15 replies to this topic

[Oboe Shoes]

Alright, since my old thread is both cluttered and dead, I'm just going to make a new, cleaner one for the stuff I've made.

So far I've got Rocket Racer, Veronica Voltage, their respective cars, and the Small Mobile Laser Cutter. Nothing that hasn't been made by other people, but I'm still very proud of my custom Racers minifigs, and I strive to recreate both the RR and Racers vehicles as close to the game as possible, and that includes using the period-correct colors. (Gotta love hunting down Old-Grey pieces on Bricklink...)

I'm currently working on the Large Mobile Laser Cutter, and I plan to eventually make some more RR buildings, and the rest of the LR1 boss-cars. (I have the remains of some old recreations of Redbeard's and Basil's already.) And if i ever get around to it, I'd love to recreate the LI1 Information Center someday..

Anyway, pictures:

Rocket Racer:

Spoiler

I'm really happy with both the minifigure and car for this. I've wanted a Rocket Racer set since LR1 first came out. The decals were taken from LR1 screencaptures and photoshopped to be a bit more presentable. Unfortuantely, the slight difference in color is a bit more apparent in the pictures than in person, especially on the helmet.

Veronica Voltage:

Spoiler

I really like this one too. I think the decals came out a bit better, especially on the helmet. The car is a nice little model too, though I'm not entirely sure what they intended the headlights to be in-game, so i mainly ended up following Jamesster's LDD take on it.

Small Mobile Laser Cutter:

Spoiler

This one's entirely scratch-built, just based on screenshots from LRR. Note that it's based on the ingame version, not the high-res model in the manual. They're actually a bit different. It actually works great as a toy, and fits in right alongside all the official Rock Raiders sets. Although, as you can see in the second-to-last image, there isn't very much clearance between the driver and the laser, but if you lean him forward slightly, the entire laser will spin around 360 degrees.

 

Rocket Racer and Veronica Voltage Decals:

http://dl.dropbox.co...All Decals.docx

 

The decals I created for my minifigures in a Word Document.

Well, that's it for now. More to come in the future, hopefully. Comments or questions about anything are welcomed.

[JimbobJeffers]

These are really nice models. Rocket Racer just looks epic, I look forward to the other Lego Racers bosses!

The only question I have is how you built your SMLC, as that and the LMLC are the only models I'm missing for my building instructions elsewhere on this forum. Although it's probably not a simple thing to post...

[Oboe Shoes]

Here's the instructions in html format. Minus the RR-specific decals and whatnot, of course.

http://dl.dropbox.co...er Cutter].html

You can add this link to your topic in addition to your own version if you want, just give credit and all that.

I'd also like to point out that I kinda had to take some liberties on the brick that holds the dish to the rest of the laser, as the thing that's used ingame doesn't actually exist. It looked like 2 1x2 slope bricks fused together so that they only had one stud. Kinda neat.

[JimbobJeffers]

Thank you very much for that! I've added it in. I didn't realise you could have nice shading on the models, I must have a tickbox checked off somewhere...

With regards to the laser, is it not just directly attached to the 1x2 hole brick? It's irritating that the manual version is different from the in-game one.

[Tracker]

Gotta love that water cooling for that laser.

[MrElephant]

Where did you get your decals from?

[Oboe Shoes]

I made them myself using some decal paper. The decals themselves were mostly screengrabs directly from Racers. (This was a bit before we found out we could view the textures directly by replacing the splashscreen) Then I just edited them in photoshop to make them completely flat and straight. The helmet decals were actually taken from some old concept artwork of Rocket Racer and Veronica Voltage, so not much editing was needed there.

The decal process I used has impressive looking and durable results, but it can be very time-consuming, messy, and frustrating. When working with decals as small as minifig parts, they're very likely to break apart, fold, and all sorts of nasty things. As great as these final results were, If i ever do something like these again, I'd probably end up going with a custom sticker kit. Much less painful, and it'd still look nearly as good.

[JimbobJeffers]

About Veronica Voltage's car headlights, are they not this piece?

Then again, all recreations I've seen use the headlights you've used.

[Oboe Shoes]

They're whatever these were supposed to be.



