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That is looking really accurate, esp in the first pic.

I was worried the red was too bright, so I had knocked it down a little in the second one. I brought it up a little more today.

Also started working on the teeth. Not done yet. It's really hard to paint the teeth because I can't really get into a good position to hold it. I'm trying to hold it at the exact right angle with my left hand while painting with my right and it gets heavy fast when you're holding it one handed at a weird angle. It doesn't help I am really nearsighted and need to have whatever I am painting 4 inches from my nose.

He’s looking horrific, which is to say, screen accurate.

Looking great , matches close to what I see in the pics. Did you consider using fluorescent paint on the reds? Then when the lights go out he would glow .

Don’t take this the wrong way, he Almost looks like he’s eaten at a bbq restaurant without wearing one of those plastic bibs .

That is definite a post-ribs smile.

Looking really impressive

 Ouze wrote:
It's really hard to paint the teeth because I can't really get into a good position to hold it. I'm trying to hold it at the exact right angle with my left hand while painting with my right and it gets heavy fast when you're holding it one handed at a weird angle. It doesn't help I am really nearsighted and need to have whatever I am painting 4 inches from my nose.

I was going to ask how much of a bear it is to manhandle this dude into painting position

All the same, solid progress is solid. Red glow looks good, glad it won't be as intense all over the beast, makes it a little less of a slog.

It might be taking a lot of work, but the results are worth it. Very cool looking!

Well, it has been... some time, as we say at work. Part of that was because it was very, very tedious work, but mostly it was because I injured my left wrist so that added 2 weeks where I couldn't paint (or more accurately, hold the thing I was painting).

But, it's done!

Here was the story of my life for the last few weeks:

Every day or every few days, I would paint for an hour. First I paid down some watery mechrite red, then I touched it up with a little watery blood red. Then when it dried, I would wash it with Army painter red. I was doing little strips here and there for what seemed like forever - very tedious work. Then I took a picture with my phone, edited it, and drew a checkpoint with my finger.



Here is a particularly productive patch of AP red:



I originally did the spines in a dark purple drybrush (looked good), then a drybrush of a lighter purple (looks good), and then a wash of Army Painter purple to tie it together (TOO FAR). The AP purple dyed the spines a pretty bright purple. I wish I had tested on a single one first, oops.



Depicted here is where the spines were at they had just had base drybrushing. I knocked them back a little with a 50/50 purple and black wash after this, then touched them up with some red to better tie them in with the rest of the body. Shin Godzilla's spines would light up purple before he used his atomic breath\laser tail type stuff at several points, but I wish the effect had been a little more subtle on the finished model. Still, I really like how the purple was executed even if it wasn't what I wanted to do conceptually.

Here it is just about finished:



I tried hard to give him the small, mean eyes that he had in his last form - the "googly eyes" the early forms had didn't work super well for me for obvious reasons \



Now to post a showcase thread and call this one done.

One weird issue I had: I couldn't get it to be as flat as I wanted to. TRhe final stage for me is always coating it with Future floor polish (clear acrylic), letting it dry, and then dullcoting. The Future is to protect the paint job from handling - some of the Minitaire ghost tints I use to shade with will wipe right off if not protected. I've done that technique on many models, both previous godzillas. For this one though... it stayed much shinier than expected.

At first I thought maybe I hadn't used enough dullcote, so I gave it a few light coats. That didn't really fix it. Then I did some googling, and thought maybe I had given it TOO many coats, and it had "stacked up" and become glossy. So, I redid some test patches with Future again, and this time went very, very light on the dullcote - was still really shiny. I waited, did a few more light coats, waiting a day in between to check the shininess, and the best I could get is what you see here: kind of satin. I even wondered if maybe I had a bad or mislabeled can so I switched to paint-on dullcote, but no.

I mean, I can live with it, but this is a weird problem I've never had before.

 Snrub wrote:
Can your printer really work constantly like that for a month without burning out, so to speak? Because that seems like a massive strain to put on it.

