Transcript:
[MUSIC] One of the things I like about 3d printing is that you can change things in size, more or less with complete freedom. I may depend on. What kind of printer you have whether or not you can actually print a model that you have resized. Of course, some traditional 3d printers may have trouble doing very small models. And if you want to print a very large model, you may have to split it up into pieces and so forth, but it really opens up a lot of interesting possibilities. I think, and I’ve explored that quite a bit, even just with vintage counter figures like you see here, I’ve done a gigantic 1 6th scale job of the hut figure. I’ve done much smaller figures, and as a matter of fact, what you see in front of you right now is an example of that. This is a half scale figure here. I don’t know if you could tell or not. I printed these off in an earlier video and painted them to look like the actual vintage. Kenner figure. And I really find myself attracted to this One-half scale. It’s kind of charming for some reason. I’m not exactly sure what it is about it, but I decided I wanted to try and make more of these basically, but there were a few, uh, technical hurdles that I needed to overcome the biggest one was that I could not get the joints to work, so I had to for both of these figures. Uh, just glue them together. And so these are no longer really action figures. They’re just miniature statues of an action figure which, I mean, that’s okay, you know, it’s not like especially with a mana man here. He basically can’t be posed anyway, but it would be nice, especially with some of the other figures to be able to move their joints and so forth and especially if I’m going to be trying to recreate Java’s entire entourage and maybe some of the other kenner, uh, action figures as well. I wanted to figure out a way to make the joints work. And I think I may have done that so here. We have a vintage kenner Gaborian guard figure along with a printout of desert octopus’s scan of that figure. And you can see at this scale. First of all, looks like a pretty good match. I haven’t actually painted this one yet, but you know, looks comparable and the joints do more or less function. They’re still going to be a little fragile. Honestly, so you know, it’s not ideal even at this scale, but I find that if you use strong enough resin that they do function enough to pose a little bit, however, when we resize this figure to be about half scale, it no longer really works, so we have here. This is a half scale gamorian body, and here’s one of his arms. You can put it on there, but it’ll flop right off as soon as you move it around very much, That’s especially true with the legs, see? Is that the right one? Yes, so you try and you try and move it and it just comes right off, and you know, these pegs are pretty fragile as well, so I don’t really feel like this is a workable solution, however. I think I’ve been able to fix this problem. This is sort of a prototype. I guess he’d say, and you can see. He does have movable limbs. You can even sit down and so forth. So how did I do this? You ask well. I heard about these very small, rare earth magnets that I guess people use for things, like, uh, war gaming modeling and things like that, But they sounded like they would be really good for this application, and I think they are. If you can see here, I’ve actually attached both sides with a magnet and they just slap right on there. Uh, and it’s surprisingly strong. You know, you can wiggle it around. He’s not really going anywhere. If you drop it on the floor, there’s a good chance that some limbs would go flying, but for my purposes just having them. Basically, obviously they’re not toys per se. They’re more just for me to to pose and so forth and display. Uh, they’re really perfect. I tried the first time by the way. This is my first attempt. I tried using a smaller kind of magnet. I’m not sure what the size of these are. I think this is about a two millimeter and the other one. Maybe a, uh, a three millimeter. I’d have to double check ill. Put it on the screen right here. But in any case, this also does work, but it feels less strong. You know, less secure. Certainly you can remove it a lot more easily. I think I will maybe use these small magnets in some cases, though for figures that have very, you know, narrow limbs or whatever. I’m sure they’ll have some uses anyway. What I want to do today is show you how I do this. To the half scale figures how I print them out, Put the magnets in and then paint them and at the end, we’ll see how they turned out, so lets. Go ahead and do that here’s. An example of what a full-sized figures parts would look like on the build plate of my Mars 2 Pro. You can see, I can fit one figures with the parts basically on the build plate, but what I’m going to do here is get rid of those supports, which are only really good for the larger size. I’m going to scale it down by 50 to make it half scale, and then I’m going to rearrange the parts a little bit so that they’re not quite so spread out and we can fit more figures on the build plate and you can see you can fit about four figures where we could only fit one before I usually use the medium support setting in c2 box, which is the program that we’re looking at here, but I think it’s a little bit sparse, looking for this small of a figure, so I changed that to the light setting, and you can see, there’s a lot more supports there, but they’re thinner and here we have. Four of Java’s guards All arranged on the build plate ready for printing. Some of the hardest part of resin 3d printing is arranging the parts, orienting them the correct way and then