Inferno Squad TIE Ln and Iden Versio

[fernwood79]

Here is the second in my series of Star Wars women pilots -Iden Versio, the leader of Inferno Squad, plus her TIE/Ln fighter from the Battlefront II game.

 

 

The TIE Ln is the Finemolds kit with a standard imperial paint scheme plus Inferno Squad Markings. Paints are all Vallejo.

 

 

 

Underneath Iden is the Black Series TIE pilot and the main changes involved dremelling down the suit bulkiness and chestplate after removing the chest box and adding the "O II" to the backplate. The belt is the original one with scratch built boxes and cylinder made from sheet and rod styrene plus metal sheet. Helmet and shoulder patches are painted over a custom decal template. Finally the shoulder pauldron is also sheet metal with red decal strips. Her head is 3D printed, the source of which is the Battlefront II game digital asset with a bit of work in 3DSMax. 

 

 

Thanks for looking

 

Chris

 

Next up will be Dorovio Bold!

 

[swralph]

Both very nice.😀

[Mike]

2 hours ago, fernwood79 said:

Her head is 3D printed, the source of which is the Battlefront II game digital asset with a bit of work in 3DSMax.

Nice job - I'd love to see the process, if it's not too late

[fernwood79]

1 minute ago, Mike said:

Nice job - I'd love to see the process, if it's not too late

Thanks  It's not too late to tell you about it, but I don't have any photos really. When I do the next figure I will try and take some photos and post to in-progress.

 

First you need to source the digital asset either from the game if you know how, or there are certain sites of an "east European" nature where you can find such things 🇷🇺. If you are interested, PM me and I can give you a link.  Once you have that you need to edit it so it's printable by a 3D printer. With this kind of thing it's mostly a case of extracting the head from the low-poly figure mesh and running it through a smoothing function (in 3DSMax it is Turbosmooth). This will bump up the polygon count from a few thousand to around 1M which I find is good.  Then you need to make sure it doesn't have any artefacts (holes, open edges etc) and then export it as either an STL or OBJ. If you don't have 3DSMax, then stuff like Meshmixer is good. I quite often use it after 3DSMax to check the output is the right size and fix the remaining artefacts.

 

I don't have a 3D printer so I've been using Shapeways 3D printing service using the fine detail plastic. Cost for each head is like $7-8, but after delivery and priority service that can get to around $15-$20. I try to order several heads at once if I can to get the combined shipping. Once you get the design through the automatic checks it goes for printing. Sometimes at the last minute they find an issue and you have to fix the design or decide to print it anyway if it's not a big deal.  Printing head designs from game assets is easier than when doing ones I create myself using facegen and DAZ Studio. For those you need to find the hair model separately and most designs take a lot of work to make it 3D printable!

 

Then it's just a case of painting her. I watched a lot of miniature painting tutorials on YT to get the hang of it but these tend to be for gaming type figures which are tiny. Applying the techniques directly would look OTT on a 6" figure so it was a case of toning it all down a bit and finding something that worked at that scale. I found having a wet palette helped a lot with the glazes and washes, and a good quality number 2 brush is perfect for almost everything apart from the very finest lines.

 

HTH

 

Chris

[gamblor916]

Nice work. I was also interested in your process in getting these sculpts realised.