vsim

Slow but steady progress on the VF-0B that I've been working on for an embarrassingly long period of time (lol, don't ask). Almost done painting, I'm down to cleaning up a few small details and touching up. Then on to a gloss coat, decals and a final coat of either gloss or matte, I haven't decided yet. The magnetically attached FAST pack works great, snaps perfectly into place and is easy to remove. I've learned a lot on this kit since this is the most experience I have gotten with an airbrush in a LONG time..mostly through mistakes. The biggest thing I learned is that you can really thin Mr Color down quit a lot and use lower air pressure to have less issues with paint sneaking underneath the masking tape.

Hasegawa 65844 - 1/72 - VF-31F Siegfried Messer_Hayate w_Lilldraken Macross Delta the Movie Hasegawa 65712 - Macross Display Stand Hasegawa 65783 - 1/72 - YF-19 'Demonstrator' Hasegawa 65870 - 1/72 - VF-19A SVF-440 Dullahans w_FAST PACK and High-maneuver missiles Hasegawa 65785 - 1/72 - VF-0C VMFAT-203 Hawks Hasegawa 65871 - 1/48 - VF-1A Valkyrie Low Visibility Hasegaw 65866 - 1/72 - VF-11D Thunderbolt Test Pilot School More kits coming, I finally got through the ones I have easy access to, so some older ones will be coming up soon!

What's interesting is that I saw the kit number is 30 instead of the usual 5 digit number? So presumable the full kit number will be 65730. I just find it interesting that some kits get a two digit number on the box and most of the rest just have the normal 5 digit. I see no particular rhyme or reason for it. In any event, woot!

Yep ! I've been on the fence about keeping my pre-order cause these have gotten so expensive anymore, so I'll be glad for the delay :). It will be my first premium finish.

Some more, life's been a bit hectic lately so sorry for not many new kit pictures lately. Hasegawa 65862 - 1/72 VF-31E Siegfried Reina Prowler Color Macross Delta the Movie Hasegawa 65861 - 1/72 VF-31S Siegfried Arad Macross Delta Hasegawa 65867 - 1/72 VF-31J Custom Siegfried Hayate Macross Delta

I've made some improvements to my scripts. Stitched images will hopefully not appear skewed anymore. It was a subtle issue but still drove me crazy enough to want to fix it. Hasegawa 65850 - 1/72 VF-31F Siegfried Kaname Buccaneer Color Macross Delta the Movie

I think it's rather cool they are doing a Myung figure. If I didn't already have an eggplane YF-19, I'd probably go for it...but since I do.. and since I'm worse at painting figures than I am at the aircraft...lol

Hasegawa 65864 - 1/72 VF-31S Siegfried Mikumo Guynemer Color Macross Delta the Movie

Yep, they've got a lot of great info. (For anyone who doesn't have the link ,it's Scalemates, scale modeling database | stash manager). Maybe at some point I'll figure out how to add to the info on Scalemates (e.g. box sides, instructions, etc.). I'm scanning everything for more of a preservation aspect. Scanner is calibrated to correct colors and I've got these at high res (including decals sheets at 2400 dpi). I started off with just decals but decided I might as well scan boxes, instructions, etc. while I'm at it because I apparently like having no free time :). If anyone needs a higher res version, just shoot me a message.

Shhh, don't ruin it for me, I haven't gotten that far into the new podcast yet! I wonder what it could be about! hehe.

Hasegawa 65849 - 1/72 VF-31E Siegfried Chuck Macross Delta Hasegawa 65869 - 1/72 VF-11D Thunderbolt SVT-27 Bluetails

Hasegawa 65792 - 1/48 VF-1S/A Valkyrie "Skull Squadron"

Wave MC-073-8800 SDR-04-Mk.XII Destroid Phalanx

Wow, that is absolutely fantastic!

Well, still glad to see it returning even with the surcharge. Hopefully that will go away before long. Thanks for the info!

Nice! That's awesome!

