Anyone into gunpla - Japanophiles unite to share tips on painting our toys (GUNPLA IS FREEDOM)

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Been absent for awhile, but this bad boy just showed up.
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READY
 
A Clockwork Soybean said:
Has anybody done anything with Bionicles or similar figures?
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Bionicles was cool when I was younger. Definitely surprising it had its own lore and everything. I think most move on from Bionacle to Gunpla. The models change in challenge but the autism never leaves.
Why? Are you into Bionicles?

Troonos said:
Bionicle is Lego and is for autistic 9 year olds.
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I view it all like this:
HOBBY GRAPH.png


I find this to be the definitive graph of inarguably autistic hobbies.

Hot Dawg said:
[snip]
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SOON
Looking forward to it
 
A Clockwork Soybean said:
Has anybody done anything with Bionicles or similar figures?
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Bionicle is fucking 20 years old now yet if you buy a set used or new 50% of the time if it's not from 2008-2010 It'll be the most solid shit ever. I don't know what the fuck Lego made the things out of and there's strange black marks that appeared on some of my old ones i dug out of a box a while ago but whatever unholy arcane plastic it is they're made of it's showed barely any signs of aging over the span of 20 fucking years. Dust and the weird black dirt shit were probably just due to where they were stored and it cleaned off pretty easy. Things look like they did the day i made them ages ago, shit ain't natural. I've seen people do some cool shit with their parts, including custom paintjobs. I don't trust myself enough to do that with my parts so I'm going to eventually probably try and delve into resin repro-casting some parts for the sole purpose of trying something like that.

A few years ago I got a shitload of used lego for cheap over the span of several months and made what was essentially an upscaled version of an old Bionicle set I liked. I've been kinda brainstorming on some Ideas involving 3d printed parts I found but out of nowhere used bionicle has just spiked in price like everything else during lockdowns. There's still some sane listings but when you got people selling a single lego part that's not even rare for 300-800 dollars yeah something's gone a bit fucky. I'm still trying to work out how some people make extremely detailed builds so easily sometimes where they give their creations shit like layered tubes without it just exploding on them. Finding parts for my current ideas been a bit of a pain in the fucking ass because the bulk used lots are being scalped half the time or just completely nonexistant for specific colors or shapes I need. There's suddenly 0 bulk listings of black axle pin hinge things despite them being really prevalent like only a year ago. There's people charging 5-50 dollars for just a single one of the fucking things though.

Context on the black pins: Lego's technic sets' friction connector parts and rods used to always come in black until they suddenly decided to make them blue and red like sometime over a decade back or so. Nobody liked it. Every once in a blue moon they release a set with the black pins again, or one somehow ends up in the mix of blue and red via some arcane manufacturing error. The Red pins actually can be helpful if you want to make something with a consistently red color scheme, although from my recent used lego purchase I noticed Lego's red is really weirdly inconsistent in coloration over the years by very small increments.

This is an extremely rambling ass heap of text but if You want Bionicle shit your best bet pricing wise is finding a bulk lot of used lego. Scalpers have recently decided to start hawking bionicle more than before used and new. Wait for an opening and get some good shit like the OG makuta or some rahi like Muaka and kane ra. Those two spiked in price to 100-ish recently but they've occasionally fluctuated back down to 50 before the scalpers buy up those listings and add to their hoard of fucking used lego of all things.
Throwbots/slizers, while technically not bionicle, still run pretty cheap and are fun if not somewhat janky designs that follow a similar design aesthetic.
 
I had a ton of Bionicles as a kid (they’re still in my parent’s house somewhere) but looking back objectively, the only waves I think actually look good were the OG Bionicles, the underwater wave and the gladiator wave, because this is the only time they bothered giving each character an actual unique design instead of just being literal palette swaps. The first wave of Bionicles were a masterclass in creating unique, distinguishable character silhouettes using an extremely limiting build system with few unique parts.

I think the biggest thing Bionicle had going for it was the concept in the early years, of these robots made for a purpose long-forgotten reverting to a tribal society on a tropical island. It’s an aesthetic that’s very rare in media - Horizon Zero Dawn is the only thing I can think of that’s kinda similar. And while the actual Bionicle plot is kind of nonsensical due to being written primarily to sell toys to 10 year olds, I think there’s actually room to tell a more serious story with its concept and setting.

