[{"content":"It’s been almost two years since Creeping nightmare at Blue-City Park. Life happened, Pnic and I moved, and the Extra Robots project was put to side. Until now?\nThe Blue-City park Diorama hasn’t left my display shelf and is still looking very good to my standards. Since almost the beginning of this journey, I had multiple diorama ideas, some like Blue-City Park being quite big and some being little one-off scenes, easier and faster to make. “Domestic Ruins” is one of those.\nThe plan was simple: let’s make a post-battle scene where one of our Extra Robots Jaeger lost the battle to a monster. Robot must be defeated, damaged and so must be the environment. I took inspiration from many epic Gundam Dioramas.\nThe build Everything started with two things I had already with me: a clear plastic dome that was used to hold a lemon ice cream/sorbet and a building I had previously purchased for Blue-City Park but never used as the scale wasn’t quite right.\nThe cardboard disk was cut to size and I started digging through the plastic building to make room for my Robot.\nI laid down some thick pieces of paper to create a bit of volume, which ended up not being visible at all, unfortunately. Using many little pieces of paper, I added some details, trying to give a more “destroyed city” look. I used my good old grounded-coffee + white glue to make dirt patches and called it a day.\nIn the meantime, I worked on the Robot itself. My plan was to have a gray and green city (I added some bushes, vines and trees, not shown here), so I went with a blue Robot to contrast as much with the scene as possible.\nOf course, it has to be beaten down so I used my pliers on the robot at some places and used paint to mimic more damage. As you’ll see in the final results, I added even more damage later on.\nGood old T-011 had seen better days.\nBeauty shots A quick side-project that took a week of sporadic work between my work hours.\nLike the other project, it\u0026rsquo;s also published on extrarobots.wordpress.com, working as a central hub for this whole project.\n","date":"2026-02-06T00:00:00Z","image":"http://localhost:1313/post/extrarobots-domestic-ruins/IMG_20260206_135815800_hu_527207764fec6017.jpg","permalink":"http://localhost:1313/post/extrarobots-domestic-ruins/","title":"Domestic Ruins"},{"content":" The \u0026rsquo;noids are just about finished. Trust me, sarge. This one\u0026rsquo;s gon\u0026rsquo; be a cakewalk.\nGalactic Rangers has always been a core memory of my childhool playing Ratchet and Clank: Up Your Arsenal. I love their quirky dialogues, overall look and the presence they bring in game. My biggest deception was the lack of Ranger skins, or a way to play as their characters. I discovered years after that a \u0026ldquo;bullhorn\u0026rdquo; gadget was planned in the game, allowing us to command a ranger squad. But it was ultimately scrapped, probably to the rushed dev time of this game.\nStraight from the game My big idea was to get the 3D model from the game, as many online resources allow us to freely download them. I jumped on spriters-resource.com and downloaded the Ranger.\nUnfortunately and as expected, once the textures removed, the model is very bare-bones with little to no details and very basic shapes. That\u0026rsquo;s what you get for ripping a minor character from a PS2 game. With a whapping 2,538 polygons, I needed more if I wanted a cool 3D printed figure in the end.\nTo the drawing board I ain\u0026rsquo;t a 3D modeler, but I had to give it a chance. Plus, rangers are made of very generic shapes, so that would be a good exercise. I started by modeling the feet. They are very simple oval shaped with a elongated dome. I added grooves and called it a day. Then it was about connecting it to the leg. Instead of opting for a static pose that I will (maybe) regret later, I decided to add articulations with small ballcups and balljoints. Instead of remaking the wheel, I opted to add Mini 13\u0026rsquo;s modular joints onto my build.\nThe Ranger would almost become an action figure!\nIt took me a week of working almost every evening on the project. So something between 14 to 20 hours I would say.\nI tried my best to be accurate to the details given by the texture image, as well as respecting scale and shapes. The body was obviously the hardest part, but in the end I\u0026rsquo;m very pleased to what I produced, and very pleased to the 3D modeling skills I acquired at the same time.