My last progress update for this is now about three months back - since then things have been progressing slowly (lots going on)… Here’s the photos, showing the current state of things:

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The Group Build page is now online and I’ve created this new post category where I will post updates related to the group build - things like summaries of the progress on various projects, new projects added, projects completed, and so on.

There have been a couple people so far who have said they might participate in the group build - their projects will be listed on the group build page once I have some information from them.  For my part, I’m resuming work on the Crest “Close Combat Type” I started last year for the MMC Armored Core contest. In terms of part preparation that project was just about ready to be painted by the time I stopped work on it - but some issues with LED lighting and wiring held me up. I will be resuming that project and then hopefully also have time to finish one of my other Armored Core projects before the deadline.

Remember, if you’d like to participate, please leave a comment on the group build page and I’ll put your project on the list.

Kotobukiya’s Armored Core kit line is probably the best injection molded robot kit line to come out in recent years - and yet, it seems exceedingly rare that anybody posts so much as a WIP thread for one, let alone a finished kit.  I tried (and failed) to motivate the Armored Core fans out there last December with the “Armored Core Contest” on MMC (nobody finished their entries - not even me!) - now, I’ve decided to try it again.

This time around it won’t be a contest - just a group build hosted here on Scope Eye.  I’m thinking of probably a late October deadline, not any particular “rules” or anything, just an effort to motivate AC builders and make people aware of other people’s AC builds.

If you’d like to participate in the build, you can leave a comment here.  Once builds are under way there will be a group build page here on Scope Eye linking to people’s WIP and/or finished models. People can participate simply by providing a link to their own website where the build progress is being updated, of course, but if people are willing I’d like to host a couple of images of each entry here, too, so the group build information can survive even if people’s URLs change…

There were a few problems with my first Zaku Kai walk cycle (I’d messed up a keyframe which caused the left leg to intersect the foot during the stride - and additionally the animation had an excess of hip movement) so I did a new one and rendered it properly. It turns out rendering on my machine at work is a whole lot faster than the machine at home - rendering the walk cycle at home took a good chunk of an hour (single core, 1.8 GHz, etc.) while at work (four cores, 2.8GHz, etc.) it took a couple of minutes…
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Yesterday I finally tried my hand at animating a walk cycle with the Zaku. This is a bit tough for a few reasons. First off, the Zaku’s lower legs and feet are huge, which makes clearing the ground in the passing pose a bit of trouble. Second, the way the Zaku is modeled, in its “rest” position the knees are actually bent backward (they don’t look it, it’s just the way it worked out since the hip joint is near the front of the leg and the knee joint is near the back of the leg and the ankle joint is a bit forward of the knee - to give the joints more clearance this is necessary) so IK was a bit of trouble. Finally, there’s very little clearance between the lower leg and the foot - so if the two don’t match up closely they’ll intersect.

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I recently picked up the book The Essential Blender and have found it very helpful in learning more about the Blender application. With the animation chapter as my guide I produced a simple animation of my Zaku Kai mesh - the robot itself is standing still but the camera spins around it… I know it seems like a painfully simple thing to do, conceptually speaking, but the significance for me is that now I know how to use Blender’s animation tools - so I’ll feel a lot more comfortable trying to do more complex stuff later on.

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Since doing the basic form for the shoulder armor I’ve spent a bit of time refining the two parts - matching them relative to each other, correcting some minor mistakes I made in the templates, etc. In the mean time I’ve also begun work on the spike for the shoulder armor - I’ll be building one spike and then recasting it to make the full set of three.

Actually putting the spikes onto the shoulder armor could be a bit of a challenge - the trick is that “fringe” around the base of the spike actually has to be sunk into the surface of the shoulder armor and then blended in. Most likely I’ll have to fully refine the blank shoulder armor part first, then plot out the three places where the spikes will be installed - cut holes in the shoulder armor part, install cast copies of the spike “fringe” and then patched up with epoxy putty or something. Hopefully I can do all that and also have the spikes be properly aligned… Then the spike “fringe” will be cast as part of the shoulder armor when the shoulder armor is ready to be cast… The spikes will be cast separately.

