Anasazi37

Oh yeah, I saw that. Honestly, given what you get on top of the base price, it doesn't seem that bad. At that point, what's another ¥4400? That's retail, though. The prices I'm seeing on the secondary market are...higher. With that said, the VF-0D PF seems to raise the bar for what we should expect from now on.

All sets have now been printed. Hope to coat and pack them over the next few days and then ship everything out on Friday.

All this talk about the Arcadia VF-0S got me thinking about why I don't own one, and the Reactive Armor to go with it. I was scratching my head about it, so I went to Arcadia's site and was instantly reminded of why I passed on them: VF-0S (Regular Finish) = ¥38280 (tax included) Reactive Armor = ¥19580 (tax included) Looked at the usual sites and it seems like the price of the 0S is holding steady at close to MSRP in the secondary market. The armor seems to show up at MSRP or a bit lower. So, they're holding their value, which is great, but that puts them at a level that's hard for me to justify right now. I'd love to see the 0S reissued in the price range of the VF-4A, with the armor scaled down in price as well. That would be much harder for me to pass up. I'm not going to hold my breath, though.

Oh, I plan to! This kit and the 1/60 Ghost X-9 are at the top of my build list. Once I finish my 3D scanner project....

Gotcha. Wasn't sure if that one was in your binder of goodies.

You're using hugin, eh? It's one of many photogrammetry-inspired applications out there that can stitch (mosaic) images together. They all pretty much do the same thing. Their automated workflows tend to a do a decent job, but not always a perfect one, so long as there is decent overlap between the images, the images were collected under similar conditions, and the images contain enough "interesting" stuff for the underlying computer vision routines to find and link across them. This kind of image processing is a subset of what I do for a living, so I can geek out over it in a big way if I'm not careful. I think you're right about hugin using the alpha channel (RGBA). My best guess as to why it's doing so is that it needs to know which pixels contain useful information and which pixels are just background fill that can be ignored. This is important during mosaicking because the software might have to subtly warp the images to make them fit together well and when it does that, background fill is introduced. If you don't ignore that stuff, you end up with lots of useless and annoying black areas in the end result instead of something seamless. The alpha channel is where the software keeps track of that, where a pixel value of 0 means "ignore" and a value of 255 means "keep." The software, after mosaicking, likely just spits out the RGBA version because the end result is going to have some background fill around the edges. My advice is to let hugin do its thing, then use another application to remove the alpha channel (convert from RGBA to RGB). You'll have larger files in the interim, but once the RGB version is created, you can delete the interim stuff.

Man, you really don't appreciate how small the SF-3A Lancer is until you see it in person. Mine arrived the other day. No regrets on buying it, but wow, it's small for something at 1/60 scale.

100% agree.

Was it the set that I made? https://sites.google.com/site/tridentdesignworksdecals/hasegawa/minmay-guard-paris-act I wasn't sure if anyone else ever made one. I always considered it to be a missed opportunity by Hasegawa. They give you Minmay and some of the supporting designs, but not the really intricate stuff that makes the valk unique. They fixed that with the follow-on "Moon Act" set. For the "Paris Act" set, I had to draft and fit everything myself, working off of the pictures in the magazine. Massive pain in the backside.

Like I said, probably a combination of factors. I think you captured just about all of them in one post (plus the potentially lower popularity of Roy inside Japan, mentioned by @Chronocidal).

The Roy does seem to be more available on the secondary market than previous releases, so your hunt should go well. There are seven of them for sale on Mandarake, which is unheard of for a DX, and there options on Amazon Japan and Yahoo! Auctions Japan as well. Nothing is at MSRP, but also not at super-high prices like the Hikaru 1J. He's also showing up regularly in the For Sale forum here, often for what the seller paid (MSRP + shipping to them) plus additional shipping to you. Several members bought multiples and want them to go to good homes. No one is sure why Roy is more available, probably a combination of factors, but I think we all hope that it's the new normal--as long as it doesn't discourage Bandai from continuing the line or cause them to do smaller production runs. I don't mind paying a bit of a markup on MSRP post-release so I don't have to get up in the middle of the night to participate in PO Madness.