supporting them. Ideally, so that you don’t have the print fail, But you also don’t have too many marks on your finished part, and I may not have done this ideally, but I think it’ll work just fine here. We have the parts all printed and ready to go on to the post-processing stage. I did rinse them off with a little alcohol so you could see the details a bit better, but I haven’t done anything else to them yet. These took just over two hours to print, which I think is really impressive and speaks to the advantages of monochrome resin 3d printing that you can do with printers like the elegu Mars II pro. So first of all, I’d like to try and do this Nicto guard figure you can see. This is the actual counter figure and here we have the parts at one half scale, so there’s a leg and so forth. Let’s just see how these fit together without doing anything to them. It does fit in there, Okay, But the problem as I mentioned is that if you try well, if you try and move it very much, it’ll fall off. And if you basically, if you do anything, it’ll fall off, so I’m going to try and use magnets to make this articulation a little bit more useful. The main tool that were going to use. Is this pin vice? This is from Tamiya! There are other companies that make them. Although I haven’t had real good luck with some of the off-brand ones, you can get at Amazon, mostly because the drill bits that they came with are really bad. This is actually just a black and decker drill bit that I took from my tool chest, but, uh, you, you know, you want it to be relatively sharp. Uh, I’m not using parts that have been cured yet. I want these to be still somewhat soft because there’s no point in making it, you know, super hard and then not being able to drill into it properly. If you just, uh, clean it off in alcohol and let it dry, It’s actually pretty good pretty easy to to drill, so we’re going to do is just take this and drill into the existing holes and it doesn’t have to go that deep. Really, these magnets are relatively thin. That’s probably more than good enough, Maybe a little too deep, but it’s not a big deal. We’ll, just go through and we’ll do that for all of these. Oops, I went all the way through. Actually, That’s not a big deal, though. Well, just, uh, we’re just going to be gluing the magnets right at the edge, you know, on the surface anyway, so not a problem. I think we’ll do this one and finally the head. So now that we have all the holes drilled, I’m going to put some super glue in. Well, just a couple of them to begin with, and we’ll see if we can’t get one of these magnets in there. So this is what what I’m going to be using. These are rare earth magnets. There’s about 50 of them here. I think we’re gonna put just one sort of, you know. The easiest thing to probably do is put it on something like a utility knife, or you know, some kind of other tool, and there we go. I got one there. It is then you can just smoosh it into the hole might be easier to use my flush cutters to press down on it. Okay, you just want to make sure that it’s relatively flush with the surface there. That looks pretty good, so I’m gonna go ahead and do this with the rest of the torso and then I’ll take a look at the limbs all right here. I’ve got the torso all finished. You can see, I’ve got five magnets installed and it’s a lot easier to do. Frankly, if you don’t have to be trying to get it on camera. It was actually quite easy to do the rest of these. So the next thing we have to do is take the limbs and get rid of these little. Uh, pegs. The limbs are a little trickier in the sense that you have to position the hole that you’re drilling on your own, whereas with the body, you’re just sort of just enlarging an existing hole, so we’ll go ahead and drill this in and as usual, put a little super glue in the hole and actually getting the magnets in is easier than with the, uh, with the body because first of all you just have to, let’s see this is the right leg or his left leg is to say you just have to make sure that you’re getting the attracting side and not the repelling side, obviously, then break off one magnet so that it’s attached to the body like that. So we got one if you can see, I’ve got a magnet on top of there and then just smash this in place. Whoops, and there it is now in the leg and we can kind of just push it down a little bit more. Make sure it’s in there good. I think that’s fine, so I’m just going to go ahead and do that with the rest of the limbs. And I’ll show you how it turned out in just a second, all right. I finished all of them and let’s see how it fits together, see. This is the front, so we’ve got the head right there and we’ve got the legs. You can see they just kind of sometimes spring toward the body a little bit. Even oh, no, oh, I forgot to put the magnet. In this one, that’s why and boom you can see how easy that was and once you get used to it. Of course it’ll be easier as well so there we have one complete half size vintage counter action figure with more or less complete articulation. I’m gonna go ahead and finish up the other guards off camera, and then we’ll come back and take a look at them. So see you in just a little bit. While I was working on the other guards, it occurred to me that I could use those smaller magnets in the feet of the figures, and that way I could prevent them from falling over quite so easily they do stand up pretty well on their own, actually, but if they’re on a little bit of an uneven surface, it might be difficult, especially because they’re relatively light, so I just did the same thing with the smaller magnets, and that will allow me to put them on a piece of metal like a metal ruler