Ulala Blue!

Okay, so not as rapid an update as I was hoping.  Mainly due to 3D print woes on another project which meant I've been working on two in tandem, and generally not having time for either.  Anyways, more Ulala work!  A sister piece to last year's Amazing Tales magazine cover, using most of the same layout stuff from that, and my Ulala model, although with a new outfit:  Whenever I unlock a new costume in Space Channel 5 Part 2 I assess it for using for these projects, and this is one of those!  A very Courreges feel to the outfit and the layout is shamefully an homage to a Cosmonauts poster I saw in the Science Museum.

It went through a lot of revisions on the actual scene.  The intent was to have her walking on a small planetoid a la Super Mario Galaxy, with alien flora, as if her and the Morolians were out on a school day trip.  But I couldn't get a look I liked, hence this being in purgatory for a time.

I like:

• Most everything on this one.  Very pleased with how it all came together once I worked out the scene.
• That a friend thought it was a targeted ad when I showed her a sneak preview!
• The outfit - with a specular overlay in Photoshop it really looks like a futuristic shiny mini-dress.
• How easy it was to reuse whole groups of layers in Photoshop when on the layout stage, probably just how a professional would!

I dislike:

• Ulala's blown out face.  One brightness contrast layer too far.  D'oh.
• Everyone's a bit disconnected from the rainbow ring, as it glows, it's got no shadows cast on it.  A necessary evil, but it does make it a bit airy.
• How many iterations it took me with some masks and overlays in Photoshop.  I need to tweak my workflow on some of it to help with layer masks updating with the right layers.

Whether another cover of Amazing Tales gets made, I'm unsure, as I really want to move on to making an iPhone game which will take a lot of my creative run-time, and as such I've been trying to finish this project and the 3D print one.  I will always gravitate to Ulala though, my space reporter muse.

Introducing Ulala! (v1 3D print)

Greetings space cats!  This project is the intellectual culmination of a lot of the classes I've taken over the last two years.  The appealing character design from Mike Defeo's class combined with the 3D print knowledge from Joseph Drust's one.  Did you know you can't get a good Space Reporter Ulala figure?  Well, you still can't, but I have one!

So the combination process: I had Ulala finished from an earlier 2D piece, then I chopped her up for joints (after dressing her in trousers as her traditional short skirt would be too stiff to be useful when posing).  Shipped to Sculpteo to print (more on them later) and then painted with Games Workshop paints.  A bunch more involved than this paragraph would indicate!

Sculpteo then.  She's printed in their white plastic but only on their standard layer thickness (100-150µm).  I wanted the fine thickness (60µm) but apparently she's too fragile for that.  Now I chose to combine her pieces on a sprue to keep the cost down (Sculpteo wanted to charge me four times as much to print each piece on separate runs, so I made a sprue to force her to be printed in one go) but doing this didn't help isolate which pieces of her are too thin (probably the microphone).  I do intend to re-print her after working out the fragile bits and re-orientating parts to mitigate the tree-ring effect of 3D printing, but not for a little while.  I had thought to sand her down to remove layer lines but trying that had a tendency to give the material an almost furry quality, as though I was pulling apart a block of nylon, so I didn't do too much of that, so her fidelity is not as high as I would like.  This wasn't mitigated at all by three acrylic undercoats and two coats of colour paint and three layers of matte varnish.  Lots learnt though.  Oh boy lots learnt!

On to more pics...  She's about 16cm tall BTW, there's no real scale indicators in the pic.

I like:

• She's the best action figure of Ulala you can (can't) get, which is almost damning with faint praise, definitely not my intent!  I think she's just great.
• The outfit is a faithful recreation of the spy suit from Space Channel 5 part 2.
• A large proportion of pieces are reusable for a different outfit.
• That she stands on her own and can facepalm (two of my aims when making a figure).

I dislike:

• The thick layers.  Should there be a next time I'll work out why Sculpteo reported that the model was too fragile for thin layers.
• The muddy face paint job, it's a side effect of the thick layers I'm sure.
• The midriff joint.  It's big and invasive for what it does (adding the potential for some contrapposto swing in them hips).  Ball pop next time maybe as opposed to a Revoltech joint to give the capability for more sublte movements.
• The thigh joints.  I knew it would be touch and go how high the knee can lift upwards before the hips got in the way but it was a trade off between that and cutting chunks out.  I should've cut more.
• Paint chipping despite all the coats of paint and varnish to finish.
• She's too fragile to really get in there and pose like I might with a store bought figure.

More dislikes than likes but they don't have the same weighting.  She'll be posed, not too outlandishly, and probably stay that way, so the paint chipping and joint dislikes aren't such an issue, and from a distance she reads just fine, largely mitigating the layers and the face.  At some point I'll do a version two with the finer layer thickness.

Having said all that I think she's fab-u-lous.  Aah to have enough hours in the day to make the entire cast of Space Channel 5.  That is most definitely not a teaser for a future 3D print project.  I do not have that many hours in the day hah!

Memo to self:  Recreate the Max Fleischer - Betty Boop pose with her.

Ulala Turntable.

Associated turntable for Ulala.

UlalaTurntable from Tom Lewis on Vimeo.

Introducing: Ulala!

Another sculpt from the "list of things to sculpt".  One that had been on it a long time too!  Those who know me will know my favourite game of all time is probably Space Channel 5.  Part 2 technically as I can actually play that without digging out my Dreamcast from storage.  The star of this is Space Reporter Ulala.  She was due a good quality high resolution update.  Yeah this is an odd subject matter as I'm basing it on a 3D model already, but it's all from my own scratch (Space Gal's musculature and head) tweaked greatly rather than me finding the original SEGA meshes and subdividing those.  Here she is:

In the spirit of me getting projects to a "print and hang on the wall" level I've gone for a retro magazine cover which was a lot of fun to do and really matches her dorky nature.  Her outfit's colour scheme is her original Part 1 one, not the white one from Part 2, although as I have the model made, I'd like to think I can make time to do a whole series of Amazing Tales Space Reporter Ulala Adventures.  She may well get 3D printed too if I can work out hip joints I'm happy with and find a flexible material for her skirt.

I like:

• That she's Ulala, blatantly.  So this project is an outstanding success.
• Her index finger mittens.  Turns out these exist in real life so I felt okay with keeping them and not doing proper gloves.  I assume her original model had to keep the polygons down so four fingers and a thumb was too much of an overhead.  They add to her charm.
• The magazine cover.  I might do that as a finishing technique a lot.
• Her anatomy, especially the hints of knees, although having said that...

I dislike:

• Her stomach.  There's no hint of abdominal muscles.  That's a mistake.
• The angle of her on the cover.  She's got lots of curves going on and the view I picked is too flat.

Right, better get a turntable sorted, although the latest ZBrush has changed their export options for movies and I'm not a fan of that at the moment as I can't make them loop perfectly, which is a key point to a turntable!