I haven’t been getting enough done on this project lately, so I started work on a new part: the shoulder armor for the left arm. I started by using the Blender model to create five cross-sections of the part - I then transferred these cross-sections to styrene, cut them out and assembled them, and filled in with clay - then laid on a 2mm thick layer of rolled epoxy putty to create the part itself.

The resulting part still needs work but it seems like a good start. Compared with the method I used to make the head I think this way is significantly easier and faster. (This is a technique that was used in the Gundam Scratchbuild Manual to make a head part…)

I had been updating my previous HGUC Zaku Kai post with different images as I found them - but I thought for this one I’d start with a clean slate… New, larger images of the fully colored HGUC Zaku Kai are now available…

I’ve cooled to this new kit quite a bit over the last few weeks. It’s not the Zaku Kai I want to see - I always expected the worst should Bandai ever get around to kitting this design again… The fact that this kit wasn’t “the worst” was sort of a pleasant surprise, and I still feel like it has some merit to it… And I’ll no doubt get one, for comparison if nothing else… But it’s ceased to be an exciting release for me. It’s long past time that I got back to serious work on my own build.

Lately I’ve been working on the 3-D CG version of my Zaku Kai, trying to work out the design of parts that I hadn’t fully fleshed out before - the position and shape of joint parts, mostly - in order to work out what gets built next and how to go about it. I’m also trying to find ways to improve the model’s posability, and work out at a practical level what the finished model will be capable of in terms of poses.

I just found out last night that Bandai is finally releasing a HGUC Zaku Kai. This is exciting news but of course it’s a little scary, too, ’cause I don’t know what this will ultimately mean for my Zaku project, if I might lose my motivation or something as a result of this… But in any case it’s exciting news, and based on the initial prototype pics I think they’ve got a pretty good sculpt. Based on lineart for the new kit that’s been published, it looks like Katoki did this one - the lineart appears to be a refined version of the old MG Zaku Kai lineart draft… For comparison I’ve posed my Blender model in roughly the same pose, to see how the two designs differ.

My model clearly has a lot more bulk to it, and a lot more emphasis on the appearance of bulk in areas like the legs. By comparison the HGUC model has much straighter lower legs, somewhat similar in form to the MG Zaku v2.0. Proportionally the HGUC chest is smaller and narrower, the head may be larger, etc. Looking at my design in comparison with the HGUC - I’d say that that’s a very unflattering angle for my chest block design. I would almost consider redesigning my chest block again, maybe slim it down a bit. I’ll give it some thought anyway…

Compared to the old 1:144 kit, the new HGUC is much less squat, the head is closer to the proper size, and the backpack is much improved. Overall the proportions are a lot more palatable than the old kit.

Overall my reaction right now is that I want to see more of the new kit. I think it may be too soon to judge the new kit decisively. The new kit is in some ways a bit “watered down”, particularly in the legs and the chest - but it’s a look that works pretty well. The one area that really concerns me is the lower legs - I think they look reasonable but I’m not entirely sure they look reasonable enough. The head bothers me a bit - it’s too large compared to the chest block… I want to get a better look at the skirt armor, too - to me, the skirt armor is one of the most attractive things about this design, so I’m eager to see in greater detail how Bandai interpreted it.

As 0080 HGUCs go I think this one is pretty good - most of the 0080 Zeon HGUCs had a tendency to shy away from the bulkiness of the original designs - I guess this one is no exception - but I think this one may be good enough to OOB (oversized hands notwithstanding) - and as HGUCs go it seems like a winner. It’s like the HGUC Alex or HGUC Zeta - not perfect kits by any means, but great examples of just how good the HGUC line can be…