To circle back to that, this definitely put some wear on the printer. After this was done, I printed a baby groot for someone, and right after that, the printer stopped working well - it wasn't feeding enough filament and I was getting awful, airy, under-extruded prints and failures, lots of clicking noise from the extruder - the thing that feeds filament into the printer.

Usually that is a clogged nozzle. You can try fishing around in the nozzle hole with an acupuncture needle to clear a clog, but bro, a nozzle is like 40 cents if you get them in bulk and I am not about that life - I swap them and throw them out. Annoying, but I have a dusty house and a dog so I expect it to happen sometimes.

Anyway, I swapped the nozzle, and that didn't fix it. Next I replaced the bowden tube, which was about $1 or so - the bowden tube is a PFTE tube adapted from common plumbing stuff, I think. In 3D printing it is used to guide filament from the extruder into the hot end - it can kink up, and carbon can build up on one end. That also didn't fix it.

Since the extruder was clicking so much, I decided to replace the extruder. I've ran it really hard, so it's gotta have burned out, right? Just replacing the stepper motor would be about $17, but the printer I had - an I3 Mega - had been upgraded right after I got it to the I3 Mega S, which has a better extruder. The newer extruder would allow me to print flexible resin and was just in general better. So, $30 bought me the Titan extruder knockoff and some other upgrade parts. That... also didn't fix it.

At that point, I replaced the entire hot end. This is the part that the nozzle goes into - it's a heated block that melts the filament along with a thermistor to allow the printer to measure the hot block temperature. This is a $13 part that technically didn't cost anything, since my printer came with a spare hot end. At this point, it's sort-of, kind-of printing again - I'm not having print failures, but the test prints look bad. I probably need to calibrate the new extruder. These are all recent developments - I did the hot end replacement last night. So I really need a day off work to figure this out.

but, bottom line, running this printer almost nonstop for super long times definitely kills some parts. Most of the parts are modular and very cheap; I don't think there is anything on the printer that can break that costs more than $30 tops and most parts are much cheaper if you get them off ebay or aliexpress from China. That extruder I bought that didn't fix the problem is something I was going to buy at some point anyway since it makes it into a better printer, but I was waiting for something to break - I don't like to mess with a fruitful status quo. So, all according to plan.

I dunno if we're supposed to save praise for the showcase thread, but literally awesome work, dude. That red is right on, if as labor intensive as possible, even before adding wrist injury to the equation Love the eye as well.

Thanks for sharing another mega print build with us!

Thanks! Unless the Legendary Godzilla is released, I think this is my last one.

 Ouze wrote:
Thanks! Unless the Legendary Godzilla is released, I think this is my last one.

So Ghidorah? Mecha-Godzilla? Rodan?

Just because you are “done” with the big G does not mean you can stop.

Alternatively, now would be a good time to start a scale model of Tokyo...

I would definitely do a Mecha Godzilla 2 if it was made available, but I have not seen one. I mentioned the Legendary Godzilla because I know for sure Dopepope did one, and I don't know why it wasn't released. I have to assume it will be at some point.

There is a Rodan:



but I think I am going to pass on it. I am very fond of Rodan but man, he is posed with his wings spread out and that is just... it's just going to take up too much real estate, I think. Where do I store it? Scaled correctly, I think his wings would be like 3 feet wide.

There is a Mecha Ghidorah, but I don't like how Mecha Ghidorah looks. His wings look dumb. Sorry not sorry. Actual Ghidorah, though, I like... it depends on the model.

I think I am probably going to do finish the Dropship next, and after that... maybe some 40k stuff. My printer is a little screwed up right now - since replacing the extruder I am getting really poor print quality and I need to figure out how to calibrate it. Unfortunate, doing so correctly involves math and that is killing me. I'm also assuming it's the extruder and not something else. I am thinking about just replacing it rather than figuring it out, but if I replace it and the next one develops a similar problem...