I’ve actually been meaning to learn Blender for a while to make 3D printed figures/statues based on Bionicle designs, but I’m lazy and learning software is hard.
 
Gar For Archer said:
I had a ton of Bionicles as a kid (they’re still in my parent’s house somewhere) but looking back objectively, the only waves I think actually look good were the OG Bionicles, the underwater wave and the gladiator wave, because this is the only time they bothered giving each character an actual unique design instead of just being literal palette swaps. The first wave of Bionicles were a masterclass in creating unique, distinguishable character silhouettes using an extremely limiting build system with few unique parts.

I think the biggest thing Bionicle had going for it was the concept in the early years, of these robots made for a purpose long-forgotten reverting to a tribal society on a tropical island. It’s an aesthetic that’s very rare in media - Horizon Zero Dawn is the only thing I can think of that’s kinda similar. And while the actual Bionicle plot is kind of nonsensical due to being written primarily to sell toys to 10 year olds, I think there’s actually room to tell a more serious story with its concept and setting.

I’ve actually been meaning to learn Blender for a while to make 3D printed figures/statues based on Bionicle designs, but I’m lazy and learning software is hard.
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They managed to give Gali (the girl toa) a feminine figure by inverting the legs, putting pins in her hips, and putting a socket block on the front of her torso. I somehow only recently realized this when looking at the sets recently years after the fact. Whoever designed the Toa Nuva didn't notice this and as a result that version of her just looks like a generic pallete swap of the other guys in those sets, despite all the toa nuva also having unique builds. The bionicle reboots first wave has really nice set design as well in terms of sillouettes.they clearly went for a look that combined the original toa and toa nuva and they did it extremely well in my opinion. The few creatres they did were nice too. Not the ones that were from the second/last year of it but the spider fucker and the scorpion with a skeleton face. Only issue I had with them were they were strangely more to scale with the original early bonicle sets than the ones from the reboot.

The plot of the original was actually mostly serious from what I remember, save for like the movies where they sound like anime dub protagonists and the wii game. Also the characters are highly advanced cyborgs, not robots. There ARE robots though and some of them are made from the corpses of the dead lego bionicle men and women. That twist didn't come till later in Bionicles run but other much more morbid shit happened in the early years. Shit got real fucking dark for a series used to sell lego sets to kids.
Finale of the first years plot in the flash point and click adventure game.

Back to Gunpla though. Within the last few months there were suddenly gundam kits everywhere, and then nowhere. Target by me has hobby nippers on clearance that I have never seen in the store before they went on clearance. There were just a whole load of them tossed in the electronic section with clearance tags on them. I have no clue what the fuck is going on with big chain stores right now.
 
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A Clockwork Soybean said:
No, but Bionicles are what I have immediate access to. I have a huge collection of parts sitting in box in my attic. I thought I may as well try and do something with them instead of just letting them gather dust in the dark forever. Would I be better off selling them to autistic collectors?
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If you got the parts then use them. Even if you don't use them to make nightmarish Lego creations there's several really cool custom mods to other shit I've seen the parts used for.
 
A Clockwork Soybean said:
No, but Bionicles are what I have immediate access to. I have a huge collection of parts sitting in box in my attic. I thought I may as well try and do something with them instead of just letting them gather dust in the dark forever.
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Do us a favor and buy a High Grade Zaku or RX-78-2. Build it. Take the head of the HG Zaku or RX-78...and put it on a Bionicle.
There. Now it'll be thread relevant and we can see what kind of wonderful Franken Bionicle-Gundam creations you bring to life. I'd actually like to see that, and @Troonos won't want to snap.

Also
Would I be better off selling them to autistic collectors?
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YES. It's WAY better to sell off that stuff. To be fair a lot of posters here should be selling their gunpla, too, since I've seen the literal walls of unopened boxes a lot of us have, to the point where homies look like they live inside a warehouse. But as for Bionicle, I'd say definitely sell it if you don't have kids or nephews to hand it off to. You'd be surprised the kind of money you can make. It's genuinely the best option.

