A few years ago for Christmas my parents funded a new 3D printer for me. I've posted many times about my 3d prints before, but those were using an FDM style printer - that is, one that robotically squirts out plastic one layer at a time. It works fine, but it has lots of downsides, including maintenance, the layer lines visible on the finished print, and of course, the long time to print.
I finally decided to upgrade to a resin based printer, and ended up with the Mars Pro 2. This printer has been fantastic - not only for the crazy quick speed, but how its worked perfectly without maintenance and the insane print quality.
In the Anime and vTuber scene, many popular characters have Nendoroids made out their character. Nendoroids are kinda like Funkopops in the way that they're hyper collectable. Except they're cute, customizable, posable, and way better quality - so basically nothing like Funkos. Over the years I've bought a handful of the official Hololive Nendoroids, for characters such as Oozora Subaru, Haachama, Inugami Korone, etc. When I started watching Aurelia Cassiopeia, a small indie vTuber, I decided it would be a fun project to try to create a 1:1 recreation of a Nendoroid for her character, box and everything.
The thing about Nendoroids is that they are poseable and come with many pieces that can be swapped out, including different facial expressions, different arm and leg pieces, etc.
I started in Blender by just seeing if I could make the basic shape in a single pose - it's already a pretty stylized toy line and I needed to make sure I could get something that looked proportionally convincing.
Once I had that, I carefully chopped it up and made the swappable pieces. I sent them to my printer and test fit them, and the worked great.
After that I painted all the parts, using acrylic paints and paint pens:
I hadn't learned about airbrushing at this point, so the paint job was by hand. I later made another few Nendoroids including a re-print of this one, and the paint came out much better.
Instead of hand painting the eyes, I learned how to make custom printed decals. You can get "water slide" decal paper that works in a normal laser printer or ink jet, which gives clear decals you can melt into the surface of the print with some decal fixing chemicals. It's really cool how you can cut them out, slide them over, and they'll just bond to the surface. This allowed me to get the eyes and facial expressions perfect.
I measured and studied the boxes and graphic design from real Nendoroids and photoshoped my own. One of the hardest things was replicating the vacuformed container they ship in. I looked into purchasing or building a vacuform, but it was impractical. So instead I opted to use use more papercraft skills. I got some clear plastic printer paper - the kind that was traditionally used for overhead projectors, and formed a custom set of shells to hold everything in place. Below you can see the final decals applied as well as several alternate face places:
As mentioned, Nendoroids are highly customizable - the hair actually comes apart in two pieces and the face plates can be swapped out and snapped back together changing expressions. Not shown above al the alternate leg and hand poses I created as well.
You can see a glimpse of the boxes I prepared in the background here:
Now that I had the Nendoroid made and packaged, I needed a way to reveal it in the community. On a whim, I decided to plan a fun video - there's a really cool store in Flushing Queens that sells all kinds of imported Japanese toys. I decided to go there and place the fake Nendoroid on the shelf along side it's real peers. I then filmed a video of me shopping & "finding" the fake Nendoroid and buying it. I also played a few claw machines and actually won - which made it into the video, see below:
With the video produced, it happened to coincide with her birthday stream, so I shared it then. Here is her live reaction seeing it for the first time:
Later that year I had the opportunity to go to Offkai, which is a vTuber convention hosted in San Jose California. Of the many vTubers attending, Aurelia Cassiopeia was there so I decided to make another Nendoroid to gift her, as well as another completely different character, which I'll take about in another post. Here's the complete in box set of four I've built:
In the above picture you you can see the the bottom row are the two Nendoroids I made for Aurelia, the one on the left was the original I made for the video, and the one on the right was my second take after I had learned airbrushing. It came out much better, and I plan on making more bootleg Nendoroids in the future. Below are some pictures of the Nendoroid posed with the real ones.
