Tuesday, June 01, 2010

From the Desk: Angelius Repairs

I'm still wrapping up the Angelius, and in fact ended up using him for the 15pt Mangled Metal tournament at KublaCon despite it not being finished and sealed. Amazingly, he came through completely unscathed and didn't tip over once! That later point is something I'm very happy about from a usability point of view. However, he still had a structural weakness at the join between the upper body and the tail that connects to the pillar. So, in order to address the issue, I decided to bite the bullet and re-work it.

The structural weakness was specifically between the main body part and the small piece that I kept from the original sculpt. The join between that piece and the body extension that I sculpted is rock solid, and continues to stay joined securely to the pillar. The first step was to drill a second hole for another pin to more secure the two pieces. Next, the original join was a little gnarly with green stuff and it removed the illusion of a nice smooth flying snake, so I filed that down smooth. There was also a couple places where the sculpting of the body extension wasn't smooth, so I carved those down smooth. Lastly, there was some roughness to a portion of the sculpted body next to the pillar (probably due to glue issues) so I carved those down smooth as well. Now, once my paint-on primer order arrives, I'll go about repairing the paint job.

This is the first time I've done a major amount of repair work on a model that was practically finished. It was a little terrifying to start carving, but once I got started I realized that I wasn't hacking up anything that would be overly hard to fix. And in fact, I think this will be a good exercise for me to try color matching on the pieces that need to be repainted.

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