There are actually two models of Veronica's car in the game, not including the playable one that's made brick-by-brick. There's the one the NPC ghost veronica uses, and then there's the one in the picture, that's only used during the cutscene where you unlock her car. There are several differences in the car's design here. Grey element instead of white, black radiator grills instead of chrome, light blue instead of standard blue, no tail-lights, and the headlights are more elongated and match the part you showed more closely than the playable version, which is smaller, and similar to the faucet piece I used. However, none of them are an actual piece, as they all have that odd cone-shaped piece for the headlight, and no clip at the bottom. I was considering putting some transparent yellow studs in the headlights to make it look a bit closer to the yellow coloring on the front of the in-game lights, but in the end I thought that it looked better without them.

Also, I'd just like to point out that the version of her car used in that one cutscene actually matches the color scheme on Veronica's clothes. Grey, Light Blue, and Black. Perhaps they changed it later on, and never updated this model?

[MrElephant]

So this is the type of paper you are talking about for example?
Link:
http://www.hsn.com/p...51-001b2166c2c0


And also what do you mean by custom sticker kit. I looked around but I haven't seen any of those?

[Oboe Shoes]

Nah, that's the kind of sticker paper I was thinking about switching to.

I used "Inkjet Clear Water Decal Paper" from Papilio. Here's a picture of some of my leftover paper, and some of the stuff you need to apply the decals to the minifigure.

Spoiler

As you can see, a lot goes into these things, and I printed as many copies of decals as I could to use as backups. (And some alternate designs for the helmet decals took a while to find one that wouldn't completely wrinkle or break apart)

An upside to using these kinds of decals, is that they can be printed on transparent backgrounds, (note the faces) which can really make things look better, as you don't have to match the background color. Unfortunately, most printers don't actually print the color white, meaning anything that's white on the decal will be printed as transparent. And since almost all of the decals for the two minifigures had white in them somewhere, I had to use solid-white background paper for most of them.

And while these do have very nice final results, and the decals end up looking like they were actually printed on the minifig, If you want to do this kind of thing yourself, I'd just go with the sticker paper. With that, you just print out your decals, cut one out, slap it on, and you're done. Compared to this process, which takes forever and involves messing with mounting fluid, and all sorts of crap. (And even though the decals I used are durable once they've dried, I'd still consider the stickers to be a better alternative if you actually want to frequently use the model, because if anything happens to your sticker, you can always just slap on another one.)

[JimbobJeffers]

Are you involved in miniature wargaming by any chance? Because I use transfer sheets on my models, and was wondering how much more difficult this decal process is. With the transfers, it's a simple dip in water for 30 secs, and slap on to dry.

[Oboe Shoes]

It's similar to that, you still have to dip them in water, although this requires a bit more trouble with the mounting and setting fluid, as these aren't sticky on their own.

[JimbobJeffers]

Ah, thank you. I have some decal paper and have ordered RR's parts so will be able to test this out soon

 

Is there any chance you could share the RR and VV decals you used please? I've tried creating my own from the game assets but, as expected, they're rather pixelated.

[Oboe Shoes]

http://dl.dropbox.co...All Decals.docx

 

This is a word document containing all of the decals that i used. I used a word document so that the printer would not alter the scale of the image to fit the page, and you can easily adjust the scale in the document.

 

The images are currently at the scale I used them at, but you may wish to adjust them slightly yourself if you find they're not fitting for whatever reason. I suggest making a bunch of copies of the decals you want to use before printing them. Get as many tries as you can out of a piece of paper. The faces are also designed for transparent paper, so you'll probably want to do those on their own.

 

As these images are scaled down from thier originals, I might eventually post each decal as a raw image. You can still scale most of them up without the quality degrading anyway, but for now, enjoy,

 

Oh, and something I forgot to mention. The helmet decals are... a challenge. They will not go on easily in the circular shape. If you refer to the pictures of the finished product, you'll notice I cut Veronica's helmet emblem out of it's circle. I strongly suggest doing this. However, the shape of Rocket Racer's made cutting it out next to impossible without making it too small to stay together. I eventually went with the hard edged shape I supplied here, but feel free to try other things, as you can see it did wrinkle slightly, even in that shape.

[JimbobJeffers]

Ah, thank you very much for uploading these Oboe I've always found round decals an issue, normally I find it a case of cutting into the decal from different corners to create a cross and folding that over, although that can make it overlap.