I haven’t been real happy with my first attempt at the Zaku’s lower legs, so recently I’ve been trying to do better. The first version I did, the plan was to build the common parts of the leg (the area above and in front of the pods – as these areas are the same on [...]

It’s been a while since my last update to this project: the Zaku project goes on and on, but there’s always other things I want to do, too. After all, I still haven’t finished my Armored Core group build entry. (close, though) Still, there’s a fair bit of new stuff to share.

It’s been a while since I’ve posted an update to my Zaku Kai project: much of that time has been spent on other pursuits, but there’s also been a fair bit of work done that I simply haven’t found time to document fully. Most recently I’ve been working on the shoulder joints and the [...]

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:

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]