Thanks again guys, appreciate it
That's not all Necro....get ready.
I really see no point in dragging this out any longer, so here goes: I have been hard at work in the Armory for the last 2 months busting my exhaust port day after day (that's what insomnia and OCD will get you) and I'm finally almost finished with this new kit. Again, I cannot stress enough my highest praise for RF's templates...they really are the shizzle folks and if you have any reservations about using them to make your own armor, well don't...they are spot on, and after finishing up the chest set I'm still amazed at their accuracy.
So grab a seat and make some popcorn ...you should probably go to the bathroom too and get that out of the way cause we're gonna be here a while
Ok, knees are done. I basically just re-sculpted the caps and bodies from scratch and re-used my old knee dart housings and 'F' shapes. Honestly they were close enough to where it didn't warrant making an entire new set of them and I just really didn't see the point (not to mention that my foam knee dart installation kits will work with both V2's and the new V3's). Make no mistake though, even using the existing parts this still took me quite a bit of time (about 2 weeks) and effort and making two sets of molds is not fun, not to mention that the undercuts on these bad boys are a nasty thing to deal with. Here are the finished parts in detail
For the right knee dent, I finally settled on this image. Again, maybe not the absolute correct one but with MOM, AOSW, SE, stunt, hero...ugh I'm sick of it all already. In the end, I liked this one the best (in case you were wondering) and decided on it lol
Now on to the shoulders. I actually did this one first because relatively speaking it was the easiest and I already knew exactly what direction to take with it. I used this following image for reference for the shape (as well as some others floating around, but this one was a very telling photo for me)
Here was the first master hot off the table...I had planned on making both ROTJ and ESB from the very beginning so I knew that I'd be making 3 molds of this thing - smooth, ROTJ and ESB. I poured the first mold then rinse and repeat for the other two. After that was the (not known at the time) dreaded task of carving out the dents. The ESB was the hardest obviously and I actually wound up screwing that one up the first time before getting it right the second go around (had to fill in with rondo and recarve...yeah, good times). Again, not totally 100% accurate, but pretty d@mn close and I'm happy with it so...
Working on the ROTJ dent
And ROTJ set
Finally, the much dreaded chest set. I was NOT looking forward to this at all (even after all the research I had done on it over the past year) but I had an idea of how to approach it (I'd hoped) and it wound up being the correct way (luckily). There were two different angles I could have started on this from, and I'm pretty sure I chose the right one (for me anyway...the vertical curve)
Again, I apologize that I cannot show you how I sculpted these, but I wish to keep my methods my own (for the time being at any rate). However, I do keep records of all my progress pics from start to finish should the ugly "R" word ever come in to play and will gladly show these pics should the need ever arise to defend my sculpting abilities and integrity.
Thanks to Dom for pointing out to me about the ROTJ dent on the right breast plate (which is absent on the ESB version). Up until then, I had no idea about it and even questioned him as to where/how he knew about this. He did show me the photo and that was enough for me. Seeing this same dent on ROTJ RF's chest template only solidified it for me.
(hard to see in the photo, but it's there)
Armed with that knowledge and RF's templates, here's what I came up with (after about 20+ hours of screaming, shouting, crying and throwing of things..uh, er I mean sculpting...till all hours of the morning)
ESB set
And here's the ROTJ set with the dent on the right breast plate
With all that out of the way, the pics below show where I'm REALLY at on this project as of right now. All I've got left is the cod, which I'm going to print out Levi's template and see how it stands against my current V2. Shouldn't be too much work to crank that piece out, it was pretty straightforward as far as the Fett armor went and should go pretty quick.
ESB set
And the ROTJ set
That's it for the moment folks. I'll be looking at finishing up the cod this week (hopefully) and will post pics and final 'family' group shots of the kit. I'll be revisiting the gauntlets, but not until next year. I have some other pressing irons in the fire to tend to first.
Thanks again for looking and all comments are welcome.
-RKD