I saw that we have a decal library, so I figured I'd start a box art library thread. Someone let me know if I missed one that already exists. I'm in the process of scanning my kits/decals/instructions so if anyone needs higher res images that have been color calibrated let me know. I also have scans of the side of the boxes. I'm only going at a rate of about 1 scan per week at the moment, so...this could take a while, :D. If you spot any errors, let me know, the process for merging scans is not perfect and although I try to look for artifacts and fix them I don't always see them. Box art: Hasegawa 65770 - VF-0B "Macross Zero" Hasegawa 65784 - SVF-124 Moon Shooters Hasegawa 65789 - Eggplane DYRL VF-1A/J Valkyrie Hasegawa 65796 - Eggplane YF-19 Advanced Variable Fighter Macross Plus Hasegawa 65865 - Sv-262Hs Draken III Roid Macross Delta

I didn't score them off Mandrake but I might have them laying around. The odd thing is my notes say that is MC-10-650 for "Wave Macross Model Support System Decals 2" yet your picture is MC-17-650. I might have a different set. I've started scanning my kits and decal sets, shoot me a message if you want me to try to dig it up a take a good scan.

Working in Windows, I don't have time to setup a Linux box at home, although I've been using Linux since 1993 so I'm one of the old timers on it, lol. So no bash for me unless I setup Mingw or something similar. Batch and Powershell seem to be working well for me so far. The merging script it just a batch script that I edit the filenames in each time, could easily be converted to take them as command line args. My powershell script is one I use to convert all tifs in a directory to have LZW compression so that I can get the decal scans down in side and not have 0.5 - 1 Gig per scan, lol.

I've got a 1 year old in the house, I don't usually get time to stitch images together, lol. I think I discovered what you just said above. I've started putting manga, etc. inside the box to keep it flat on the scanner. That seems to help the images stitch together automatically better. Although I still had 1 or 2 where I needed to go in and manually futz with it some. Hugin seems to not be happy sometimes if it needs to stretch the image, so I think I need to put more effort into making sure the box is completely flat and not scan near the edge where it is riding up on the lip of the scanner. Sometimes Hugin does great with the automation I've set up, other times it does weird things....still figuring the tool out and all the command line arguments; but slowly getting better at figuring out exactly what it's doing. If I ever get it where it works very reliably I'd happily share my scripts. I'm only doing the boxes at 400 dpi for now as it seems to give a nice image without taking up nearly as much space as the 2400 dpi decals, lol. I discovered an issue with the VF-0B scans, if you look, you can see in the "Macross Zero" lettering in the older image above where it didn't stitch together correctly, although I don't know why. Here's a better one I've also fixed my scans of the side of the box which had similar issues. I'm not sure if too much overlap is causing the issues, or what exactly Hugin's issue is. I've started scanning black space around the box to try to give it a better defined border to adjust to, but that may make things worse. Here's the Sv-262 that I fixed today as well: @TMBounty_Hunter, what software did you use to stitch yours together? Gimp or something similar?

Did some more testing and tweaking this morning, scanned in the VF-0B kit I'm mid progress on. Unfortunately it means I've already but some of the decals out..oh well VF-0B Box Cover stitched together with Hugin (and shrunk down for posting).

That looks like it's from the Hasegawa kit 65763 Macross VF-1J Max & Miria. I have it and could scan it for you but it doesn't sound like you want a scan.

That is a beautiful cel! Hopefully it found a good home!

Yeah, that makes sense. Thanks! I figured out how to get Image Magick to remove the alpha channel and get rid of the extraneous virtual canvas that hugin had created as well. So that's all automated now as well. Thanks for the info, it was just enough so that I could squeak by with google searches and experimenting with different options. Half the time I don't know the terminology used for graphics programs all that well so I'm not always certain what to search for to solve my issue. What you said about the alpha channel makes sense, thanks for explaining, I was wondering why it had 1 bit for the alpha channel, lol. So my scanning software goes straight from 24-bit to 48-bit for colors so I think I will keep it at 24-bit color scans. And so far I have been disabling any descreening or anything else like that in the scans. I figure that can always be done postprocess, but if I lose the data during the original scans I can't get it back. I'm mostly scanning the boxes just because they have nice art. The decals are more to try and preserve. Now I just need to automate things a little bit more so I don't have to edit scripts every time I run. And then see if the final scans from hugin are the approximate correct physical dimensions of the original boxes, etc. as it seems to mess that up some. I got it set for the test images I did but I'm not sure it will be correct for other images. It's not super important as it will only affect box art scans, but I'd still like it to match if I can get it to. And then I need to get back to building my VF-0B kit! lol

They are taking them right now on HLJ. Must have been temporary. I'm sure they'll have more when the kit is released.