Jul 272010
 

This friggen’ model is taking forever. Not helping is the fact that once I got the topside turret finished, I realized that I had utterly mangled the topside countours, and had to completely rebuild. Rhino’s good for solid modelling,  but it has some distinct limitations… it’s nightmarish when it comes to unioning parts together (if there is a common edge or face, most of the time it’ll just give up), and the only way to change something of complex curvature is basically to erase it and start from scratch. Feh.

The underside guns are longer than shown here.

2010-07-27-blob-1.jpg

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UPDATE: Getting there. All that’s needed now are the various weapons pods (oy…) and some surface detailing… major panel lines, vents & such.

2010-07-29-blob-1.jpg  2010-07-29-blob-2.jpg

 Posted by at 6:42 pm

  3 Responses to “It just keeps going and going…”

  1. Just out of curiosity, how large of a run do you need in order for a project like this to be worth your time and effort? Or do you only do models that you want for yourself?

  2. I’m creating the model master parts under contract to Fantastic Plastic (http://www.fantastic-plastic.com/onlinecatalog.htm). As I understand it, the break-even is typically somewhere around 35 to 50 kits sold.

    From a certain point of view it might not matter to me how many sell, since I’m getting paid up front to produce the parts. However, the more that sell, the more such contracts I should get in the future. And hopefully, the more I can charge for some of ’em… I *really* underestimated the complexity of this one. Live and learn.

  3. Yeah, you got that one right…that’s one mighty complex and strange looking design.
    I never realized just _how_ complex while watching the movie; which is good, as a good director doesn’t let the details of the technology get in the way of the story (like all that crap Lucas threw into that second Star Wars series), and most of the views of the thing in the movie were close-ups of parts of it as it was under attack.
    I wonder if the overall concept came from the Bell X-22:
    http://www.aerospaceweb.org/aircraft/research/x22/

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