Working on the Jagd Doga

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Even with it being grounded and having a big body I still wanted to go lite on LEDs for the Jagd Doga. The beam going through it and the mono eye are the only source of illumination in the Jagd and using the reasoning I explained in the fin funnel post I actually felt totally fine with it. Most of all I just don’t want the frustration of the Nu to repeat itself, and frankly after seeing the Nu lit up while on the diorama base I found a new reason why doing it this way is the best course of action. As you can see in some of the pictures below the lit up Nu’s thrusters are very bright to the level of actually casting spot lights on the diorama. Now with that in mind if I lit up every thruster of the Jagd Doga the base would look like I threw a bucket of blue paint over everything.

As I mentioned in the previous post I was deciding on what type of beams to use, and what I decided on was using both the ZZ Gundam beam and one of the pink sprue rods. Now my problem was getting these to not only stay in place but to also have it line up exactly with the Nu’s beam rifle. It took ALOT of tweaking but I eventually got it working. Afterwards I modified the open left hand so that it was a fist and used a dremel, pla plates, and a soldering iron to do the beam’s battle damage. Cut a bit of the inner frame of the head and super glued a very small surface mount LED to it for the mono eye. Finally I puttied away the engraved zeon logo on the shield so I could replace it with a decal some time in the future. Weathering, getting the pink beam LEDs situated in the chest, and funneling the wires to the leg is what I have to tackle next.

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Beam rods

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Having a small problem, I have to choose what to use for the main beam of the diorama. This beam will go from the Nu Gundam’s beam rifle through the chest of the Jagd Doga. I am using clear acrylic rods, the problem is which version to use. First I tried using spare clear sprues the problem is all the nubs and stuff on them, being clear it is almost impossible to remove the big intersecting chunks of plastic. There is also clear pink sprues which are longer so they have almost no nub areas to deal with, the problem with these though are that they don’t illuminated as drastically as the pure clear rods. The third solution is the clear rods I already have that are pretty thick, they illuminate great but they are huge and might even through off the balance of the Nu or the Jadg Doga. Lastly was using old beam saber blades primarily the MG ZZ Gundam beam blades which are pretty big. The positives are the shape which have more of a blast look to them as they gradually change in thickness, on the other hand they are also clear pink so the same problems from before are still present. There is one last solution and that is buying clear rods specifically in the size needed. It’s just that this build has become very expensive already and every time I have to spend more on it I get more and more frustrated.

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Painting the Nu

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It’s been a while but I have been spending that time painting, decaling, and weathering the Nu Gundam. After doing light battle damage with a dremel I primed and did a pre shade coat with black since I wanted the white to have a pretty strong shade as it helps with the weathered look. I went with alclad gunmetal for the inner frame but unfortunately it was extremely dark, so much so that it could be confused with the black. I decided that I had to redo the frame and used alclad dark aluminum instead. Doing the yellow was the most difficult as I primed the model with Krylon gray primer and this primer is pretty dark so I had to paint about 6 different coats of yellow before it was the right shade. One last thing I did before decaling was to paint silver in the recesses that house the LEDs so that the funneled light would be brighter.

I wanted this Nu Gundam to have slight battle damage but no signs of weathering from time or use. So I didn’t use things like salt weathering or washes instead I used the techniques found in Kamm’s HLJ MKII tutorial which can be found here. I used them before on the RX78-2 diorama and the results were good then as well. I might have gone a little overboard here and there but overall the results were pretty good.

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Meltdown

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A day after the last post I got a little package, it was the 2nd shipment of LEDs that I ordered. 100 blue, 50 white, and 20 pink, I have no idea what I am going to do with all these LEDs after this diorama is over. Now with the pink LEDs I compared them to the red ones and luckily they are much brighter.