Permanent Battroid mode for me, complete with sword, shield (solid, not the folding one), missile packs, and a Lil' Draken flying on each side. I was careful during its one and only transformation process because it was a lot more complex and looked a lot more fragile.

It was the only VF-31 that I owned for exactly that reason. The colors of the other four are a little too garish for my taste. Then the armor showed up in the movie and I just had to have what another MW member called "the hulking orange death machine." Managed to grab an Arad the day before the armor PO was announced and I'm glad that I did. Price jumped more than $200 after that and hasn't come down much since. I'm generally not a fan of orange, but for that armor I'll make an exception.

I've been building my own 3D laser triangulation scanner for the past several months and it's been a similar experience: learned more about how all of that stuff works than I ever really wanted to know. Sounds like you've made significant progress. Keep us posted!

I'm still taking orders through tomorrow for the decal set!

That is exactly what I did for all three of the 1/20 kits. Pre-pandemic, of course. Couldn't hurt to ask if it's still an option, since it sounds like the automatically-generated shipping cost hasn't changed much. I don't remember the exact reduction they made, but it was substantial. Now that they offer a surface option, they might just push people in that direction instead, but I hope not.

Glad to hear that yours arrived safely! Mine reached Tenso yesterday and should ship to the US tomorrow.

...and even when you do that, sometimes yellowing still happens because of the composition of the plastic. The Toys R Us exclusive VF-1A CF Yamato v1 1/60 comes to mind. The landing gear flaps and missiles turned this awful shade of yellow, despite my keeping the valk in controlled storage since I got it in 2002, and every one of them that shows up on Mandarake has exactly the same issue, so it seems to be a manufacturing problem. To add to @Chronocidal's bottom line: do what you can, within reason, but sometimes yellowing is going to happen regardless. @tekering has a lot of examples of how it still happens, even under the best of conditions.

If we can't give each other a healthy amount of grief for collecting very expensive hunks of plastic/resin and then worrying about how to make them look as "realistic" as possible, why are we all here?

Nice to see a preview of what I ordered. I think my Lancer II reached Tenso this morning, but they haven't notified me of receipt yet. They'll likely use a larger-than-necessary shipping box as well, so lots of wasted space. Yeah, it did seem like a lot to pay for a kit, but it's a rare one that I've never found anywhere else. I more or less justified it that way and by thinking about what resin kits from folks like @captain america usually go for, due to the amount of time and craftsmanship involved in making them. Half the quality for half the price? Have to pay extra for decals? Sounds like I'm running some kind of decal racket....Just trying to help folks here and I don't take on many projects these days. For the price of this kit, not including a sheet would have been very disappointing, but we've seen worse. I'm looking at you, Max Factory. I'm still annoyed that their 1/20 valkyrie kits, apart from the armament sets, don't come with decals.

Received notification early this morning that my 1/60 SF-3A Lancer II has shipped! Based on the tracking info, it looks to be heading to the correct post office for Tenso, so there's a halfway decent chance that this might actually work out. Fingers crossed....

Post in the For Sale forum is now live. Starting in a few minutes, I will be responding to those who have already reached out

For folks who might be interested. I received several inquires about making a sheet after the price for the Premium Finish version was revealed by Arcadia.

For folks who expressed interest in a decal set for the YF-19, I should be able to do it (assuming my printer continues to work). I'm basing that decision on a scan (see below) of the sheet that comes with the first issue of the regular finish and an assumption that Arcadia won't change it for the reissue. Like the set I just made for the VF-4, there's probably a bunch of stuff that can be dropped to make the sheet more economical. (scan courtesy of the Scorched Earth Toys blog, aka @jenius)

Sorry for the delayed response, everyone. Absolutely crazy week at work. Ran the numbers and sets will indeed be $10 each, plus shipping. I'll post something in the For Sale forum tonight and will also start responding to members who have already expressed interest.