3D Prints, Painted Models, and New Doom Monster

Here's the stuff I've been working on over the past month or so. As always, this is a crosspost from my personal website, https://hydromecha.website/

Transformers Legacy G2 Jazz Shoulder Adapter

This is a simple adapter I made to mount Jazz's cannons on his shoulders I modeled in Blender and 3D printed. You can get the .stl file on Cults3D.

Dragon Turtle

I printed this model over a year ago and finally got around to painting it recently. Pretty happy with how it turned out. Download link to the model is listed on the art post.

Kaiser Hedd Kannon Scratchbuild

I made this guy for Robot Day! This was my second piece to get frontpaged, and also got an honorable mention. It was pretty fun putting it all together, definitely gonna be doing more scratchbuilds in the future. I need to record my process for one of these to make it into a video or something later.

Surprise Elemental

This funny fella is another monster for the same Mod the Snowdemon (posted with last month's update) is part of. Still gotta render out the sprites for it.

Other Projects

I got caught up with some other stuff so I wasn't able to mess with the website much. I do want to get it working on more displays, but it isn't too big a priority for me. I've made a few small edits for the Hazardous Materials script (see previous updates for more info on that comic) but I need to get cracking on the chapter 2 script this month. I was busy painting those other models so I didn't get a chance to work on my ever-growing backlog of Transformers customs. Hoping to get at least one done this month, but we'll see.

Crossposting from my personal website. Check it out at hydromecha.website.

Website Updates

Made some changes to the website to hopefully optimize loading times a bit. The "monitor" border image has beens shrunk down slightly and split into four different pieces, the static textures I added with the previous update have been cropped/reduced in resolution significantly, and the sidebar buttons now have their highlight variants preloaded (this is done by having 0px x 0px images on the page).

The backdrop image has been made slightly brighter so you can see a bit more of the seafloor environment.

I still need to go through everything and make sure it plays nice with other window/monitor sizes. Right now everything is set up with absolute pixel dimensions so it looks good on my computer, but as you may have noticed already, it doesn't really look good if you aren't using a 1080p screen with windows at full size.

I also moved the copyright message to the bottom of every iframe page, which is why I had go through and update pretty much every single page on the site.

Doom Monster Model

This is the Snowdemon, a monster for a Doom wad I'm making with some friends. The Snowdemon has a pretty nasty blade for a hand and spits out fireballs in volleys of two, angling its second shot upwards. We're mostly making/gathering resources currently, no word on a release window yet. We've all got other things going on on top of this, so it'll take a while. The next monster I'm gonna be working on is called the Surprise Elemental.

Hazardous Materials Comic Update

Hazardous Materials is a comic I've been slowly chipping away at. There's some more info in previous posts on my website. I recently finished the chapter 1 script and have also been working on various character designs/sketches, pictured below. Expect things to look different in the actual comic. I definitely want to change some things with the designs or generally refine them more. To avoid spoilers I'm only gonna show the major characters that appear in the prologue. Check my website for the full res sketches.

Background

Every character in Hazardous Materials is named after, resembles, and retains the properties of something inanimate. The protagonists are Asbestos and Coal Dust, hence the name of the comic. Asbestos and Coal Dust work for Platinum, gathering important pieces of literature for the Rockopolis Archive. Asbestos hates her job. Coal Dust seems alright with it.

Asbestos

I want to have every character have a unique eye and pupil shape. Asbestos's pupils are made of vertical lines since Asbestos is a fibrous material. I've also been messing with different hairstyles for the character. Asbestos used to have lines running along her body to make her look like she's made of fibrous stuff, but I didn't like the way it looked. Maybe if I have an extreme closeup somewhere it'll be visible then.

Coal Dust

Coal Dust's pupils are based off of hexagonal Carbon rings found in Coal and a bunch of other compounds that have Carbon in them. Coal Dust is made of particulates suspended in the air so she has to wear an exosuit if she doesn't want to be dissipated by the wind. Other characters made of similar fluid stuff like liquids will also be in funny suits.

Gold

Gold is Platinum's assistant. Gold's mouth was sealed shut in a recent welding accident. You'll find out why that happened in the prologue. The characters in this comic don't actually need to eat or breathe. They can see, feel, and hear, but can't taste or smell. They get energy from Money, which nobody actually knows the origin of.

