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Wednesday, November 10, 2010

[Mini WIP] HGUC Delta Plus



Hey guys, finally finished the mid exams. ^^

I have finished the HGUC Delta Plus, but I didn't manage to get many pics for WIP (even though I did quite a bit of coloring extras here and there). And even then the pics were taken with bad lighting which forces me to crank up the exposure and brightness while sacrificing quality, really sorry ;^^

As I've said before, I wanted to paint every single white parts and parts that is supposed to be white (or white stickers) into silver, but turns out there's even more extra parts that I used my beloved Mekki (plated) silver on ^^.

Right from when I first saw the pipe parts of this kit, I already decided I'm going to use the gold-silver treatment that Ngee Khiong frequently use, and it worked pretty well :D.
Used the normal silver instead of the mekki silver on the thruster parts. This marker gets kinda thick when it dried, making panel lining the parts pretty worrisome ;-_-.


The outside of the thrusters are supposed to have white stickers put on 'em, so plated silver gets there instead XD.
Also added the plated silvers on the small square parts that is just asking to be detailed. The pipe has already been done on the previous part.


Other than the knee, the other parts that I painted silver on this pic aren't white/supposed to be white to begin with. But after building the RG, color differentiation just seems like a must on every gunpla XD.


Same stuff for the back of the legs.


After all the silver on the legs, the upper body doesn't really have that many marker paint.


The only parts on the arms to be painted.


After looking at Gunpla Secret Factory's built of the Delta Plus, I decided to follow the same way of detailing the "eyes". But then I realize my skill with the design knife aren't that good ;^^. I then decided to just paint the eye with plated silver instead.

But I didn't realize my mistake until too late...

"Pretty good" is what I thought at first. But I then realized that the eye sticker that Gunpla Secret Factory made was placed much more near the center, while the default eye location are pretty far off from the center.


And to make matter worse, The red gundam marker on the transparent part looked good, but did not allow enough light to go through to make the "eyes" visible.
Oh well, at least it seems better than just putting the red sticker ;^^.


And that's pretty much all the WIP pics that I took.
I also added silver on the shield, rifle, and beam sabre handle, but didn't took a clear picture of them ;^^


The MS form.

The Delta Plus as a MS is a beautiful, sleek and sharp looking MS.
While it color scheme implied a "no nonsense, this is a machine of war" style, it still remembers to be stylish by exposing some frames beneath it's armor ^^.
But because of it's lack of articulation on the legs, it's pretty hard to assume a more "aggressive" or "dynamic" looking pose, so an action base would help greatly.
And for the Wave Rider form, let me say this right away:

The Transformation gimmick...

IS SO INEFFECTIVE!!


Here's my list of the bad things of the transformation gimmick:
1) You need to literally take the kit into pieces.
2) Quite a bit of parts from the MS mode became unused which are then replaced with new parts.
3) if the whole body and waist are going to be replaced anyway, why not make those parts as articulated as other new HGUC (articulated shoulder, articulated waist-hip, etc)?
4) Transforming from MS into Wave Rider mode took quite a bit of time, but that is nothing compared to when you tried to transform it from Wave Rider into MS mode.

With all that said, let's move on to the good parts of the Wave Rider form:

1) It's tight and stable. If your children/nephew/niece/any kid get their hands of this thing and plays around with it, it's likely that it'll come back with everything still in place (except of course, unless they threw it like a paper plane).
2) You can use Action Base 2 (unlike the HGUC ReZEL that needed Action Base 1 (the one for MGs)).
3) It looked really awesome :D.





Until I give this kit a full review, here's my general pro-con of this kit :)
+ Looked really great in both MS form and Wave Rider form.
- Lack of articulations in some parts.
- Not so effective transformation gimmick.

8 comments:

  1. nice build, really great job on the coloring! applying color separation does seem really cool after the RG release lol

    having to take apart the whole kit to transform is pretty lame XD

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  2. Haha well actually I prefer this method of transforming as it results in a more stable wave rider form ^^ But good job on the detailing there!!

    @ Rocklee don't like yoko take apart the MS like what she did earlier to a certain bike...

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  3. Nicely done the marker jobs.

    As for the transformation part, better to part-swap than having a very flimsy/paper-thin construction.

    Question: What ARE those four things sticking out of the shield?
    Don't tell me all fours are... beam sabers...

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  4. @rockleelotus:
    yeah, color separation is the future of gunpla detailing! XD

    @chubbybots & bd77:
    I do agree that parts swapping are more effective and safer for 1/144 kits. But among all transforming kits that I have (which other than Delta Plus are just ReZEL and Loto :p), I have to say that Delta Plus was the hardest to transform, and it also leaves a lot of unused parts (more than ReZEL).
    And the body parts are totally unused for transformation, which means it should be safe to have more advanced articulations like shoulder articulation, yet it doesn't =/

    @bd77:
    the foremost two are missiles, the other two behind it are beam sabres.
    the sabres are supposed to have a black circle on the front of the cylinder, but it doesn't have any difference in elevation or grooves, so I didn't put any black on =/
    oh, and while you could say that Delta Plus have 2 beam sabres, it can only hold one on its right hand as the left hand is a closed fist =/

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  5. Wait... MORE parts unused? I heard that the Delta Plus "reduces" that compare to the ReZEL...

    Now I know... They make the missiles looked the same as the saber hilts...
    Thanks.

    Only one hand to hold the saber... Yet it has two beam sabers...

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  6. This is a nice build man :D
    The problem with a transformable MS for me is that when it is fully painted, it's gonna be so hard to transform without scratching the paint..

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  7. @bd77:
    I heard that too, and I was also shocked when I find out about it firsthand.
    here's a comparison of the unused parts from dalong:
    ReZEL:
    http://www.dalong.net/review/hg/h103/p/h103_46.jpg
    Delta Plus:
    http://www.dalong.net/review/hg/h115/p/h115_62.jpg

    well, actually the hilt on the shield can't be taken off, and we got one hilt that is cannot be mounted on the shield as the actual held beam saber (we got two beams for the sabers though). ;-_-

    wanna know what's worse?
    The hilt was in different color than the one on the shield, and had different and less detail than the one on the shield.

    Bandai, WTF!? @_@

    @h4msterworld:
    thx :D
    you got a point, I guess I should appreciate part swapping transformation a bit more...

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  8. The delta plus the transformation into a plane looks like a marcoss!

    ReplyDelete