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Love the scheme Dobber and your patience in masking is very well rewarded! Love this aircraft and you've truely done it justice. Thanks for sharing, I can live vicariously through your builds. Keep up the high quality imaginative work!

I was thinking the same thing... BF3 "looks" soooo much better than CoD - I mean the new CoD looked good, but it still looked like a video game - but when I first saw the play screens in BF3 - I was shocked, it looks spectacular! Don't they all play similarly? Although BF3 didn't get the glowing reviews CoD got. Does anyone know first hand if either CoD or BF3 supports Playstation Move? I can't find any official information (so I guess that's a bad sign). Sorry to be a newbie, but what do you mean?

kyekye - that's exactly what I need! - going to order one if the shipping isn't insane. Valkyrie - YES! YES! YES! BTW - what colour are they supposed to be? Orange or Red? and which side for which number? 01 - Starboard & 02 Port?

Woohoo!!! Thanks so much KillerRobot.

Wow, I didn't even know that existed... cool, I have a look at it the next time I'm at home depot! However I don't think there's much contact surface here to do much good, the lip is only 1-2mm in width. My only hope is to get a really strong magnet to sit behind a few layers of plastic. I'm not even sure if the PE parts are magnetic - they're silver and not brass, but I don't know even if its stainless or whatnot, so its just an idea for now until I get home.

Yay! I get to finally put this leg portion back together again... Now for my secret weapon! I got a hold of these decals made by PNT from Starship Modeller (think they were originally designed for the Babylon 5 model kit) http://starshipmodeler.biz/shop/index.cfm/product/798_140/11000-hull-plating-detail-decals---gray.cfm And these great 1/144 tiny decals that KyeKye put me onto. The plan is to pre-paint in a close shade all the PE panel parts and apply them to the toy first. Then cover it in all these decals (over top of the PE parts to tie them into the panelling a bit more so they don't look stuck on). Then apply another pass of lightly airbrushed aztec pattern over the decals (probably a lighter colour to bring up the values as the decals will tend to darken the overall tone) to tie the decals in a bit more to the base colour of the toy. Lastly a post-shading layer to weather the decals a bit, tie them together, lighten the darker grey areas and darken the lighter grey areas (I personally find the two contrasting greys in the toy too stark) and seal it all in with several coats of flat clear-coat finish. The only side-track might be to take apart the ARMD to find a way to get tiny magnets inside near the Valkyrie launch windows so I don't have to glue the tiny PE launch arms in place and they could be magnetically attached.

I wanted to thank KyeKye and vf_1s so much for the next part. The city background - they provided invaluable graphics, tips and suggestions to where to find the appropriate artwork from the available Macross Books to compile my own city background behind the city. I loved what they did so much that I liberally stole from both of them and photoshopped my own composite of the best parts that I liked from the two designs. I loved the "blue" look that vf_1s established but also the transformation signage from kyekye - I hope you don't mind guys ;-) I later de-saturated the file so the bluish hues were toned down a bit to match my painted city a bit more. I also ended up cutting pieces straight from the background and gluing them as facades directly onto a few of the larger buildings to tie together the foreground and background a bit more too. I wished I had the time (or patience) to put lighting in, but in the end, the time that would have taken would have been time from the exterior which I am looking forward to. I'm sure many Dads out there will understand how precious time is - and for the times that I will see the outside in my display case vs. picking it up afterwards and opening it up to turn on the lights just didn't justify it enough for my personally. I started to airbrush the PE parts the dark grey that I was going to apply to the darker leg areas... I love the fact that they are self-adhesive - but I worry if they will fall off over time (I hope the clear-coats that I will apply in the end will alleviate that problem a little.

Really?! – my eyes have gone bug-eyed… I realized I’m not as young as I used to be. My eyesight isn’t as good now and I found it really difficult to see down to the level of detail I wanted initially – so I ended up having to back off and stop a little bit premature than I was planning on. Oh well. To all who are trying this, now that I’m taking a crack at detailing one of these beauties up – I appreciate that much more or respect that much more the level of dedication KyeKye and VF-1S has done to make their SDF-1s look the way they do! Kudos to you guys. I managed to squeeze a few more hours over the last few nights to get the city done – I just wanted to close the leg back up (before I loose the screws!) and get to the exterior detailing and painting as soon as possible (that’s my favourite part).