thereasonsy

Since I feel like getting my feelings hurt, Barry, did you ever design the rest of StarTrek like DS9 or more importantly TNG?

11 hours ago, nandoninny said:

damn, Barry's story reminded me of when i worked with folks in China.  they'd wait up for me to get to the office and even though it was 8 or 9 PM for them they'd ask if i had finished my coffee before we'd get down to business.  I am glad to hear i'm not the only one with such a good interaction with folks there.  i wish i'd kept up with my main contact there.  he was always a pleasure to work with.  

I have always had great experiences working globally with China. Seems like a common theme. I am actually meeting up with one of my old vendors in Sydney of all places in a few weeks because we’ve kept in touch throughout the years. @Barrythese stories are touching and thank you for sharing. 

On 11/9/2025 at 6:07 PM, Padrino said:

Thanks.  This is what it looks like without the figure.

 

 

I used a silver sharpie as a primer and then a few covers with a black paint marker, leaving the edges so that it looked like the energy effect in the comics. Front and back. I wish I had a way of smoothing out the central area but that's outside my skillset, lol.

This has made my DAY!

9 hours ago, Ivan said:

Thanks everyone. Hopefully I'll have more to show soon.

Just modelling. For each layer, the printer will lay all the red plastic, It'll then go grab a different nozzle hooked up to the black filament and lay it down. Then a third with the white. Then it will shift the layer down and repeat. So thankfully there's no need to work out those tolerances for a press fit. I had enough trouble with that with just the ball joint tolerances.

Here's a head that I cancelled mid-print. It may make it clearer.

This is beautiful 

21 minutes ago, luke314pi said:

Shang-Chi is up for preorder!

 

 

 

This is a comics-based version of Shang-Chi. He includes a staff, nunchuck, and jumping stand. He is a limited edition of 36, and you can preorder him here: https://lukestoystore.com/products/shang-chi-custom-minimate

 

For those of you who ordered Raza, he is now shipping. 😊

Epic choice in hair! Can’t wait to get him

7 hours ago, Barry said:

The only reason why the What If set was from the Marvel Zombies episode was because it was easiest to make with minimal new parts as they were just zombified pre-existing MCU designs.  I was able to fit Scott Lang's Head's cape and jar and Wanda's hair into another tool being prepped at the time.  Anything else would not have fit unfortunately.  If we'd had full tooling, there was brief (like, 5 minute) talk that Guardians of the Multiverse could have been the set, but I probably would have made it the more unique characters from Season 1, and less episode-themed:  The Watcher, Captain Carter, the Hydra Stomper, Strange Supreme, Ultron, and Scott Lang's Head.

Soooo… the line up I wanted 😂 I hear you on the expense. Whose hair was Wanda’s going to be? 

4 hours ago, Barry said:

completely respect that decision too.  I am on record in interviews saying that I had a hard time working on this line and only in the latter half became a bit more desensitized to it.  I'm not belittling people for liking zombies and horror either, it's just not something that's for me, and when that person was uncomfortable with Penny I understood why. 

I have never been a Zombie person. It was why I was so disappointed the What If set was zombies instead of the “Avengers”. Always wanted a Captain Carter. 

11 hours ago, Ivan said:

EDIT: Sorry about the images. I haven't configured my sites for https and the board software won't let me embed http links.

'Tis the season for necromancy, right?

I just wanted to share my latest Minimate project, a 3d printed Spider-Man Minimate at 3x size.

http://minimatelabs.com/img/mmmv/20251023_spidey3x_pose1_1200.jpg

It's based on the original Spider-Man from wave 2 so many years ago.

http://minimatelabs.com/img/mmmv/20251023_spidey3x_pose2_1200.jpg

I've had the base model and a 5x version for at least 10 years, but I just kind of fell out of the printing game. I recently jumped back in with a new multi-material printer and wanted to test it out the new capabilities. The tricky thing with multi-material, is that the tools to 'paint' different colors are rather crude. It's all free-hand and straight lines. 