Platinum

Platinum's pupils are designed to resemble the crystal structure of Platinum and her hair tube things are supposed to look like ingots. Platinum and Gold were initially designed by a friend. There'll be other characters also designed by friends that you'll see later.

Other Projects

Last time I said I was working on some more Transformers customs. I did get some progress done on them this past month, but I still need to finish them.

I also got some good progress on painting a 3D printed Dragon Turtle model I've been putting off for nearly a year. Expect that and maybe one of the Transformers done by the end of August.

Just updated my personal website with a total overhaul to its design. See the screenshots below for a before & after or see the website firsthand by clicking here. All the new assets were made using Blender. The website is designed for desktop displays, so it probably won't look the best on mobile. I'll need to go through and try to optimize things better later. Right now the site uses a few 1920x1080 renders for things that I could probably shrink down or crop better so they'd load faster.

Before

After

Crossposting stuff from my personal website, not including some more website-specific things. You can see the full contents here: https://hydromecha.website/#6/4/2023

Cursed Watch Story

I recently finished a short story for a writing contest I'm holding with some friends. Each story in the contest has to include a cursed watch that can grant you something instantly, costing you your time somehow. You can check out what I wrote on my website here.

Generic Alphabet Minis

I needed some generic miniatures for a tabletop game I'm gonna be GMing, so I made these alphabet minis using the Tye Spices font from Font Monkey and Blender. You can find the files on Printables, Cults3D, and Thingiverse.

Future Projects & Other News

I've got some more custom Transformers parts and paintjobs in the works. I've done a custom part for Beast Wars Wolfang as well as a Marvel paintjob for Siege Megatron. One thing I'm planning on doing is turning Earthrise Airwave into Cybertron Metroplex (with some artistic liberties, of course).

I want to get back to painting things this month, whether that's Transformers customs or some other models/scratchbuilds I've been meaning to finish. I've also been putting off actually rigging/posing that Hydromecha model I posted to my website a couple months ago. I'll try to get that done for the next month's update to my website so I can finally replace that old model/render on the About page.

Updated my personal website with some projects I've been working on. Major ones are the Tankman action figure I did (which you can just go see on Newgrounds anyways) and the Doom mod I contributed to that recently released. Check it out here: https://hydromecha.website/#5/7/2023

Updated my website to show off some stuff I worked on last month. Check it out here: https://hydromecha.website/#4/2/2023

Here's a couple pics from the post:

Got some news on Hazardous Materials (comic I'm working on) plus some other stuff I've been doing on my website here: https://hydromecha.website/#3/5/2023

If the 3D printed action figure stuff I'm doing goes well I might try making a Tankman fig for Pico Day.

Last time I made a news post I teased a comic called Hazardous Materials. It's still happening, but it'll be a while before I release the first chapter. I've got some more info on my website here: https://hydromecha.website/#2/3/2023

Just pushed an update to my personal website that includes some new pages for the comics I already have on there, plus a tutorial on making basic vector speech bubbles in Krita. You can check out the tutorial directly here.

I posted this on the main page of my website, but I have some more info I wanna add on here. I recently started working on a new comic called Hazardous Materials that I plan on uploading to my site once I get a few pages finished. I'm mostly using it as a means to get better at drawing overall and I'm aiming to get a new page finished every 2 - 3 weeks. I've got one page done so far which you can see below as a sneak peak. The main characters here are named Asbestos and Coal Dust. You'll have to wait for more pages for more context.

But wait, there's more! I've been making biweekly posts on my company site describing mechanics in Tablespess, our homebrew TTRPG. You can check that out here.

That Froz Challenger comic I've mentioned a few times before is still something I wanna make, but it's gonna be a good while till that sees the light of day. I'm working with a friend on that and we're probably gonna do a short side story/pilot(?) first to figure out a good workflow. If that turns out well I'll put it up on the Goblin Base website, but there currently isn't any ETA on it.

I've got a Thingiverse account now! I've uploaded a few models to it already, and plan on making some more things to print after I re-learn CAD. So far there's the ocean base addon and chair monster models I've posted here plus a little monowheel robot. Making articulated action figures of Froz Challenger and other characters is definitely a long-term goal I have in mind. I also wanna dabble in making some custom parts for Transformers figures.