How to Get Started Customizing, Figure Repairs, Other Advice

Testors has discontinued Model Masters paint as of (I think) April 2020. Why it's taken a year for anybody to really notice... I don't know. But Hobby Lobby currently has it on sale for $1 a bottle. It's time to go take advantage and stock up before it's impossible to find. It's on the model car aisle.




Thanks to the massive clearance, I am finally going to try out a bunch of the colors they make. Most of their colors are tailored to automotive stuff, like leather, muscle car engine colors, transparent red blue and green, and a bunch of colors for military model kits. I have only depended on the Model Masters Flat Clear Acryl over the years... opting to use much cheaper Delta Ceramcoat acrylic paints for colors. The flat clear acryl protects my paint from getting scratched or chipped, and provides a fairly eggshell/flat finish... albeit a little milky. However, it's the only brush-on clear I've ever used and I've been using it for like 20 years. I'm looking forward to trying the MM colors and seeing why exactly a little bottle of acrylic paint would cost 4 to 10 times as much as the same quantity of Delta Ceramcoat. I'm hoping that I don't have to use any clear on top at all...

I bought at least 20 bottles of various colors and some clears and mailed timone317 a few duplicates since I know he loves the MM paint colors. 

If you're a first time buyer (like me), make sure you read the label and just buy the acrylic paints (there's blue on the label). The enamel paints (I think they had red on the label) require paint thinner to clean your brushes and enamel paint is only appropriate (usually) for use on metal or wood if I remember right. So unless you plan on painting Hot Wheels or a little tiny picture frame, stay away from the enamel paint. Enamel has a bad habit of never fully drying on plastic and remaining sticky forever. 

Ascat I don't 3D print, but I have seen the results of a lot of it and talked to a bunch of people about it. Someone else might chime in with better first hand info, but I can give an overview.

For 5 inch scale (or even smaller scale), 3D printing with PLA or ABS is too rough for characters. You end up with pieces that have to be sanded to remove the little grid bumps. Some people give their prints an acetone bath (I believe they put it in a bag or jar with the gas that liquid acetone gives off), and that softens the exterior kind of the same way the blur effect works in Photoshop. It's basically a loss of detail by melting the surface. PLA isn't toxic, but printing with ABS is highly toxic, and has to be done in a ventilated area. The benefit of ABS is that ABS plastic is a very durable plastic; it's one of the main plastics used in car interiors. So the underside of your center console glove box's lid is almost certainly ABS, as is the upper dash (the piece closest to the windshield), as well as the inner fender liners of the wheel wells and a bunch of other pieces. Printing replacement pieces for your car interior out of ABS is pretty reasonable. But most people I know with 3D printers print some of the most useless junk out of PLA.

Resin printing is highly preferred for small scale prints, and the quality can be absolutely incredible. It has some extreme downsides though. I have a co-worker who does it and he told me all about it around a year ago. He's the one I am waiting for to print my Gregory. One downside is that uncured resin is so toxic that you have to have ventilation and you have to wear gloves, a respirator, and goggles when messing with it. And the clean up process is very wasteful and takes a lot of time. So while you can basically just randomly decide to set up your 3D printer to print something out of PLA before you leave to go to your job and you can come home to a finished print ready to mess with, you can't just do that with a resin printer. Working with resin is like working in a hazardous material lab from what my co-worker has told me. But resin prints don't necessarily need any prep before painting, and the surface can be extremely smooth and beautiful.

In my personal opinion, 3D prints using PLA or ABS are not suitable for action figure collections if you're wanting to print characters. You could use them to print some larger stuff or stuff that doesn't need to be very smooth, like maybe some accessories. Resin prints are fantastic though... as long as you are just printing little statues.

Hopefully that's a decent overview... that's reasonably accurate.

With regard to the models online, a lot of them are so polygonal and lifeless that I don't personally think they look good in collections. Part of that is due to people ripping them out of Playstation games and similar. They end up looking VERY stiff and chiseled looking.

The guy that designed the Gregory STL I bought does pretty good work. His Gregory is definitely his best though.

He has two Oolongs that are pretty good, but I can tell just by looking at them that they will have some bothersome features when resin printed. The one without a hat has some strange looking human hands with long forearms and his nose is abruptly extruded from his face, so it won't look good when viewed from the side. The pants are a bit simplistic and melted looking compared to something hand sculpted. His DB one in the hat has better clothes, but the nose isn't right either. Still, for $6 each and a resin printer... you can have some reasonably good Oolongs.

I think this person did a much better Oolong though. He has a very good looking nose. It's free too.

Models like this will look melted when printed.