Bandai releases new Star Wars Model Kits for 2015!

Bandai, that company that simplifies the process of modeling with easy to build but superb, highly detailed molds of science fiction kits, has decided to release a ton of classic Star Wars items for 2015! But even better, a few of these will be available in November and December of 2014! Click the link to visit their Star Wars page, which is mostly in Japanese but has an english menu.

The X-Wing Fighter, due out this November, features two pilot figures, one standing and one in a seated position. It also includes an R2-D2 figure as well as R5-D4, so you can customize the vehicle to the one of your liking (i.e., Red 3, Red 5). Click the link to see all of the features.

Darth Vader's T.I.E. Advanced Fighter includes a 1/72 scale standing Vader figure as well as a seated one for the cockpit. Also included are optional laser blasts. Follow the link to see the pics. Both this kit and the X-Wing are scheduled for November of this year.

Also out this November is their highly posable 1/12 scale Darth Vader (link). And the Stormtrooper, which is the one I really want, will be out in December of this year.

But they have many more planned for 2015, click here to see pictures from their Hobby Show that features images of the Snowspeeder and AT-ST prototypes and others, as well as a few new Yamato 2199 kits.

HT-AT: A Custom Lego Creation Inspired by Star Wars; 7 Years in the Making!

Long ago in 2007 when I was still crazy-inspired to crank out Lego originals based on popular science fiction movie design sensibilities, I really felt I needed a walker vehicle of my own. Enter the heavily armored HT-AT.

This led to the birth of my HT-AT. A Clone-Wars-Era walker made to fit right in with the AT-TE and other vehicles used by the Galactic Republic, like the LAAT dropship.

About 3 months ago, I revisited my MOC (Model of Choice) because I felt I needed to update some of the construction and finer details. I reduced the amount of visible studs, streamlining it just a tad.

It's technically still under construction, as I'm a bit of a perfectionist. Plus, I need to add some moveable support mechanism to the underside. I designed it to attach to my custom LAAT Dropship, but the weight of the much larger model does put some stress on the legs of the smaller walker. 

HT-AT

HEAVY TERRAIN ARMORED TRANSPORT

Clone Wars Era

Galactic Republic

The HT-AT is a multi-role walker made especially for extremely rugged terrain. it is an extremely versatile machine that provides ground support as well as transport capabilities. Much smaller than an AT-TE, HT-AT's can be used in a number of tight spaces such as caves or man-made structures. Its legs are designed to scale a variety of challenging surfaces. It can climb a vertical cliff and has even been deployed in zero gravity environments, attaching itself to large craft, such as cruisers and space stations. After the much smaller AT-RT, it is the 2nd fastest walker used by the republic, though it has a limited range. 

This design is not "cannon" or an official Star Wars design. I created the model myself about 5 years ago out of a love for similar vehicles.

Hasbro Star Wars COMMAND Hand-Painted Customs. Why not?

I was at a store a few weeks ago and saw these. In recent years I've been trying to stick to model kits and forced myself to not buy toys anymore (Really? Who am I trying to fool? The animated Star Wars Rebels will be out soon!). But when I saw these stark, unpainted figures I felt that tremor in the force again. 

Unpainted Star Wars miniatures? Sold!

At just 2 to 2 and a half inches, they make great gaming pieces and great miniature display figures. Warning: I'm not a great photographer and the digital camera makes the fine details look harsher. A LOT!

First, you have to prime them. This is absolutely necessary as the material they are made from has a certain residue that makes the paint slide across the surface. I washed the figures in liquid detergent, then let them dry thoroughly. 

Next, I sprayed them with Tamiya "Fine" White surface primer.

And last I painted them with different acrylic paints like Floquil's Polly Scale and cheap craft acrylic. Believe it or not, you can work wonders with some of those little 50 cent bottles!

The Endor set includes 4 Ewoks and I painted three of them as different characters based on my Hasbro figures from Power of the Force or the Saga series.

Obviously, they're all copies of Wicket. But they look real cute to the naked eye in 3-D. Who wants an army of just Wicket clones?

Next from the Endor set are the two vehicles, molded in a semi-soft, almost rubbery plastic.

After priming they can be painted real easy. I used Tamiya's panel line accent color again and I really need to get the grey and mix it with the black, I think. The pure black lines are great on darker colors. but they might me a wee bit too dark on the X-Wing fighter. It looks good in person, though.

Because of the molding of the three lines on the s-foils (wings), I recognized this as Red-3, the X-Wing piloted by Biggs Darklighter. So I referenced an old magazine I still have with a few great pictures of ILM's filming models to get the right color scheme. Bear in mind, this thing is about 2 inches long, so getting the details right on the little astromech droid wasn't easy. He's a little sketchy!

I still need a few colors here and there to get this one 100% done. This really inspires me to get a an actual X-Wing model kit like the 1/72 Fine Molds or even other versions. 

I love X-Wings.

The AT-ST Chicken Walker was A LOT easier to finish. Basically, grey spray paint and panel lines.

Will I use these in some game? Probably not. I've never actually done Star Wars RPG. That doesn't mean I'm not at least curious. But I want more of these. The "Rebels" one with the new characters looks really cool. 

"A SPACE ADVENTURE THAT NEVER WAS" Part One

Long ago, 1995 I think, I acquired an inexpensive but very satisfying computer graphics program called KPT Bryce. It was created by Kai's Power Tools back when they were still joined with an old software company called Metacreations. It was then in those years that my brief experimentation with CGI began and then quickly ended in part for personal reasons, because I went back to hand-painted art, and because of the ever-shifting and impermanent world of computer software and hardware technologies.

I was running this software on my first Mac, the Apple 6320cd, a cream colored machine that operated on 16 MB OF RAM! AND HAD A HARD DRIVE OF 1.2 GB! I don't think I have a flash drive with less than 2Gb on it. Well, the program was made for rendering landscapes of canyons and islands but also had a few basic geometric primitives like cubes and spheres or even a pyramid shape to drop in your cg desert. One of my earliest creations, that horrifies me now, is a DUNE themed landscape. This was made quickly with the program's fractal-based land mass generator and the adjustable "atmosphere" controls to make clouds, mist, haze, etc...

So I continued "playing" with Bryce's geometric primitives, which could be elongated, connected, colored and textured. Above is an example of these in an unfinished Gundam mecha I was designing. It's right leg and arm pieces were assembled separately and the picture probably shows nearly a hundred of these small geometric bits. By current CGI model making standards, it's really time consuming and complex, even if the result looks simple.

Because I'm a huge Star Wars mega-nerd, I went on to make figures from that series. Tho not terribly realistic (they look really funny to me now), I would use these as smaller elements in very complex scenes with buildings, spacecraft, and moons thrown into their synthetic skies. The more familiar creature at the left, a Rodian, had his head first constructed from a larger sphere, his snout from a cylinder attached to the sphere, and then everything else on his face and head made from even more spheres and cylinders, all "pasted" together. The program didn't really provide you with any soft, organic curvy shapes. The curved head of his brown hammer head companion was made by introducing a cylinder or squashed sphere, duplicating it onto an imaginary invisible circular diameter, then duplicating those two elements, rotating them so now the four elements are 90 degrees across from each other, duplicating those into eight pieces, rotate, duplicate, rotate, repeat, repeat, repeat until you have about 100 squashed rounded bits side by side and so close AND even overlapping each other to create a softer torque shaped object. The program didn't have torques. I would then cut off one side of the torque and the half-torque made the hammer-headed curved portion of the head. NIGHTMARE!