Val's sideblog of modelling and craft stuff

The undersuit is made of a thin nylon mesh, somewhat like a pair of tights, to give and stretch enough for posing but be thin enough for small wrinkles and to not make the suit look bulky. It’s then been textured with some kind of rubber/silicon/something coating to match the show appearance, and that’s an issue. Over 17 years it has somewhat.... decomposed. The mesh is fine but the rubber has come off and stained portions of the armour (and my fingers), and you can see the for some reason partly clear body underneath

I plan to paint the clear parts black and replace the bodysuit with a non-rubber material to prevent the problem happening once again, and clean the armour. Hopefully repainting the armour is not necessary

Speaking of the body, it’s weirdly proportioned

The chest, stomach and pelvis are very scrawny compared to the thighs and biceps, and leave the chest armour very floaty and the undersuit wrinkles into the gap which looks very weird. Going to fill it out with putty and possibly sculpt some muscle definition in, depending on if the replacement bodysuit will conform to it. I definitely need to do something to add shoulder articulation or have a different method of adding/removing the chest armour because that was incredibly difficult to remove (I think I broke the elbow doing so, but i’s repairable)

The feet are rather..... clown shoe-esque. they’re just super out of proportion to the body, and the anklets are far too high giging the illusion of stumpty shins. They’re also for some reason a hollow silicon shape with an articulated skeleton foot inside, but are far too big for the skeleton foot to really move. THe skele-foot also doesn’t touch the sole of the shoe, so sometimes balancing him is like using an inflated carrier bag to hold up a brick.

I’m genuinely not sure how to solve this. My current plan is cut off the anklets so they can sit lower, and sculpt the shoe onto the skeleton foot, while working out how to add a very needed ankle tilt

Godai’s face is actually a fairly decent likeness to Odagiri Joe, although a little gaunt and narrow in the cheeks. It is an entirely hollow head of thin flexible plastic, so it may well be that mine is a litle squished as there’s no internal support structure. The unpainted skin hurts it a lot though, in my pictures it’s not so bad cos the shadows help show off the sculpt but in normal lighting it’s just one solid colour

So the human head needs some internal structure to help keep it’s shape and not wobble on the neck post, because it has no proper locking like the helmet head, and bending out so it’s not as narrow. And then lots of repainting. I’m also very tempted to remove the hair and replace it with some dolls hair? I’ve no idea how possible this is for me though so might not happen. It also sits very high, much higher than the helmet head, so I need to find a way to may it less giraffe-necked.

The helmeted head has a problem common with early kuuga, in that the mouth/jawpiece couldn’t realistically fit an actors jaw/chin inside, it curves toward the neck too much. (the problem may also be the positioning of the connector inside the helmet being too far forward)

so I want to adjust the mouthpiece shape and move the connector back, plus remove the seamline from the side of the helmet.