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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Lately I’ve been working on the design of the belly part of the Zaku, and thinking about how I can improve the model’s posability a bit. Part of me feels like this is a waste of time – better to make the model look good than to make it posable, and poor posability can be […]

I was working on this project for the MMC Female Mecha Contest – I got quite far on it but unfortunately it just wasn’t enough to meet the deadline. At this point I have all the basic colors done (except the red dome on top of the head – I forgot about that) – but […]

Since the last WIP update I’ve mostly been working on the backpack. The extra care taken this time through has really paid off, and the backpack part is nearly complete. I’ve mounted it to the chest block using styrene rods and polycaps: this makes it a lot easier to establish correct position and alignment for […]

New changes: Rejointed the arm Built up the front contour of the lower leg a bit with putty so the vents on the knee armor will have the right shape, once I add them Made the cockpit hatch and crotch part narrower I had wanted to rejoint the kit’s elbow, mainly to improve the looks […]

Didn’t break a lot of new ground today: I cut the right shoulder to match the left (still needs some work of course) I also refined the beard, hollowed out the vulcan cannon area, and added the plates to either side of the face.