\nPrinting, assembling, painting Once printed, the model looked very good. I obviously had a ton of sanding to do, but it was very pleasing to see something you spent time creating in the virtual word coming to life.\nI don\u0026rsquo;t have much pictures of the WIP painting unfortunately, but it was quite straight forward. UV resin was used to make the eye and blaster glow, and I printed three little disks to make the antenna.\nFinal model The base is a simple wooden disk with grinded coffee and glue as sand/pebbles. Rocks are made with a cork, and the whole base is meant to represent Tyhrranosis\u0026rsquo;s dusty ground, with the little bush and orange tone.\nFiles 3D files are all available for free on my Thingiverse or Makerworld profiles. If you ever make your own, please ping me somewhere, I\u0026rsquo;d be glad to see!\n","date":"2025-12-11T00:00:00Z","image":"http://localhost:1313/post/galacticranger/Galactic_Ranger_figure_04_hu_2f756f0f47340095.jpg","permalink":"http://localhost:1313/post/galacticranger/","title":"H22, Galactic Ranger"},{"content":"The Project The idea of this project started in late 2021. As a crafting hobby I was making epoxy replicas of some Jojo\u0026rsquo;s Bouncin Bonheads, trying to create original finishes that were never made into real figures. Very quickly, fellow collectors were interested, new content in the Jojo\u0026rsquo;s collecting community was not very common, and as imperfect my casting were, I often found myself adding some in my trading packages as cool freebies.\nCustom figures are cool and all, but half of the nostalgia we feel is heavily reliant on the unboxing experience. The infinite excitement of our kid brains about to open a mystery bag containing few little colorful plastic toys. The logical next step was then to create little paper bags to hide my replicas. First paper, then cardboards, I iterated quite a bit on my packages to give collectors a great experience.\nFast forwarding in mid 2024, a friend casually asked me \u0026ldquo;Ok, but why not make your own designs?\u0026rdquo;. That felt like a very obvious thing to ear, yet I never dared to give it a real thought. Until that moment anyway.\nThe making I bought some fimo modeling clay and went to work. Guess what, you can\u0026rsquo;t really improvise sculpting skills, even less at a Crazy Bones scale. So I turned around and went to a more beginner-friendly tool that I knew: my computer. Using the awesome Blender software, I gave myself the challenge to complete a series of (at least) five characters.\nEvery character design went through a lot of phases and iterations. At some point, Blaze did not even have hairs!\nI also took advantage of my fdm 3D printer, a Anycubic Kobra 2, to quickly prototype until both the design and in hand feeling were \u0026ldquo;right\u0026rdquo;.\nI ended up with 7 final designs. One of them didn\u0026rsquo;t make it to the final round. It was too goofy and the shape was too different from the other six. Once finished, I commissioned a local print shop to make some batches of the figures at a 30 micrometer resolution in 3D resin printing. This step was necessary to provide me with pieces clean enough to allow me to make a silicon mold and epoxy replicas.\nAfter some sanding and hole filling, I made two little holes underneath that would serve two purposes: by inserting a piece of plastic tube in each, I will have two stilts that will center the figure in the silicon mold, and once removed will serve me as holes in which to pour the epoxy resin.\nSilicon is then poured around the figures to create a mold that will allow me to duplicate as will my Unregistered Bonehead.\nIt then goes into a pressure pot to remove (compress) air bubbles and cure. Once hardened end emptied, the silicon mold can be filled up with epoxy resin.\nRince and repeat until you have a great variety of colors and are happy with the results.\nPackaging A big part of this project was also to make it believable. It came through two major ideas: having some cool packaging and having a top-notch website, like in early 2000s.\nThere ain\u0026rsquo;t much to say here. I got my hands on some cardboard pillow cases and a very nice carboard cases, both holding a different amount of figures.\nThe collector case box contains all six figures in random colors, each wrapped in a paper bag. I also added a stand to display all six figures and two stickers.