Chronocidal

Actually... what kind of formats can TurboCad use? If the textures aren't really needed, I can send you a copy of the model to just transfer directly.

K, I've got full views, but they're of the Hasegawa model, or at least renders of a polygon copy of it. So the proportions are a little different than those pics, and I'll need to send you the whole set so they're consistent.. what size do you need? (got the model, can render it in any size ) just for a preview, here's a render....

Crap.. yeah, just doesn't look right. Now.. my main question.. how long before Iran dumps their F-14s, and one ends up on the airshow circuit in the original VF-84 scheme from the 70s?

You ever watch "Tales from the Crypt?" I think that was one of Cher's lesser known roles...

Holy cow.. I thought this was a joke, and the shirt was paintshopped.... schweet. Wonder if any of the shops around Sacremento have em... hmmm.. not likely... although, SanFran isn't far...

Hmm.. I think in this category, I lucked out majorly. I never did manage to see Robotech on tv, my first exposure to the VF-1 was one of those midget 1/200 scale models that Testors put out in the 80's. I thought it was a Tomcat. I left it at that (I was about 3 after all) and then bought a Millia JM at a toy store when I was about 6. Honestly, took me a few years before I realized they were the same plane. I saw the word Robotech on the package, but it didn't mean anything to me, since I had never seen the show. Now, years later, while browsing on ebay, while looking for models, I started coming across the old transforming 1/72 Bandai valk kits. They were purely Macross, so I started looking up the word Macross, and my head nearly exploded when I first found a few of the Taka 1/55ths up for around $1000. I gave up right then and there on ever getting a decent sized one...Then, a friend of mine bought me Mac+ for Christmas. Watched it, loved it, and fell in love with the YF-19. So, I started browsing for those on ebay and various search engines, looking for info on the plane. In the end, I found both Yamato and MW right as the 1/48th debuted. Best timing ever. Really though, the thing that drew me most to the Yamato valks was the emphasis on the aircraft design. I always thought the Chunky Monkey would be a cool toy, but didn't look at ALL like it would actually fly. The MPC is better, but not much.. I always hated the swing-bar design for the legs. I'm an aircraft nut first, Macross fan second, and I went for the one that looked like an actual plane, instead of a clunky collection of aircraft parts that transformed. That's partially why I got sick of the old aircraft transformers really fast... they always seemed to have some robot part sticking out that ruined the shape of the aircraft. The VF-1 was the first transformer I'd ever seen that managed to fit all the robot parts in a believable aircraft form, and still deliver a decent robot.

Heh. It's easy to see why, though.. some parts of the two planes look almost identical.. the wing shape, the upper intake design.. pretty similar.

Hehe.. well, I use max, but my animation skills are mostly limited to doing control surfaces and landing gear.. although, a transforming valk can't be that far off. But as for things like walking, I've got no clue where to begin. My few experiments with bone structures didn't work out at all like I'd hoped.. probably need to run through a few tutorials. I could probably make a Valk transform, but that's about it.

Hmm.. judging by those pictures, the plane looks like an overall light-ghost grey, probably lightened a bit... quite a bit actually.. maybe a 50-50 mix of l-g grey and white, with either white or a very light grey for the nose.. that pretty much goes with current camo colors though, so it may be what they used. It might be more blue than that though. Note though, that's just off the model pics.. the cg is MUCH lighter... I can't really tell, in some places it looks blue-ish, others it looks greenish.. I'm very tempted to suggest an overall coat of light gull grey, what has been used on naval aircraft since Vietnam.. this just looks a little more blue than that shade, and a bit lighter, light gull grey is almost a light tan. Your best bet may be to mix a little bit of blue with light gull grey, or maybe make a mixture of light ghost and light gull greys... I'd mix a little bit of those colors on paper and see if you can get a good mixture ratio, but those colors would probably be a good starting point, along with some white to brighten it up to the point of matching the animation.

Hmm.. if it's too much work, I guess you could just make sure all the materials used are double sided, but that does up the rendering time. I remember many a time making a polygon mesh for a game where I had to literally go through the entire mesh polygon by polygon and manually flip all the backwards faces.. took forever.. then I finally learned how to draw them the right way in the first place so that never became such a big issue again. Lol.. vectors.. normals.. sheesh, we're covering those in my calc class, and my hobbies finally helped me understand something in math class. Oy.. see, you can calculate face normals manually if you want to.. you basically need the three points of the polygon, and turn them into two 3d vectors in space.. then you can find the normal vector by taking the cross product of the two edge vectors... umm.. yeah... I'll shut up. But I was thrilled to find out something in calculus that's useful for modeling.

Lol.. the old Taka Valks are called Chunky Monkeys... maybe the Yamato YF-19 should just be called the pregnant goose? That actually is the phrase that one of my friends used the first time he saw it.

