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 […]

This is a rendering of the head that I made in order to clean up inconsistencies in previous head designs appearing in orthographic designs for the whole Zaku in preparation for building the actual head part. I had done one of these before, but I decided to make a new one in order to incorporate […]

This front view is mostly a combination of Ortho Front #1 and Leg v5 redrawn on a light table. This front-view also incorporates various improvements and additions that were made on the computer composites, like the second arm, the shield, etc. I created it in order to have a solid baseline for creating side and […]

Version 4 of my leg design looked good to me until I tried it in a composite with the rest of the Zaku body. All such composites that I do have the leg tilted, because I regard this as the Zaku’s “neutral” pose. But it’s much easier to take advantage of the graph paper when […]

After creating version 2 of the rough design for the leg, I created a third and fourth version attempting to correct the main flaws in the earlier design: the low knee, a few inconsistencies between the front and side views, and so on. The third version was an improvement, and gave a nice, hefty look […]

After creating my first orthographic front view of the Zaku Kai, it became clear that I needed to refine the leg design. The first attempt was based on the drawing from the Zaku Kai front view drawing. It improved upon that work, but it was still a very rough attempt. The second version was a […]

All the best material I’ve read on scratchbuilding emphasizes the creation of detailed plans as a first step. If a plan is good enough to give you the contour and measurements of any section of a part, then there is no reason why a detailed replica cannot be sculpted. In other modeling genres, creating the […]