So I had to model each individual color. Here's the black part of the torso (in the 3d modeling tool Blender) for example.

http://minimatelabs.com/img/mmmv/20251023_spide3x_blender.jpg

I eventually figured out a good workflow with GIMP, paths, and Blender. But there's still a bit of clean up in Blender once you cut out the pieces.

I'm not sure what happened in the scaling from 1x to 3x but all the joints initially came out very loose. More than you would expect from simple material shrinkage. I had a lot of trial and error to get nice, snug fits.

http://minimatelabs.com/img/mmmv/20251023_spidey3x_static_1200.jpg

Neck joint is still a little loose, but that torso takes forever to print. About five hours. I plan to separate out the neck peg and pop it in manually. Surprisingly the head only takes a couple hours even though it has three colors and plenty of web too. Overall print time was about 20 hours I'd guess. I could speed that up by printing all on one plate now that I have the kinks worked out. 

Here's a shot of all those lovely layer lines and poor arm resolution.

http://minimatelabs.com/img/mmmv/20251023_spidey3x_layerLines_1200.jpg

That resolution is one thing that held me back. It was adequate for rendering, but you see all the facets when scaling up. I didn't want to have to remodel everything. But I've found I can selectively subsurf to smooth them out.

I'm not sure what's next. I want to see how big i can make one of these without slicing up any individual Minimate parts. But I may try some smaller projects first.

Sweet Christmas this is EPIC

On 10/16/2025 at 4:05 PM, Barry said:

I know a lot of people didn't like how he often came out.  He seems like he should be simple because he's mainly one colour, but that actually creates bigger problems. 

The cap was usually painted plastic, while the head underneath is injected.  Both use the same Pantone, but injected and painted colours will never look exactly identical.  They reflect light differently and have different surface finishes.  The injected pieces are usually more translucent and shiny while the painted ones are solid and matte.  The thickness of the plastic, and whether it's ABS or PVC can change how the colour is read as well.  If you try and adjust them to separate Pantones to force a match it actually makes it look worse.  Different Pantones are clearly more different than the same Pantone applied in two different ways.  Because of cost, we weren't going to be able to create custom mixed colours where it's a very small percent difference.

Not that it really applies to Thing, but tampo Pantones can look different than painted or injected ones too.  You sometimes see this on lighter colours that don't stamp as well as darker ones (mainly whites, caucasian fleshes, and yellows).  Often they require two or three hits to match the same quality of the same Pantone when painted.  You can even see this in some colours like reds on Spider-Man, where the stripe down his upper arm does not quite match the red of his mask.  The arm red looks darker and not as saturated.  Hitting it twice might make it pop more, but then it's hard to tampo on a curved surface, so you risk an increase in errors.

We had looked at orange tampo lines to mimic the sculpted rock texture when a wash was not applied, but that made the face stand out in a VERY odd way, which wasn't going to pass approvals.  It looked like his eyes and mouth were floating, and it made him look really clownish.  His facial features are a part of the rock formation in the comics, so unless the facial detail was also orange it was going to look odd.  I tried making the shadows of his eyes and mouth also orange, but again it looked strange when up next to the whites of his eyes and teeth.  

When we used black wash to bring out the sculpted rock details, it would only work on textured surfaces.  So, we could never apply a wash to the head to make it match the head cap because the head's smooth and more polished.  The wash just beads up or wipes away, so it couldn’t be used there.  When you wipe a wash on the sculpted parts, it finds the crevices and holds there when drying.  There's nothing on the face to hold onto, so you'd get the somewhat dirty looking darker orange head cap and the clean bright orange face.  You could try to adjust the Pantone here, but the wash is unique to each figure so it wouldn't work well.

From a cost standpoint, there’s only so much you can do at this scale and price.  Tooling a new head with sculpted rock detail might have worked, but then you encounter the same tampo problem as when you use orange lines.  The face pops when there's no black rock lines with it.  Tracing every rock line with a paint pen so the sculpted rocks match the tampo would have required a lot of manual labor and driven the cost up far beyond what would have been feasible.  At the same time, making all the body parts smooth and covering them with a full-body tampo to perfectly match the head would’ve been far too expensive.  You would have ended up with a lot of 'only on the top surface' rock detail where it fades as it goes to the sides.  There would be no way to completely wrap tampo around his hands or feet, or the head cap.

