tetsujin
Active Member
- Joined
- Jun 26, 2009
- Messages
- 101
HGUC Zaku WIP
The Zaku is, generally speaking, my favorite design from Gundam. However, this also means I tend to be pretty picky about how they should look.
The situation with the Zaku is a bit odd in that its look has never been entirely consistent. The original animation, the lineart, the Zaku kits that came out in the 1980s... None of them really match each other. The animation itself, additionally, is so error-laden that it is challenging to use it as a basis for how a Zaku "should" look. So to some extent it's all open to interpretation.
One of the big changes early on was the bulking-up of the Zaku. Originally the lower legs of the Zaku were pretty slim, but pretty much every rendition since 1982 has had a lot more emphasis on bulk. Overall I think this has been a change for the better, though I am interested in building a non-bulky version of the Zaku as well. In 1982 as part of the "MSV" series of kits they released a new tooling of the 1:144 Zaku, the "Zaku Minelayer". It was the first Zaku kit (of the regular Zaku, as opposed to a variant) to feature the bulked-up look. It was also (IMO) the first Zaku kit that looked great built OOB, and it's still one of the best-looking Zaku kits ever made. They really nailed the look of the head and the shoulder armor on that kit.
In 1995 a new design for the Zaku was introduced for the Master Grade line: this design became the de facto standard look for the Zaku in models, games, etc. for several years... However, it does look a bit different from the original Zaku. Beginning with the HGUC Zaku in 2002, Bandai started making kits that were supposed to capture the original look of the Zaku a bit better. So being the Zaku fetishist that I am, of course that was an exciting development.
Over time, however, I started to really hate the look of the HGUC. Worse, I wasn't entirely sure how to fix it. While the kit itself is meant to evoke the look of the old Zakus, it didn't seem to be close enough to any identifiable specific look that I could compare and say "this bit is wrong, it should change." I felt there was a problem but I didn't have a clear direction for improving it. So of the three HGUC Zakus I bought back in 2002, one wound up built with minor alteration, one I scrapped to experiment with certain alterations, and one I sold off in frustration, swearing never to buy another HGUC Zaku again.
One of the things that made me really rethink this position was working with the various MSV kits. Fun kits generally, but every one of them has some bit of wonky proportions or skewed shape somewhere. It made me reflect a bit on the merits of the HGUC Zaku: despite that nagging mystery of why the overall effect wasn't working for me, the kit provides a well-engineered, nice and simple representation of parts common to most of those variants: head, body, arms - which were very inconsistent between the different MSV kits.
So I was looking at some of the Zakus that appeared after the original anime, but before the Master Grade: the MSV Minelayer kit, the MS-X lineart for the "Skiure", the brief appearances in the ZZ and 0083 anime - looking at the problem again it seemed that it might be possible to make the HGUC Zaku look more like one of these versions with relatively little work. So I did some photo-editing experimentation in GIMP, and the results did look promising... So I bought another HGUC Zaku and decided to try out the alterations for real. Now I'm really excited to see how it turns out. It's like with this one little change, the HGUC Zaku has changed from utter garbage to an unpolished gem of a kit.
The Minelayer kit was an inspiration, but I'm not going for exactly the same look as the Minelayer. (Though I had considered simply transplanting parts from the Minelayer and applying them to the HGUC... But it seemed like a shame to sacrifice a Minelayer just to make a HGUC look good) It's kind of the same rough parameters for the proportions of the lower leg and the shape of the shoulder armor, but I want to keep the modifications simple so that they're easy to repeat - and I want this modified HGUC Zaku to build on the HGUC's strengths instead of working against them. So, for instance, one decision I made was to keep the lower leg symmetrical. Because the Zaku's got that fringe around the ankle joint, the lower leg sometimes looks a little more natural in a shoulder-width stance (IMO) if the outboard side is longer than the inboard side. In typical poses, you don't even notice the asymmetry, you just see that the bottom edge of the fringe lines up nicely with the ground-plane. But doing this would complicate the HGUC leg mod, so for now I'm not attempting it.
The shoulder armor mod is a little more complex, and if I want to make more of these I may just recast the part (or recast the part from the Minelayer kit instead) instead of repeating the process. I'm not sure I'm happy with the modified part I've been working on so far: the idea is to give the edges a more gradual curve, and downplay the concave trench that runs parallel to the edge - give it generally a more rounded, mostly-convex look. It is tempting to shorten the spikes as well, but that may be going too far for this project.
Rather frustratingly, all the Zaku kits released since 2002 share roughly the same set of problems as the HGUC: lower legs that look slightly bloated or amorphous, and shoulder armor that just doesn't look right... The MG Zaku v2.0 and the RG Zaku share these problems, but I haven't spent as much time yet working out how to solve the issue with those kits as with the HGUC.