Also make a Bionicle-Gundam maybe, just one gunpla kit and one Bionicle. You can sell the rest.
 
EyelessMC said:
Do us a favor and buy a High Grade Zaku or RX-78-2. Build it. Take the head of the HG Zaku or RX-78...and put it on a Bionicle.
There. Now it'll be thread relevant and we can see what kind of wonderful Franken Bionicle-Gundam creations you bring to life. I'd actually like to see that, and @Troonos won't want to snap.

Also

YES. It's WAY better to sell off that stuff. To be fair a lot of posters here should be selling their gunpla, too, since I've seen the literal walls of unopened boxes a lot of us have, to the point where homies look like they live inside a warehouse. But as for Bionicle, I'd say definitely sell it if you don't have kids or nephews to hand it off to. You'd be surprised the kind of money you can make. It's genuinely the best option.

Also make a Bionicle-Gundam maybe, just one gunpla kit and one Bionicle. You can sell the rest.
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I don't view it as a better option to sell shit off especially during this corona time where more than likely it's just gonna get snagged up by the career scalper accounts that have been sending everything online into a state of hyper-inflation price-wise during Corona times. It's just scalpers buying off scalpers and hoping they can find a sucker or a scalper to pay the 40 copies they got of anything. Once this corona shit is over prices are gonna go down and even with corona in play this game of price gouging chicken eventually caps at scalpers listing shit at 800 dollars at which point they just sit in a state of in some dirty ass storage warehouse unit somewhere. This applies to literally anything, gunpla, bionicle, model paints, weird cheapo shit like promotional lint rollers, the possibilities are endless and probably automated RNG algorithm based on the scalpers end. I've been making due with what I can get in terms of gathering supplies for Ideas I've had involving basically anything because literally everything in existance I end up realizing I need is being scalped online right now to some degree. Respirators are still a fucking no-go even a whole god damn year into corona so if I manage to get the tools that require a respirator to use I'm going to have to just live with inhaling the cancer fumes.

On another note, this just reminded me that I still have my Zakus from like the 2000s. and though they aren't painted they're pretty solid even to this day. Somewhere deep in the basement or some shit I actually have a big one that IS painted I got used off some guy back when I was a kid for like 20 or 30 dollars. It was a really sick paint job, too. Kinda worried it's possibly been like just devastated from being in a dusty ass basement for way over a decade now. Considering how a while back I dug out my old bionicle sets from there and they were fine save for some strange dust and grime that came off easy enough, the same should be true for the Gunpla, hopefully. I should remind myself to check for that sucker is next time I Have a chance to go through old boxes.
 
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My younger brother has a ton of bionicles and those bitches can hold UP.
TLDR: The family ordered one off ebay for him, some blue one idk what the name was, and it was on the way over to the house until the mail truck actually caught fire. I'm dead serious and he has a letter from the post office explaining what happened. Surprisingly enough, his bionicle survived the mail truck fire, didn't melt or anything and ended up getting what I'm assuming are smoke damage marks? Some of the blue pieces of plastic have black spots on it but it actually looks pretty fucking cool.

However on the subject of gunpla, so i'm fresh into this series as a whole and was curious if there are any kits for beginners. I'm super into Char's red comet, but yea I have 0 idea how to navigate the gunpla hobby. My brother and dad put together model kits once in a while, but they haven't done one for maybe 2 years now? The closet experience I have to any type of customizing is OOAK dolls. So if anyone can offer help it would be greatly appreciated since the hobby store downtown has a HUGE selection of gunpla's. As in, a whole fucking WALL that stretches to the FLOOR full of them.
 
KaibaCorp ToeSucker said:
My younger brother has a ton of bionicles and those bitches can hold UP.
TLDR: The family ordered one off ebay for him, some blue one idk what the name was, and it was on the way over to the house until the mail truck actually caught fire. I'm dead serious and he has a letter from the post office explaining what happened. Surprisingly enough, his bionicle survived the mail truck fire, didn't melt or anything and ended up getting what I'm assuming are smoke damage marks? Some of the blue pieces of plastic have black spots on it but it actually looks pretty fucking cool.