or in this case, it’s a metal pry tool and it’s not super strong, but it will stay on there relatively well. Once I got all the magnets installed, I cured all the figures in the elegu mercury curing station just to make sure that they were nice and sturdy so here, we have the finished figures with their magnets installed and ready for painting. Normally, I would use a spray primer for something like this, but because these are completely disassemblable. I thought that wouldn’t be a great approach. I want the paint to go on all of the surfaces. I figured since the parts were magnetic. I could put them on a piece of metal like this, and maybe paint them that way and I wouldn’t be able to get every surface that way, but I could come back later and fill in the gaps, and I thought it might work, okay, But the problem with magnets is that they’re strong in one direction, but not very strong in other directions So that when I was trying to paint them with the brush here, they would be moving all around and it just made it a lot harder. I think than it really needed to be so, uh. This didn’t work very well. In the end? The solution I went with was the one that I would have generally used anyway, which is to basically just temporarily glue them to something like a piece of cardboard and use that to hold the figures while I’m painting them, and then you can just remove them later on without any real problems, and you know, paint the bottoms of their feet separately and I did end up removing parts one at a time, so I could paint all the surfaces as well once I had the figures primed. It was just a matter of filling in all the, uh, individual colors. I mean, vintage figures generally speaking are not that difficult to imitate, because they don’t have a lot of complex shading or highlights or anything like that. It’s just block colors. So that’s what I did now, Of course, these are going to look really terrible until you get to. Maybe the second or third coat, and you know, you’ve managed to more neatly block in the colors. Doing the fine details can be a little challenging. I couldn’t find my smallest brushes for some reason, so I was using a well small one, but not the smallest one. You can get certainly and that hampered me a little bit. I had to sort of go back and clean up my lines A little bit more than I would ordinarily have to do, but it worked out. Okay, in the end. I think and, of course, keep in mind that what you’re seeing blown up on your screen Here is really a very tiny figure in reality, so you won’t be able to see most of these details Very clearly, if you are holding it in your hand in person when I’m doing eyes like this, I’ll typically just go in and do a big black blob there on the eye socket and then come back with the flesh color and make it smaller so that it doesn’t look so ridiculous. Yes, it’s take your child to work day at Jabba’s palace today. No, these are, of course, the finished half skill figures next to their kenner counterparts. And I think they came out pretty well. I did have to do a fair amount of paint mixing. This is what I was using to to mix up different shades of things. Some of the things I could just use straight out of the bottle and others like the Glorion guard skin, which I wouldn’t say I did a fantastic job. Matching did require mixing some other colors into it. But you know, generally speaking, especially when you consider that there are paint variations in the vintage line as well. I think it was. Uh, a pretty good job. There we go. We can take a closer look. At each of these, of course, their articulation works like that can make him fly through the air. This guy in particular, because I guess it’s because his feet are so close together, and they’re also fairly small. He has a little trouble standing up sometimes, but, uh, it’s all right here We have we quay came out pretty well. The Gamoran I did spray these with some crystal clear enamel spray and made them a little bit shinier than I had really anticipated. That’s accentuated by the lights. I have here, of course, but overall. I think it came out pretty well, and you know, if you want to see, I do have the magnets there. Still the the paint has already started rubbing away where the magnets are in many of these figures. But that’s not a big deal. I just wanted to make sure there weren’t any obvious like, you know, joins where this part wasn’t painted or something like that, so I did did want to make sure I got all the surfaces painted and finally well. Look at clothes, there he is. I do want to go ahead and do more of these. Although some of them like bib, Fortuna are going to be a challenge because of the cloth that’s involved in their outfits. I’m not really sure how I’m going to do that. I may just have to omit that part, but I think it’ll be interesting challenge. I’d also like to try and do something for Jabba’s throne. I have sent a throne to desert Octopus Quite some time ago took a long time to arrive and various things have happened, so I. I don’t have a model for that as of yet, but hopefully I will get one. Uh, fairly soon and we’ll see about doing that. In half scale as well, so thanks very much for watching, and we’ll see you again soon. I’d like to thank the people who support me on patreon for helping to make videos like this possible, including these palace Vips and especially Angelica Brady. Thank you very much if you’d like to support me on patreon as well. You can get perks like getting your name in my video’s. Early access to some videos and behind the scenes post and so forth as well. So do check that out. There’s a link in the video description to my patreon page. Thanks very much for watching.