\nEach pillow case contains two random figures, also wrapped in a paper bag and with the same two stickers.\nWebsite Last but not least, I had to make a cool retro website, a sort of time capsule. Of course the fun was for me, I made all of it in a bloc-note software (no IDE!) using only bare minimul html and css. No javascript, no flexbox, only what you would expect from a late-90 / early 2000 website. Of course, a mandatory visitor counter and other easter eggs hidden in a lot of places.\nYou can visit it (unless I\u0026rsquo;ve since deleted it) on https://unregistered-boneheads.jojos-archives.net/\nPostmortem The challenge of making a full (even if tiny) art-toy series was\u0026hellip; Well, challenging. I planned a two-week release and teasing schedule, starting november 17th 2025. At this point I was only releasing little bits of things, a blurry picture, a fake newspaper ad, a backlighted 3D render. That was the fun part, people were overwhelmingly hyped and gave me a lot of energy to continue and to feel proud of my work. In the same time I was doing daily batches of resin replicas. That was more of a mental load than a real physical one, but my flat was still looking like a factory (and sometimes smelling like one).\nEconomical breakdown\nNon-fun stuff but part of a portmortem, and what to expect when starting such an adventure.\nProject ended up costing me a bit more than 450€.\nResin printed master figures: ~40€ Packaging stuff (2D art, source materials, stickers): ~ 180€ Tools and materials (resin, silicon, tooling): ~ 250€ This doesn\u0026rsquo;t count the time spent working on the project and many tooling I had from various resin projects (gloves, mask, pigments, colors\u0026hellip;) With all of that, I made 22 full series (132 figures) before my silicon molds started to broke down (slightly earlier that I would myself 🫠!)\nI was expecting to sell some to recover a bit of the costs. Since I\u0026rsquo;m not a greedy bastard, my asking price was 3,50€ per figure, 9 cents more than the production cost. I gave some sets to friends and family and sold out of everything else.\nWhat an adventure!\nGallery ","date":"2025-11-17T00:00:00Z","image":"http://localhost:1313/post/unregisteredboneheads/80-Group_photo_05_hu_d668364325977ceb.jpg","permalink":"http://localhost:1313/post/unregisteredboneheads/","title":"Unregistered Boneheads"},{"content":"Metal Arms : Glitch in the System has always been a favorite of mine. And of many other people, chances are that if you ever meet someone who had this game, this someone may have loved it.\nThe model Eleven years after its release, I wanted to try to make a cool statue of the main character, Glitch. Fortunately for me, some skilled people already extracted and 3D model from the game, and even rigged it. So I downloaded what Vissova had made for the Steam Workshop and started posing Glitch. Unfortunately, the game model was not made to be 3D printable at all, so I had a bit of work to be done, mostly to connect loose faces and recreating some meshes that were simply not gonna print as it.\nOnce done, I split the model into multiple parts to be more easily printed. Assembly will be required, but that\u0026rsquo;s a small price to pay in exchange of a way better printing experience.\nAt some point I wanted to split even more and make the figure articulated, but that was simply out of my skills at the time.\nIt tool multiple prints and 3D adjustments to have a great results. Once assembled, I started painting the figure, mostly using Citadel paint.I used UV resin on all shiny parts (eyes, headlamp and various screens) to give a bit of depth and realism. 3D files are available both on my Thingiverse and my Makerworld profiles. I\u0026rsquo;ve already seen some people printing their own, if you do, please send me a picture!\nBeauty shots ","date":"2024-08-07T00:00:00Z","image":"http://localhost:1313/post/glitch/glitch_ban_hu_e39a13a416fa2f10.jpg","permalink":"http://localhost:1313/post/glitch/","title":"Glitch in the system"},{"content":"Few weeks ago, I stumbled upon Phil’s blog and crafts. He’s making minis out of model kits sprues leftovers. I found this very cool, both for the challenge and for the principle.\nConcept After giving it a thought (and moving houses, which took a bit of time let’s be honest), I finally cleaned my craft desk and starting to work. Of all of his awesome models (of which, I encourage you, to check!), one was my favorite, by its simplicity and robo-esque design: the first and original Sprue Dude.