think about it, since I never display my stuff in alt-mode). There really isn't much to this, you take it and stick it in your Superion and marvel at how it suddenly doesn't suck quite as much, since now the cockpit no-longer slips into the stupid hole in his body.
I recommend using White Strong and Flexible, paint apps aren't really required.

So yea, here come the photos:

Out of the box




Assembled, you can see that I used a pin, a needle, and nail clippers as tools:











Superion Filler, as you can see I slightly painted it to make it more interesting, that's how I found out that the WSF sucks for painting.

Thanks for the write up DM. I was kind of hoping you'd sway me on these when you got around to posting about them but you description of the materials doesn't sound great. On the other hand I'm pretty experienced with small scale modelling (coming up on 20 years wargaming) so I should be able to get some presentable results without too much fuss. So, yeah, still undecided really. I'll probably order a couple of Superion fillers at least at some stage, maaaaaaaaaby more...

They don't look THAT bad, though, like you said, better in the dark... So, Whats this "Filler" look like?

BeastProwl wrote:They don't look THAT bad, though, like you said, better in the dark... So, Whats this "Filler" look like?

I'm interested to see the final product too, I've been tempted by this one for a little while.

Mkall wrote:

BeastProwl wrote:They don't look THAT bad, though, like you said, better in the dark... So, Whats this "Filler" look like?

I'm interested to see the final product too, I've been tempted by this one for a little while.

Updated, sorry for forgetting to take and post some in the first place.

waaaaghlord wrote:Thanks for the write up DM. I was kind of hoping you'd sway me on these when you got around to posting about them but you description of the materials doesn't sound great. On the other hand I'm pretty experienced with small scale modelling (coming up on 20 years wargaming) so I should be able to get some presentable results without too much fuss. So, yeah, still undecided really. I'll probably order a couple of Superion fillers at least at some stage, maaaaaaaaaby more...

Yea the fillers are awesome, but mostly due to not really needing any paint and being one piece.

I'm not really sure I want to buy two new thuggers in Frosted Ultra Detail, I would much rather buy these as casted figures. I wish Fakebuster would just collaborate with a 3rd party company so we could have proper versions. Oh, here's a link to the guy's tfw thread on these including instructions. Should have put that in from the beginning.

http://www.tfw2005.com/boards/radicons- ... twins.html

If you ever decide to buy from Shapeways again, try WSF Polished - basically a WSF sanded down. It makes a world of difference, looks like "real" plastic, and it's still stronger and cheaper then frosted ultra detail.
As for the sucking paint problem, I painted my stuff this way and was pretty happy with the results:

1. I put some spray primer on the piece
2. Painted it with acrylics (it was still sucking the paint)
3. Put some spray to seal the paint (I used Citadel Purity Seal)

And the result was by no means different from any other plastic I painted. It was no completely smooth, of course, just had a satin finish that kinda looked like the FP plastics.

thanks for the review. I've been tempted by Thuggers before and planned to buy in red and indigo as well. the colours look pretty good, and the red one seems okay from what I can see in those pics. the paint issue is worrying though, as is the detail. think I'll hold off for now.

Guys, awesome news!

so after I posted this review, I went over to tfw and asked Fakebuster, the creator of the WFC Rumble/Frenzy kit if he could team up with a 3rd party group to make plastic versions, this is the answer I got:

Good suggestion, and in fact I'm in contact with a 3rd party group now and we are actively considering doing an official version of the WFC recordicons.

The thing is, we can get away with a lot of stuff in Shapeways that conventional methods cannot do, so you'll have to accept that official versions might have some compromise in design. But, be assured I'll try my best to push the envelope and make them as close to the Shapeways versions as possible.

You can find it by clicking here.

Dead Metal wrote:Guys, awesome news!

so after I posted this review, I went over to tfw and asked Fakebuster, the creator of the WFC Rumble/Frenzy kit if he could team up with a 3rd party group to make plastic versions, this is the answer I got:

Good suggestion, and in fact I'm in contact with a 3rd party group now and we are actively considering doing an official version of the WFC recordicons.

The thing is, we can get away with a lot of stuff in Shapeways that conventional methods cannot do, so you'll have to accept that official versions might have some compromise in design. But, be assured I'll try my best to push the envelope and make them as close to the Shapeways versions as possible.

You can find it by clicking here.

Way to step up to the plate! Maybe they'll make them even MORE soundwave compatible than the Shapeways guys? Still, I want these thuggers. When I get around to painting again, I may consider them...

Definitely keeping my eyes out for the potential releases. I have a few Shapeway stuff in my basket at the moment, but I may change their material since I added the same type you did. I would rather pay more for better looking pieces.