Sorry for the lack of news people, my computer's basically gone through hell in the past few months... Service pack 2 problems caused me to lose a LOT of stuff from a messed up system restore. It seemingly deleted a bunch of files from my hard drive, fortunately none of which were irreplaceable. But I've been working the past few weeks getting things back to normal, and I still don't have any programs to work on this with yet. I'll post updates as I can, but I've got to find a way to recover a lot of stuff before the final version of this plane can come out.

Hehe.. Just as long as the only exclamation used during the movie is not "UNTHINKABLE!!" I'll be happy.

That's the edge of the skull I think, but it doesn't become clear until a split second before the valk blows. The skull is illuminated by the explosion for a short time.

Actually, if you go a few more frames forward, you can just make out the skull markings. It's really dim though, and I don't think the stripes are green.

Technically I don't really collect die-cast anymore, I prefer the plastic variety. But go back about 15 years, and it's a different story... I collected all the little die-cast planes you could get for about $.85 back then.. the Dyna-flites, and Skybusters, etc.. loved those things. Actually, when I think back it's kinda freaky.. most kids sleep with a stuffed toy as a little kid.. I cuddled up with my favorite toy planes.... yeah.. I know. Is it any wonder I'm an aeronautics major?

If that thing does transform, it's probably a duplicate of that transforming Hasegawa kit that's been seen around.. that thing looks like a part-by-part duplicate of the Hasegawa -19 judging by some of the part seams and the overall shape.

I'd highly recommend FLCL, especially ep5.. total random insanity can be a good thing to cure depression. I think being high on caffein (or your own drug of choice) helps a bit though. FLCL also seems to make quite a bit more sense if you don't sleep for a few days.

Well, goofy maybe, but unreal definitely.. when was the last time you saw someone diffuse a fist fight by jumping away from the punches while singing "Lean On Me" or some equivalent? Given the history of Macross, Basara did have a good reason to try singing to distract the alien invaders, since, heck, it worked before. I can understand the musician thing, I come from a musical family, play a few instruments, etc... the "coming from the heart" thing makes perfect sense to me, personally I think that's the best kind of music. But you have to draw the line somewhere. I don't sing to avoid confrontations, or burst out into a jazz trumpet lick when someone insults me. Granted, it'll probably at least get people off your case since they'll assume you're just plain nuts, but it wouldn't be my first choice of retaliations. I guess it just kind of comes down to whether pacifism works or not. Pacifism would work, just as long as everyone agrees to it. Once someone renounces it, it doesn't work for anyone. Someone once told me, if you want to show a pacifist the error of his ways, punch him in the face repeatedly. Cruel, yes.. but there's a painful truth in that. I guess I could say I'm pacifistic to a point.. I'd much rather avoid confrontations entirely than fight through them, and I'd rather everyone just got along. But there has to be a line somewhere, and if someone or something threatens something that I hold dear, I'm going to do my best to fight it any way I can. No, violence isn't the answer. But sometimes it's the only language that will be understood, or respected. (K, I'll get off my soapbox now, sorry, I've been thinking of joining the air national guard to pay for college and get experience in my field (aeronautics), and these kind of issues are kind of heavy on my mind right now.)

Wow.. Well, that just made my day. Couple weeks ago, I was thinking "Man I wish I'd bought a Roy -1S while I had the chance." My one and only 1/48th is a -1J Hikaru wth fast-packs, and it's kinda lonely... Besides, this'll give me an excuse to buy a set of strike armor. Very good news indeed.. maybe if I get a good price I'll buy two and customize one.. although, I think I lack the guts to try that. HBAR HBAR HBAR HBAR HBAR HBAR HBAR HBAR HBAR HBAR HBAR HBAR HBAR HBAR HBAR HBAR HBAR HBAR!!!!!!

Lol.. yeah, good point, that was pretty off the topic here.. I think it got linked in with the idea that M7 was on the "bad' pile of Macross. But that is a good point about the robots... having seen giant aliens, I guess the best option is to be prepared for anything. Besides, after training pilots for years on the techniques of controlling a mech, it makes sense to keep them in the fleet, keep making them, and just keep the pilots flying them. Once you implement a new type of weapon, it would take serious and costly changes to remove it again, both tactically, and monetarily.

