pandacronic-art - Tumblr blog

pandacronic-art · 18 days ago

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🏖️ 🐼

☕ coffee?

#kemono friends #kemono friends 3 #animal girl #giant panda #red panda #crab

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pandacronic-art · 23 days ago

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I made an action figure

Posting this both on Tumblr and my Ko-Fi. Go there and hit any button anywhere if you think this is the kind of thing I should keep doing!

I'm just going to go ahead and call this finished, because otherwise I'll keep tweaking it and won't get anything else done.

I recently got a 3D printer and have been trying to print a bunch of stuff, as one does. Never content with just doing easy things though, I decided to try designing and printing a figure right away. I thought my Kemono Friends White Rhinoceros model would be an easy starting point. It both was and wasn't.

Starting with the scale, I went with a pretty weird one, and I'm sure that's caused me many past and future problems. Instead of a logical 1:12 scale like a civilized being, I opted for 1:12.8. My rationale was entirely that I wanted this and any future Kemono Friends figures I might make to fit in with Generations Beast Wars figures! Well it makes sense to me...

The unusual scale doesn't bother me much since I don't have a lot of human figures in any particular scale anyway. If I did a different series' characters or my own OCs, I would probably go with 1:12 though.

Being new to all this, I wasn't sure if I could pull off ball joints or double hinges, so everything is peg-in swivels and hinges. That said, I tried very hard to get as much articulation as I could without disrupting the sculpt. Conveniently, her armor helps a lot to hide the joints. It also turns out if you've got a sculpt bulky enough to hide some joints in and was already designed to minimize restriction of movement, jointing is actually pretty easy-ish. I mainly copied designs of joints I had seen on some model kits for the same sort of figure, assuming those would be better suited for less tough plastics (I only have PLA on hand) than figures that sell finished. The necessary tolerances I had already mostly worked out from some earlier prints. I managed to work in:

wrist swivels

single joint elbows (exceeding 90 degrees)

bicep swivels

universal shoulders (pauldrons rotate independently for more clearance)

neck swivel (it's there but the hair gets in the way)

sideways head tilt (failed attempt to help the neck swivel)

universal hips with swivels on both ends

single joint knees exceeding 90 degrees (barely)

X and Y ankle tilts

Transformers forums tell me this makes it a double-good toy

ponytail joint

Easily manages to hold her horn in both hands thanks to the sculpted tilt in the wrist.

A surprising amount of time had to be spent making sure the armor could actually print, but hey I was doing this to learn, and that's a learning opportunity. For the torso I ended up needing to split it up into more parts than I had expected, which was frustrating. In most cases though it was just a matter of thickening the armor to the minimum where I was confident it would print and also not crumble in my hands. Durability on a figure is important to me. I made this to play with! The hands are 3mm pegholes!

I had to make a revision of the joints when it turned out the initial style of joint I went with was wearing too quickly.

I'm really happy with how well the sculpt printed, by the way. I wasn't really sure how much detail might be lost. I'm relieved and impress it's mainly just the eyelashes and some thinner hairs that really got lost. The face sculpt features smooth eyes because I only planned for it to be a model, but for a future project I might take time to try out sculpted irises. The bolts on her armor melted a little, but they're there still. I'm glad I didn't go through with an idea I had to print them separately for authenticity. I was delighted the hands didn't print as blobs because of how fine the fingers are, even with gauntlets.

For construction I didn't want to use glue (because I forgot repeatedly to buy any, but also out of preference), so I tried to avoid needing it. I am happy to say I did, everywhere except one spot. Said spot is the neck. Not the neck joint, mind, just the neck part. I think this too could have been avoided with better planning. It was only necessary because I made a peg too shallow, and did not want to reprint the entire upper chest assembly one more time. I'm certain that if I had just made that peg longer, I could declare that this figure is 100% glue-free.

(I pleaded for the reprints to stop)

I'm probably not going to jump into making another one right away, as at the moment I'm not sure what I'm going to try next. "Retooling" this into Black Rhinoceros seems like it would make most sense, but since she's a little taller and a lot of her torso armor is different, I wouldn't really end up reusing as much of the sculpt as one might assume at a glance. I might just do a whole new unrelated character sculpt to avoid the tedium of doing a lot of same-but-different.

I think it might be fun to eventually have a whole shelf of different Friends figures I've made. That might take a couple years at this pace though. For now, the princess is just going to have to join my desk peanut gallery of figures with nowhere else to fit in.