After trying the new lights out I went ahead and tried making a bigger and better beam field using hot glue but it was just a mess, so I gave up on that. Instead I made another etched beam field and this time did it cleaner. With the brighter LED and the cleaner transparent plate the beam field looked good in high or low light. I then went ahead and redid the first etched beam field and consider that aspect of the build done. By the way I used the clear front cover of a CD/DVD jewel case for the pla in this. They are clear and thick enough to get the job done, the only problem is you have to be very careful when cutting them cause you can crack them easily.

Being done with the fin funnels it was time to try and wire everything up together. The legs went fine and modified the waist so that a 2 pin connector could connect the model to the exterior power source. The upper body was a whole other issue. I was getting EXTREMELY frustrated trying to get all the wires fitting in the small chest and stomach of the 1/144 Nu Gundam. During this I ended up losing the forehead jewel and just got fed up, this was the point where the title of this post actually occurred.

The next day after I cooled off I made a new forehead jewel with the mindset that the model will be weathered anyway so little imperfections were fine. I also redid the wiring so that closing everything up was actually possible. Once everything finally started working together I took it all a part so that I could start adding battle damage and priming.

 

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Fin Funnel Frustration

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Continuing with the Nu Gundam I moved down to it’s lower body and managed to add LEDs to the thrusters while channeling the wires through the legs right to the waist. The only problem is that because of the thickness of the wires I will have to rewire the feet thrusters and the calf thrusters together so that only a pair of wires have to travel through the leg.

After that I thought I would breeze through the next part but like usual with gunpla the things I expect to be simple end up the most difficult and time consuming. Done with the body I started on the fin funnels. While not integral to the diorama I wanted 2 or 3 fin funnels hovering around the place. I approached them by mimicking a Korean modeler who is very well known for his amazing LED gunpla work http://blog.naver.com/odokevyo/.

I ran into a bunch of problems first being that I was unable to do the back thrusters of the funnels. I just couldn’t fit 2 separate LEDs back to back without it being a big mess of wires. I even made a quick thruster emission out of cotton (wont have micro fiber for some time) to see if it was worth it and it wasn’t.

Doing this has even a greater impact of the diorama then one would think. It makes it so if a thruster isn’t being used at that moment it shouldn’t be illuminated. Which will cut down on a lot of the LEDs on the Zeon suits. Of course I can just do what ever I want but I want some consistency.

The other problem I faced was that the LEDs just couldn’t illuminate the fin funnels enough. In low light they look great but with the amount of light used to take high quality photos without using a high powered camera (which I don’t have) they come off very dim. For now I am using red LEDs and will receive pink ones very soon but even so I have no guarantee they will be brighter. Note the blue fin funnel was me testing it out with a brighter blue LED (the ones I having been using for thrusters) and it was so bright the camera couldn’t capture the light correctly.

I decided to try something different to tackle the brightness issue. So I used hot glue and transparent pla sheets to make a beam field within the fin funnel. The hot glue beams were just a test and I could make it look even better so now I am considering which route to take.

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Time to get to work

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Took a day or two off after finishing the base and managed to redo the area I use for modeling while I was at it (I will make a post showing where I do my modeling in the future). Yesterday though I came to a decision to alter my original design for the layout and action of the diorama. Basically not much has changed except that the Nu will be firing a beam rifle instead of a beam saber. With this all the damage done to the other models will be projectile based instead of melee based. Also the Nu will be elevated much higher than it was originally. I wanted to stare clear of working on battle damage and explosions at the moment so I started modifiying the Nu Gundam for the LEDs that will be placed inside of it.

Firstly I cut the camera on the left of it’s chest out. Then I cut the back side of the backpack thrusters and drilled out holes so the LED’s would fit directly within them. A lot of cuts latter and I managed to string the wires through to the stomach. Next I tackled the head by cutting out it’s eyes and it’s head cameras. Finally I placed a LED in the beam rifle and funneled the wires through the handle to the hand all the way up through the arm.

