Cody's Coop » Making of Yuna - Modeling, Garage Kits, Anime & Mecha by Cody Kwok

Making of Yuna

Making of Yuna Copyright (C) Cody Kwok

The primary reason I was drawn to this kit is her double gun. Somehow, you can always make cool poses with ‘em twins. The sculpt itself is also nice, with a pretty good rendition of her semi-realistic face and the nice assortment of details on her costume. Added with healthy dosage of hack-n-slash, comes this “Yuna in John Woo land” piece

	I actually kinda like her original standing pose; standing sideways looking cool is always better than standing straight like a piece of wood. But given the sculpt itself is a very good rendition of Yuna, it would be great if she can be even more ass-kicking, especially since she does all these cheesy sentai-like poses in the game.Here’s a list of things I changed, with the picture showing the original version: (1) Her head turns more to her right. To give her more attitude, I also have her head tilt a little to her right. I also gave a little extra hair strands on the front. (2) Her left shoulder is sawed off and reattached more backwards and outwards. (3) Her colorful braid thingy is (accidentally) broken and reattached at a floating position, (4) The right shoulder is changed to lift her right arm, so that she’s pointing the gun forward. It’s a bit tricky here because I had to make an armpit for her. (5) Her long braid on her back is heated and twisted. (6) Her waist is reattached so that her back is bending backwards. This also expose her midriff more (yum). (7) Her twisty pattern on her chest was molded on her exposed chest area. I sanded it off and made a brass floating version. (8) The left arm and hand are also attached at a different angle than the original. Her arm band had to be given more volume also. (9) Her pretty half-dress is moved a bit backwards. To fit the change in the dress, there was a lot of test fitting on the waist “scarf” and the belt. The metal rings which link the belt parts had their centers molded solid, which I drilled out. (10) The scarf is heated to fly more. However both strands broke during bending (it’s just too thin!), so they’re both reinforced with brass wires. (11) All 4 of her shoe laces were molded to her boot. To give her more details and dynamism, I sanded them off and made new floating ones out of plastic sheets. (12) Both of her ankles are reattached at a tip-toeing position. (13) Her left thigh is reattached at a more outwards and backwards position. (14) Her left knee is bent at a 30 degree angle. (15) Her half-dress is super heated and bent to an almost 70 degree angle. This was actually quite difficult because the resin simply could take so much stress, so some parts cracked and I had to fill those.
	The beginning! The dress was superheated and bent to the desired angle, but it simply won’t take the abuse and cracked. Ah well, some Aves Sculpt will patch it up, though there’s more work to resculpt the wrinkles. The shoulders get new angles. The red stuff is automotive glaze putty which is kinda like Tamiya except tons cheaper.
	Yuna’s taking shape and I’m trying to find the right way to dice up the waist. I thought I could simply modify the existing junction in the waist, but it turned out to be very unnatural; therefore I made another splice. Yuna’s pants is rather interesting with that groin belt…
	To smooth out the transitions from clay to body Mori Mori was used to patch things up.
	I had a hard time deciding the leg angles, since I was unsure whether I wanted a forceful leap from Yuna or a flowing/flying freely approach. The latter won out eventually. I also miscalculated the ankles’ angles and here it’s quite unnatural, and had to be fixed later.
	Yuna gets a little more exposed tummy in her new pose. The dress was a big hassle. Since I changed its angle, I have to create new places to attach the dress to the body securely, and also needed it to fit her belt and waist “scarf”. I decided to leave the scarf’s sculpting until I’ve got everything painted; it doesn’t really work without the right side of the banner attached to Yuna’s body. I made a mistake in thinking I can have Yuna’s mini-cape be attached after I painted her body. I wanted to paint it separately, but since I changed the head angle I had to glue the head to the neck. To attach the mini-cape, I split its front so that there’s an opening. I thought by heading the cape a lot I can make the resin very bendable and fit the mini-cape in, but in the end it was a failure and scratched a lot of parts. I ended up splitting one of the “arms” of the cape, paint the dang thing, glue to the body and putty the broken junction.
	I didn’t really plan on replacing the insigna on her chest, but somehow I realized that I can get more clevage if I made the insigna float like the way it was in the game. So I cut and sanded the molded insigna off.
	Yeehaa, here comes Yuna without bra! After a lot of puttying and seas of Surfacer, the mess above is finally fixed
	I went back and forth on what to create the chest insigna with, and eventually settled on brass sheets. I couldn’t believe how tough they are! The installation was quite hard (including me losing the whole cut-out insigna ^_^;;), but if it were some other more fragile material such as plastic sheets, it’d have been even more difficult.
	After a few nights of fitting and painting, the final dress-belt-scarf assembly had to be done. It wasn’t really too painful, but the fact that I tried to get more details by emptying out the centers of the belt’s “rings”, the belts became incredibly fragile and broke on me twice. These things are incredibly hard to glue back together!When the belt became less of a problem, I glued the scarf on and sculpted its continuation on top of the dress. At this point I’ve also removed the mold-on shoe laces.
	The swirly “magic aurora” thingy was something I wanted to do but didn’t really know how to do it right. I also wanted to add some lights inside to make it glow, but after I did it there were two problems. First, I didn’t make the base large enough to hold batteries, hence the kit pics looks kinda bad with the wire showing. Second, the clear acetate doesn’t diffuse light well, so it didn’t get a glowing effect. Ah well, the swirly thing serves its purpose of hiding the support rod, and that’s all I’m asking for.
Finished! Even though I thought a 1/10 kit is easier to modify than say a 1/5, I still went through a lot with her. Mostly it’s in getting the details right, but it still felt she’s taking forever. In the beginning I was planning to get another one of her to make another cool pose… after all this hassle, I’m pretty sure I have to be happy about this one and move on! I hope you’ll like her too.

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Making of Yuna

Making of Yuna Copyright (C) Cody Kwok

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