I have to agree with that.. while the story in M7 isn't at all bad compared with some stuff I've seen, the way it's presented is kinda goofy at times. In SDF, the Valk's were purely military vehicles, fighters in a war. The only reason Macross didn't fall victim to what I'm going to dub the "Giant Fighting Robot Fallacy" was because there were actually giant aliens to fight. M7 kind of loses that.. suddenly, some of the Valks are personal vehicles to paint and customize as you see fit.. I'm making a big assumption here, since I haven't seen any giant aliens in M7, so the GFRF appears to be in effect. That may change later, but so far the aliens are the same size as humans. Plus, there is never... EVER... EVER any reason that a giant fighting robot needs boobs. Call them speakers (another joke, since sound doesn't transmit in space anyway ) or sensors (lol) or whatever you want, but they're still boobs. I guess I can understand people wanting to customize their vehicles.. but oy.. there is such a thing as too much customizing. Course, on the flip side of that.. you're giving a transforming fighter/mecha to a 17 year old pop-singer who's still in the middle of puberty. If Mylene were anything like my sister, she would've plastered it with Happy Bunny stickers, or painted it up to look like Orlando Bloom as Legolas. Given the alternative, it could've been a lot worse than it was. Knowing the female population at my high school, they probably would've come up with everything from Stripper Valks to Cheerleader Valks... which kind of explains the mentality of this picture, but hardly excuses it.

Well, DYRL is kind of odd to me in a way... I enjoyed it, but I really thought the characters were pretty shallow, or not developed much at all. The few character development scenes you see leave the characters pretty one-dimensional. That, plus the awkward silences in so many places kinda just left me waiting for somone to actually say what they were thinking. The little "knowing glance" or "slow nod" bugged me, cause it didn't really tell you anything about the characters. I probably did miss a lot of the background in SDF, and I'm sure DYRL would probably be better after seeing that whole series. But to be honest, the music just kind of got on my nerves. It's like, "oh, we're trapped in an abandoned section of the ship... let's make a music montage of the time there!" or, "Let's do another one while Hikaru and Minmei are out on the town!" There's so much more that could've been done with these scenes, instead of just blasting through them quickly to a blaze of music. But yeah.. Mac+ had the best dogfight I've ever seen... EVER. One of my favorite things to do in Flight Sim 2004 with my YF-19 and -21 is to fly at ground level through NY City at high speeds.. sweet feeling.

After seeing Wrath a few times, I'm beginning to think that it was only rated well because it blew TMP away in terms of... well, action mainly. The special effects weren't as eye-blowing, but I think that's what kind of ruined TMP.. sensory overload, and plot undervolt. Course, they were both better than ST:V, "The Search for God". found out that steaming pile was directed by Shatner... go figure. First Contact and ST:IV hold a close tie in my mind for the best Trek film... hmm.. time travel.. I'm seeing a trend here. As far as Macross goes though, I'm witholding most judgement till I see everything. Macross Plus was my first experience with the series, and I loved it wholeheartedly (mostly for the aircraft, but the plot wasn't bad either. ). I can probably say it'll remain my favorite, since I saw it first. Saw DYRL recently, and although not bad by a long shot, the musical interludes kind of annoyed me. I liked the way that the music in Mac+ was kind of just a byproduct of the plot and characters, rather than a large portion of the plot like in DYRL. Granted, that's the way the story was written, and the music was key to winning the battle, but aside from the final song, I think the characters (especially Minmei) would have benefited from a little more personal dialogue like Mac+ had. Now, I haven't seen SDF Macross yet, so I'm probably missing a lot of backstory from that, but it seems like DYRL on its own is a little lacking as far as characters go. I also preferred the style of music in Mac+ somewhat, it tended toward orchestra and piano music rather than pop-singing. "Voices" has to be one of the greatest pieces of music I've ever heard on piano, right up there with the theme from Forrest Gump. Now, I've only seen a few eps of M7, true the combat is kinda lame at first, and the intro is kinda lacking, but I'll have to wait and see how it turns out later. I'm only up to episode 5, and I'm not hating it yet, so that's a good sign. And as repetitive as the music gets, I don't think it's that bad. Macross Zero on the other hand is kind of strange compared to the other series.. there's almost no music involved, aside from the Mayan songs that Sara sings... But so far it's been pretty good. I'm eagerly waiting for the last episode.

Hehe... That was me.. I still haven't finished it. Chances are, I'll have to make the legs solid before it will stand up, but I'm stranded at college away from my legos as the moment. No room for them here in my apartment. There is one part that may hold it up, but I'll need to buy 2-3 AT-ATs first to get the parts, or find them online (it's a pretty rare part), and I'm pretty broke right now. Btw, I spent a few years perfecting my own UCS versions. They were all in pseudo-mini-fig scale, but I paid strict attention to the classic proportions of the originals. I had an X-Wing, Y-Wing, B-Wing and A-Wing... but I kind of obsessed about the scaling.. I built the X-Wing first, then calculated a scale based on the number of studs long the ship was. Yeah, I'm like that. The X-Wing came out to be about 18 inches long, the Y-Wing was about 2 feet long, the A-wing about 14-15 inches, and the B-wing was a little over 2 feet.. umm.. wide? Anywho, I have photos, but not here. The B-Wing and Y-Wing were taken apart to make the Valk, but the X-Wing and A-Wing are still in my closet. The A-wing turned out best I think, very carefully layered with plates to get the right shape. I just wish I had them here.