Wanted to mention a few other things namely that I am going to change the beam rifle’s LED with a pink one once I get my new shipment of LED’s. That since this is a fixed pose model I am pretty much ruining the articulation in order to get the LED’s working right. That these pre wired LED’s are a blessing and a curse, that alleviate the frustration of wiring it all up but in the end you get far more wires clogging the area when you could have consolidated them. Finally that for anyone interested I HIGHLY recommend the HGUC Nu Gundam, it is probably the best HG 1/144 model out there. To put it simply it almost has no seam lines. It only has 2 seams and they are on the rifle and bazooka, the bazooka one being a small area on the top and for the rifle half of the underside, they aren’t even noticeable. It does leave a bit to be desired articulation wise but besides that it is amazing for a HG.

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For anyone who doesn’t know

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Just want to make sure that anyone who isn’t aware and is reading this that the MAC forums are temporarily located at http://s3.zetaboards.com/MACforums/index and that the MAC competition is being moved to a new forum called the Mecha Lounge located at http://kamm-mecha.com/mechaloungeforums/index.php.

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Layers

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The most important point of advice I would give someone who is new to dioramas and wants to make a great looking one is to layer. One of the most popular types of diorama when it comes to gunpla is of a grassy forest or rocky type area and most of the time the grass and the foliage looks flat and unrealistic. The problem is that just a single coat of flock is added to a plain base. I have seen videos of professional modelers do just that and make amazing pieces of work but unless you are a pro the results will just look bad. What I suggest is to first detail that base. Add a glue rock/dirt/sand mixture, paint it up, add pastels or pigments, highlight the lights and shadows, basically make it look as good as it would be if no grass was ever going to be on it. That way when you sift the foliage on there will have depth no matter what. It takes some extra work and might seem like it’s pointless but if you are inexperienced in dioramas it will result in better looking work.

Why I bring this up is because I am finished with the Char’s Counter Attack base and I added a extra coat of pastels (this time without mixing it with thinner). A light brown and blue mixture to cool down the highlights while lessening the earthy reddish tone.

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Base coloring

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The weather cleared up and I managed to prime and flat black coat the base. Once the black was dry I airbrushed some chrome over the mechanical areas. I then took some cheap acrylics hand painted a mixture of grey and yellow to the rock areas and dry brushed a light grey over it. The mechanical parts seemed a bit bare so decals were sporadically applied to it.

I have one of the Tamiya weathering sets but the colors don’t really suit this diorama so instead I shaved off bits of oil pastels. Covered the rocky areas with various coats of browns, and used a dark tone to highlight the shadows. Afterwards I added 2 more dry brush applications, since the pastel tones became pretty dark after top coating it. Still planning to do a bit more to it.

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Plaster, Sand, and Gel

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So I took the shards of plaster I made from earlier and placed them around the base in hope that they would add extra depth to the rock texture. Before coating the base though I had to get the footprints done. Originally I tried using epoxy putty but when I tried it I realized that not only does epoxy putty have a shelf life but that in order to do this it would take a larger amount of epoxy then I was willing to use. So instead I used plaster as the foot mold with baby powder as the release. It managed to get the job done but the print wasn’t as detailed as I would have liked.

Once the prints were dry I went ahead with the main challenge of covering all the styrofoam with plaster. At first I tried mixing the plaster with sand and rocks but as I went on it seemed pointless to do it in that fashion as the sand and rocks were getting visually lost in the plaster. It made the plaster harder to work with, and the amount of plaster used made the trouble of adding things to it in every batch not worth it. Once the base was covered and dried completely I added some random beams here and there similar to what can bee seen on axis in Char’s Counter Attack.

With mostly the plaster the base lacked a good ground texture so I used a mixture of white glue, water, small pebbles, sand, and fine sand and covered as much of the plaster as I could except the footprints. I let this new layer dry overnight and like with every other diorama I have done in the past I covered the entire base with a mixture of water and acrylic gel medium to seal everything in.

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