So, it always came down to getting him as close as possible within the limits we had.  It’s definitely not ideal, but sometimes we had to accept when it was good enough.  If it makes anyone feel better, I never looked at a sample of Thing and thought that it was 100% amazing.  It's what we could do with the limitations we had.  I still think the modern bulked up ones turned out well, even if they were not perfect.  Wave 82's wash to tampo ratio looked really good, I'd thought, even though the base colour of the parts to the head were a bit darker.

Absolutely beautifully explained. Hats off to you.

It was there at the Neca activation at NyCC among several other logos throughout. Could just be to tease or just to show ownership of the IP. Either way everyone I asked at Neca just said nothing to announce and that it is nothing to get excited over. 

16 minutes ago, cylonchaney said:

Imagine trying to do a Karl Malden or Owen Wilson and you can't draw the nose.   

Barry’s struggle was real as the kids say. 

23 hours ago, Barry said:

 You don't realize that some people are more recognizable for their face shape or their nose until you don't have those elements to use.

As I have been working on my own decals, I deeply feel this. Characters like Tombstone need noses and other identifying features that make them stand out on Minimate shelves. I’m honestly surprised we didn’t get an official one.
 

As for the shift in faces, boy did my wallet notice as I went through and updated every face on older mates that I could with the new face versions.  
 

13 hours ago, Barry said:

When characters appeared at multiple retail locations, they were considered the same figure.  In my tracking sheets they were listed as 'reused' characters even if they were new for that release.  (So, new for Specialty, reused for the same corresponding TRU wave).  Some ended up with small differences, like the Wolverine belt situation, but those weren’t intentional or planned running changes, so I don’t keep separate production files for them.  Similarly, I don’t log a specialty version and a TRU version as different in my own list of everything I worked on.  They're the same figure.

At one point, there was more than one factory involved, but I’m not sure how long that lasted since I wasn’t project manager then.  That may have caused differences like the Wolverine belt, but it could just as easily have been a matter of different runs done at different times.  All the source files were identical and the variations likely came down to a factory or individual missing something.  

Occasionally, sets were re-run multiple times.  For example, Deadpools Assemble (my original title was “Deadpools Resemble!” but I digress…) was produced at least four times.  Over the years, minor differences are inevitable, but I still consider them the same figures.  I understand that some collectors care about those small changes, like Star Wars POTF2's infamous long vs. short lightsabers, but from my perspective they’re all the same figures.

As far as intentional changes go, there was only ever one true running change, and I don’t think anyone has ever noticed it.  The Hulk Through the Ages set originally included Classic Iron Man’s helmet among Maestro’s trophies.  When we re-ran the set years later, the original helmet tooling was unavailable.  The factory asked to swap in the Extremis Iron Man helmet, and I approved it since it fit on the base without issue.  Since most die-hard collectors bought the first release, the revision likely went unnoticed.

 

Honestly, I’m a little relieved we never got to Eternals because I think the tampo costs alone would have broken the bank!  I know some of the post-Endgame MCU characters remain frustrating holes in collectors’ shelves, but at least we did manage the one What If? set with the Zombies from Season 1.  The only reason that happened was because most other What If episodes would have required new tooling, while the Zombies were existing MCU designs just reimagined in animated, zombified form.

As for my own collection, I don’t have any playsets or dioramas only because of the sheer size of it.  I’ve kept one of every figure I worked on, and when I had them displayed, they filled rows upon rows.  So many that I eventually ran out of space.  Sadly, I took them all down during an office redesign.  Maybe one day they’ll return, but for now I’ve shifted focus to statues in my personal collection.

When the figures were up, it was incredibly useful having them right behind my desk.  I could just turn around, glance over the rows, and spot suitable reused parts for a project without digging through storage.  Then I could easily take them out and kitbash a new figure together to make sure the parts worked without interfering with each other.  The photo I have here is the last shot I took before taking them down that I can find.  They were displayed on old IKEA VHS/DVD shelves, which I’d customized with acrylic doors for combating dust.  Since then, I’ve completely redone the room with Moducases.  For reference, there's 4 rows of figures on each shelf, so there's just over 2,000 displayed here.