\nOf course, my design had to be one-eyed and robotic. This is the original drawing which ironically ended to be 1:1 scaled with the mini! Keeping it simple, it would be a robot knight, brandishing his blade after (probably) a victory or just before a very bad encounter.\nAnd this is what I should be working with. I don’t have a ton of model kits (mostly gunplas), nor did I kept most of the sprues. The build Like Phil, I started by gluing the feet to what would be my working cork. And this is the exact moment I realized “Oh my god this is small”. And small it was.\nI struggled a lot with the torso. I wanted to have a wider piece than the pelvis, so I tried to glue together two pieces of sprue to sculpt, but nothing pleased me. I now respect even more what Phil is doing with his minis!\nI ended using a leftover piece from a Gundam kit. Is this cheating? Probably. That was technically on my sprue at some point! Sorry Phil, I failed you. Last but not least, this little injection mark was the perfect size and shape to make myself a nice little head. Then came the sword, taken from a panel on the sprue. I kept the little dots as they would probably serve a design purpose. As you can see, I struggled a lot with my glue, and I used a bit much of baking soda. I sanded most of it before painting.\nI’m skipping the painting part as it wasn’t very interesting. White undercoat, and multiple coats of regular citadel paint.\nFinal model The base was 3D-printed, the model comes from ecaroth on thingiverse. Is this cheating²? Maybe. I’m not even very proud of this part. Anyway. Please enjoy my little Sugilite Knight, crawling dungeons and fighting horrible monsters to save his kingdom!\n","date":"2024-05-15T00:00:00Z","image":"http://localhost:1313/post/sprue-dude-the-sugilite-knight/ban_hu_6de07179bbfdaebe.jpg","permalink":"http://localhost:1313/post/sprue-dude-the-sugilite-knight/","title":"Sprue Dude: The Sugilite Knight"},{"content":"I had the pleasure of making kibashes and scrapbuilds with Pnic for my last two projects, however I finally took the plunge of doing one by myself, from start to finish.\nThe build Unfortunately I didn’t took a lot of pictures while building this little guy. The torso is actually a piece I took from a long lighter. The piece between the handle and the articulated “neck” of the lighter. It was the piece that drove the entire build.\nArms and legs are both made of beads, bootlegs hama and random round beads found in my supply store. I used a metal wire to hold everything in place. It allowed me to have some sort of articulation that helped the pose.\nI somehow quickly find the idea of using the plug of an old usb cable I had lying around. It would match perfectly the “retro robot” look that I was aiming for. Feet were made using cork.\nHaving a general idea of what the robot be like and what purpose it would have in this universe, I started to make a base out of coffee, cork and an old poker chip. The poker chip idea is from Bill Making Stuff as he often use some for his Gutterlands figures.\nGrounded coffee and white glue is surprisingly effective to render a earthy texture. This idea comes from a YouTube video that I unfortunately can’t remember to link here. And of course, I ued cork to simulate stones. My goal was to have a mountain-like environment so my robot could wander around to find his true purpose.\nPainting Here comes the first coat of paint. I wanted a cool retro futuristic robot, made of simple shapes and with vivid colors. This blue-teal (Citadel’s “Ahriman Blue” to be exact) was the perfect fit.\nUltimately, the metal USB will dictate the use of chrome color for the joints.\nOn this picture you can also notice the base that is starting to be painted. Very simple, grey stones and brown earth.\nBut what’s a mountains wanderer without his walking stick?\nQuite straight-forward, it’s a stick with a (broken) light bulb on top. So far, almost every person seeing this bot on my shelf is asking if the bulb is working and if I can light up the mini. Unfortunately, I can’t. But the idea isn’t bad at all…\nNot seen until the finished model unfortunately, I added a little backpack made with papier mâché and tin foil.