The Zaku is, generally speaking, my favorite design from Gundam. However, this also means I tend to be pretty picky about how they should look.
The situation with the Zaku is a bit odd in that its look has never been entirely consistent. The original animation, the lineart, the Zaku kits that came out in the 1980s... None of them really match each other. The animation itself, additionally, is so error-laden that it is challenging to use it as a basis for how a Zaku "should" look. So to some extent it's all open to interpretation.
One of the big changes early on was the bulking-up of the Zaku. Originally the lower legs of the Zaku were pretty slim, but pretty much every rendition since 1982 has had a lot more emphasis on bulk. Overall I think this has been a change for the better, though I am interested in building a non-bulky version of the Zaku as well. In 1982 as part of the "MSV" series of kits they released a new tooling of the 1:144 Zaku, the "Zaku Minelayer". It was the first Zaku kit (of the regular Zaku, as opposed to a variant) to feature the bulked-up look. It was also (IMO) the first Zaku kit that looked great built OOB, and it's still one of the best-looking Zaku kits ever made. They really nailed the look of the head and the shoulder armor on that kit.
In 1995 a new design for the Zaku was introduced for the Master Grade line: this design became the de facto standard look for the Zaku in models, games, etc. for several years... However, it does look a bit different from the original Zaku. Beginning with the HGUC Zaku in 2002, Bandai started making kits that were supposed to capture the original look of the Zaku a bit better. So being the Zaku fetishist that I am, of course that was an exciting development.
Over time, however, I started to really hate the look of the HGUC. Worse, I wasn't entirely sure how to fix it. While the kit itself is meant to evoke the look of the old Zakus, it didn't seem to be close enough to any identifiable specific look that I could compare and say "this bit is wrong, it should change." I felt there was a problem but I didn't have a clear direction for improving it. So of the three HGUC Zakus I bought back in 2002, one wound up built with minor alteration, one I scrapped to experiment with certain alterations, and one I sold off in frustration, swearing never to buy another HGUC Zaku again.
One of the things that made me really rethink this position was working with the various MSV kits. Fun kits generally, but every one of them has some bit of wonky proportions or skewed shape somewhere. It made me reflect a bit on the merits of the HGUC Zaku: despite that nagging mystery of why the overall effect wasn't working for me, the kit provides a well-engineered, nice and simple representation of parts common to most of those variants: head, body, arms - which were very inconsistent between the different MSV kits.
So I was looking at some of the Zakus that appeared after the original anime, but before the Master Grade: the MSV Minelayer kit, the MS-X lineart for the "Skiure", the brief appearances in the ZZ and 0083 anime - looking at the problem again it seemed that it might be possible to make the HGUC Zaku look more like one of these versions with relatively little work. So I did some photo-editing experimentation in GIMP, and the results did look promising... So I bought another HGUC Zaku and decided to try out the alterations for real. Now I'm really excited to see how it turns out. It's like with this one little change, the HGUC Zaku has changed from utter garbage to an unpolished gem of a kit.
The Minelayer kit was an inspiration, but I'm not going for exactly the same look as the Minelayer. (Though I had considered simply transplanting parts from the Minelayer and applying them to the HGUC... But it seemed like a shame to sacrifice a Minelayer just to make a HGUC look good) It's kind of the same rough parameters for the proportions of the lower leg and the shape of the shoulder armor, but I want to keep the modifications simple so that they're easy to repeat - and I want this modified HGUC Zaku to build on the HGUC's strengths instead of working against them. So, for instance, one decision I made was to keep the lower leg symmetrical. Because the Zaku's got that fringe around the ankle joint, the lower leg sometimes looks a little more natural in a shoulder-width stance (IMO) if the outboard side is longer than the inboard side. In typical poses, you don't even notice the asymmetry, you just see that the bottom edge of the fringe lines up nicely with the ground-plane. But doing this would complicate the HGUC leg mod, so for now I'm not attempting it.
The shoulder armor mod is a little more complex, and if I want to make more of these I may just recast the part (or recast the part from the Minelayer kit instead) instead of repeating the process. I'm not sure I'm happy with the modified part I've been working on so far: the idea is to give the edges a more gradual curve, and downplay the concave trench that runs parallel to the edge - give it generally a more rounded, mostly-convex look. It is tempting to shorten the spikes as well, but that may be going too far for this project.
Rather frustratingly, all the Zaku kits released since 2002 share roughly the same set of problems as the HGUC: lower legs that look slightly bloated or amorphous, and shoulder armor that just doesn't look right... The MG Zaku v2.0 and the RG Zaku share these problems, but I haven't spent as much time yet working out how to solve the issue with those kits as with the HGUC.