A funny little side note: the reason Minimates come with stands at all is because of my own greedy need for them.  My own collection kept dominoing over, which drove me nuts.  I brought the issue up to DST, arguing that it had to be happening to other collectors too.  Since the added cost was negligible, we went ahead with them, and they became standard.

I can’t help but sing the Will this Minimate be on my shelf theme every time I see a picture like this. Thanks Luke 😂 

13 hours ago, Barry said:

I did sit down recently to draw again as a way of retaining the muscle memory.  Coincidently I drew characters from stories stemming from Uncanny X-Men #269 where Rogue is in her Savage Land attire.  These were for my own growth and maybe for a bit of fun.  They're nothing official, and nothing anyone asked me to do, so please don’t take it as some kind of return or resurrection, because it really isn’t.  It's just me daydreaming and trying to keep busy after months of unemployment.  I’ve been debating whether I should share them or just leave them be.  

Well, we are here for them if you ever decide to share. Know it’s a tough time but we appreciate you. 

If you aren’t following Barry on the gram you’re missing his cool posts about what was designed on this day! 

2 hours ago, Padrino said:

Awesome idea! Did you use a template?

 

I started off by printing off Luke’s so I had the neck piece and length marked out and then just freestyled it. The cape isn’t meant to be perfect so I just went with it. 

3 hours ago, Padrino said:

Im wiling to pay for that goblin queen cape

Not the same I know but, I made one from cutting the plastic window that came with a Minimate and then painting it black. 

6 hours ago, buttheadsmate said:

Before or after it's sold ? 

Preferably before but after works as well so I can shed more tears. Who knows maybe someone will learn how to 3d print one. 

If anyone see the baby Christopher prototype up for sale anywhere can you please let me know?  

On 9/16/2025 at 1:32 AM, cylonchaney said:

The blue is darker than I wanted. But the lighter blue plastic I had was old and brittle and kept breaking in the colour changing hardware. I put a chest sticker on one but it didn't look right. I'll have to make one custom for these guys if I want them to have muscles. I might go with the uniform on the right and just leave it like that. The guys on the left need some detail if I'm going to continue down that road. I'm quite pleased with the results of my first effort at multi-colour printing though.

The base face I modified was Wizard from our decals thread. I don't want to search through the whole thread to figure out who to credit but my gut says Dave based on the art style. If I stumble across who it was, I'll edit the thread. In any case, thanks!

 

These are beautiful 

On 9/16/2025 at 7:22 PM, Padrino said:

this is my homage to that amazing new Rachel Summers Legends figure

Sunbird

https://imgur.com/PWHG478

(I need to update my Rachel figure with those wings but I have to get it from storage first)

Wow this is beautiful 

17 hours ago, luke314pi said:

I am extremely limited by what parts are available to me in larger quantities, so that has always limited my character choices. I am happy to hear suggestions, and sometimes it does spark ideas, but unfortunately most of the time my answer is "sorry, I don't have the parts to do that". 

::Cough:: Speedball and Marvel Boy ::Cough:: who said that?

On 9/15/2025 at 5:07 PM, Padrino said:

Hi Barry,

Did you work on the Alpha Flight set? Were there any unreleased figures from that set (i.e., Talisman, Diamond Lil)? 

Also, in the Infinity War set, was that Tony/Iron Man using magic? Man, I have to look into the rewrites on that movie!

I’ve been working on a decal for Diamond Lil for about 6 months now and she’s a tough one to crack. May just stick to her Trisha look because of this. 😂

7 hours ago, Shanester said:

That Stark camo is genius!

It’s so freaking good. @Barry has done it again. 

35 minutes ago, NerdyTrev said:

Your comments put me all at sea.

I’m just soaking them all up. 

4 hours ago, Barry said:

Sorry, I'm not sure I follow.

Sorry you were ,entirely I g tooling restraints and I was curious if that is why we only got one AIM solider.