However on the subject of gunpla, so i'm fresh into this series as a whole and was curious if there are any kits for beginners. I'm super into Char's red comet, but yea I have 0 idea how to navigate the gunpla hobby. My brother and dad put together model kits once in a while, but they haven't done one for maybe 2 years now? The closet experience I have to any type of customizing is OOAK dolls. So if anyone can offer help it would be greatly appreciated since the hobby store downtown has a HUGE selection of gunpla's. As in, a whole fucking WALL that stretches to the FLOOR full of them.
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I dove head-first into RG (Real Grade) and hated it because of how small it is, but depending on your hands and patience it's not so bad. High Grade (HG) is usually what people buy and recommend because it's got that perfect balance of price and build quality, and there's tons of them you can buy from just about every iteration of Gundam.
Master Grade is bigger in scale and more complex, but depending on the kit it's not that complex overall. Once you build one kit you get the hang for it fairly easily.
Perfect Grade is "Big Dick Town". If you can build a Perfect Grade (PG) then you can work in computer repair or construction. PG kit building should be on a resume.

If it's Char's Zaku you want and you're looking for entry level kits, then I'd suggest the Entry Grade RX-78-2 and the HG Char Zaku (this one, not The Origin one, although the Origin one is supposedly better to built and looks cooler). It's annoying that the Entry Grade (new line of kits made specifically to be so simple they can be built by 12yr olds) is twice the price it originally was, but $16+ isn't so bad for a kit with that level of detail and posing potential. I have one and it's great. The Zaku's gonna give you more bang for your buck.
In total you can buy both for under $50, just ten or so dollars cheaper than a single Master Grade (MG) kit. . If you like building after that, see what else you want to try.

Newer kits from Bandai (Gundam) are made with English in the manuals, not just Japanese, so the instructions are better. However it's more about following the pictures themselves which are always clear (mostly).
Also I suggest a cheap all-about model kit building tool set like this, which is less than $14.

So altogether for about $60, the price of a videogame, you get two kits and the kit building tools for whenever you want to build other kits in the future.
 
EyelessMC said:
I dove head-first into RG (Real Grade) and hated it because of how small it is, but depending on your hands and patience it's not so bad. High Grade (HG) is usually what people buy and recommend because it's got that perfect balance of price and build quality, and there's tons of them you can buy from just about every iteration of Gundam.
Master Grade is bigger in scale and more complex, but depending on the kit it's not that complex overall. Once you build one kit you get the hang for it fairly easily.
Perfect Grade is "Big Dick Town". If you can build a Perfect Grade (PG) then you can work in computer repair or construction. PG kit building should be on a resume.

If it's Char's Zaku you want and you're looking for entry level kits, then I'd suggest the Entry Grade RX-78-2 and the HG Char Zaku (this one, not The Origin one, although the Origin one is supposedly better to built and looks cooler). It's annoying that the Entry Grade (new line of kits made specifically to be so simple they can be built by 12yr olds) is twice the price it originally was, but $16+ isn't so bad for a kit with that level of detail and posing potential. I have one and it's great. The Zaku's gonna give you more bang for your buck.
In total you can buy both for under $50, just ten or so dollars cheaper than a single Master Grade (MG) kit. . If you like building after that, see what else you want to try.

Newer kits from Bandai (Gundam) are made with English in the manuals, not just Japanese, so the instructions are better. However it's more about following the pictures themselves which are always clear (mostly).
Also I suggest a cheap all-about model kit building tool set like this, which is less than $14.

So altogether for about $60, the price of a videogame, you get two kits and the kit building tools for whenever you want to build other kits in the future.
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I'm new to gunpla and gave up on RG too. It just feels too insubstantial, and when you finish building the model, it just seems so tiny. You have to use a crab claw death grip to hold the pieces when sanding off the nubs, so your hand feels like death after a few hours.

PG is prohibitively expensive.

So MG is just perfect. Affordable but large enough to feel worth it. Full inner frame. Tons of detail.
 
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