\nFinished model Lore:\nDecades ago, the tty_bus_0x004 unit was commissioned to transmit a serial message to an archaic terminal located on a distant planet. It was supposed to meet with a COM unit in orbit to translate its payload and be able to perform its task. Unfortunately, its transport layer failed and send it to the wrong planet. Since then, the know named “tty_BUS_wanderer” can be seen from time to time traveling the planet again and again, looking for the expected COM oracle.\nOverall I’m very proud of this build. I like the scale, what I pulled out regarding the build, but also the painting. For a first, it’s good!\n","date":"2024-03-14T00:00:00Z","image":"http://localhost:1313/post/the-forgotten-tty_bus_wanderer/ban_hu_46f581a219112bca.jpg","permalink":"http://localhost:1313/post/the-forgotten-tty_bus_wanderer/","title":"The forgotten tty_BUS_wanderer"},{"content":"Creeping nightmare at Blue-City Park is my biggest project to date.\nGenesis It all started back in 2022. Pnic and I were just finishing our kitbashathon project and were compulsively buying a 2006 series of Kinder-egg toys: the Extra Robots.\nWe had great plans in sight: making a cool-ass kaiju-robot diorama using those. We did a lot of planning, sketching and prepping maximize what we could achieve on a 4-days long stay of Pnic at my place.\nSince this project is the first of (hopefully) a full series, we dedicated a little wordpress site to our crafting journey. As such, I won\u0026rsquo;t elaborate much here and link you to the full site at:\nextrarobots.wordpress.com.\nThere you\u0026rsquo;ll find a full fledged tear-down of every step of the project, from the idea, prepping and of course, making.\nGallery Close-ups\nBy night\n","date":"2024-03-02T00:00:00Z","image":"http://localhost:1313/post/extrarobots-creeping-nightmare-at-blue-city-park/blue_night_01_hu_530eb8b7aa9fb408.jpg","permalink":"http://localhost:1313/post/extrarobots-creeping-nightmare-at-blue-city-park/","title":"Creeping nightmare at Blue-City Park"},{"content":"This build is actually from mid 2023, when my friend Pnic came to my place for a weekend. Our goal: create something out of trash during the available time. We honestly kinda underestimated the time it would take.\nThe week prior, I mulled over the general idea and concept. Being influenced by a old (but nice) game named Feudal Alloy, I had my visual style. Dead Head Fred, a PSP hidden gem, was also one of my main inspirations.\nI roughly sketched what shapes I needed, and I was ready to go: a robotic medieval knight with a twist: his head is a brain in a jar.\nThe build This two-days kitbash marathon (kitbashathon?) was really intense. I gathered a lot of stuff, but never enough, and the lack of parts was both a handicap and a source of constraints that helped the creativity.\nThe main body is a part from an old electronic toy. Using beads, tubes, gardening hoses tips and a lot of glue, I started to have the cartoonish robot shape that I wanted. The brain itself was made using fimo. Not my best piece of art, but it works!\nOf course it needed googly eyes. I also added wires both for the details, but also to give the illusion of the floating brain plugged to the mechanical body.\nFinished model The base is a simple wooden disc on which I glued cut pieces of cardboard to give the illusion of a stone pavement.\nPnic\u0026rsquo;s Mandatory inclusion of Pnic\u0026rsquo;s kitbash : Za\u0026rsquo;hg the martian\n(source)\n","date":"2023-05-27T00:00:00Z","image":"http://localhost:1313/post/sirbrainiuscortex/brainius_ban_hu_cb10aa793cfad41.jpg","permalink":"http://localhost:1313/post/sirbrainiuscortex/","title":"Sir Brainius Cortex"},{"content":"Guess what ? That’s my first post on this blog. I used to have other blogs, like a tumblr (actually two), but I’m only reblogging, almost never making content. Maybe this one will be an umpteenth side project, with one post (hello there) and no more content, until I decide to stop paying for the domain and hosting and delete it without even look back at this smol blog.\nAnyway, Hello Internet lost visitor (I should add a 2000-ish visit counter to measure that), and welcome to my new blog. Here will be posted some of my crafts / works / customs / plastic things that I make when I’m bored.\nEnjoy your stay !\nBanner picture from Lukas Mayer on Pexels.\n","date":"2023-05-10T00:00:00Z","image":"http://localhost:1313/post/hello-world/ban_hu_5c996b96a6865a18.jpg","permalink":"http://localhost:1313/post/hello-world/","title":"Hello, World"}]