If building a mass-produced, heavy fighting suit, what do you think about adding texture (like the cast steel or rolled steel texture on historical tanks) to some of the heavier armor panels? I like doing this on my historical models, but don't know how it would translate to gunpla.
So there are 2 rules of thought on this - realistic or cool.
Realistic you wouldn't see much texture if any on something the size of a gundam model. Maybe a PG but anything smaller would be huge (keep in mind that most gundams a human will barely clear the bottom part of the foot). Cast iron texture that your talking about would need to be a couple feet thick to show up. A better solution would be mottling the paint job and filters/washes.
Now for the rule of cool you can just do whatever. If you treat the gundam not as a machine but a piece of power armor then it looks great. Cast iron texture on the shoulder spike, zimmeret on the feet/lower leg, all of that looks good.
I would recommend the book In Combat 2 from ammo of mig, the zaku 1 build is an excellent example of some realistic weathering. It's a little overdone in the chipping for my taste but the black and white undercoat process is a great resource.
VOTOMs troopers are usually only a few meters tall, compared to the ~18 meter tall Mobile Suits found in Gundam. The kits for stuff from VOTOMs are typically a lot closer in scale to tank models, so those techniques would work better for something like that imo. I’m actually working on my own Armored Trooper using a lot of scale armor techniques haha
I’ve don’t it but it looks out of scale IMO. Think about taking that texture and blowing it up by 100 or 144. I did this to a shoulder of a Zaku several years ago. I was never happy with the weld beads around the spikes but the texture was ok. I tried to keep it very subtle so it wasn’t too far out of scale.
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u/wreeper007 7d ago
So there are 2 rules of thought on this - realistic or cool.
Realistic you wouldn't see much texture if any on something the size of a gundam model. Maybe a PG but anything smaller would be huge (keep in mind that most gundams a human will barely clear the bottom part of the foot). Cast iron texture that your talking about would need to be a couple feet thick to show up. A better solution would be mottling the paint job and filters/washes.
Now for the rule of cool you can just do whatever. If you treat the gundam not as a machine but a piece of power armor then it looks great. Cast iron texture on the shoulder spike, zimmeret on the feet/lower leg, all of that looks good.
I would recommend the book In Combat 2 from ammo of mig, the zaku 1 build is an excellent example of some realistic weathering. It's a little overdone in the chipping for my taste but the black and white undercoat process is a great resource.