Detail-related pun (day 33)

I just realized, at this point I am one-third of the way through the hundred day challenge. I’ve known from early on there was a real chance that, at the pace I was establishing, I probably wouldn’t finish the whole build in the hundred days, but being a full third of the way through the challenge does kind of put things in perspective.
Today I did more detail work on the chest block. I decided the ridges on the front of the chest were too high, so I relocated them, and I added the similar ridged details on the sides of the chest block, and on the sides of the backpack.


I had been looking at the reference lineart for the ridges on the chest block, and comparing to some other versions when I realized I had placed mine too high. In the front-view lineart the lower of the two seems to be almost halfway down that top slope. I think maybe I didn’t really refer to the lineart when I was placing these, I just put them where I thought they were supposed to go or something. Careless. After realizing the mistake I decided to move them, experimented in the photo editor to see how they would look a little lower down, and checked my Blender model to see where I had put them there. To move them I first cut the upper of the two off the surface of the chest block and re-attached it directly above the lower one, then I cut the lower one away and relocated it and re-attached it. Then I went through the usual routine of checking and correcting the position with measuring calipers.

With that done I moved on to the side ridges on the chest. These are a little bit tricky since there isn’t a very good reference point to establish the location of these parts. As with the chest ridges I started by cutting out lengths of styrene strip to the same length, rounding off the ends, and then putting them in position and trying to get them to match. I started with the ones on the left side of the chest and placed them more or less by eye using the lineart as reference. When I did the ones on the right side, the priority was to get them to match the ones on the left.

Finally I moved on to the ridges on the side of the backpack. These ones are also tricky because most of the edges of the side profile of the backpack are angled. It’s hard to get a good measurement for, say, vertical position of the ridge, since I’d have to measure from the point at the top of the backpack or the bottom of the backpack, and keep it vertical using the backpack’s mating surface to the chest block as reference.. And I can never be quite sure those reference points are reliable due to imprecision in the build. Still, good enough I guess. I started by using the calipers to try to gauge how long the strips could be – then after cutting out the strips I decided they were too long, so I cut them shorter. The lower strip on each side was placed more or less by eye, and the upper one was placed to make it parallel to the lower strip.

As usual, not necessarily the most exciting developments but it’s work that needed doing, and progress is progress. I do think that adding little details like this, things that had been left undone for years so I could reserve judgment on whether the overall shape was OK, really does a lot to make the assembly feel more like the model it will be rather than the collection of parts it’s been so far.