a triangle lives here

focus stack (crossbone x-2)

I'm trying a new thing! Composite photos stacked to allow the entire object to be in focus. I especially wanted to do it for the lance this guy has, but I did all of these this way just 'cuz it was fun

A navy blue robot shrouded in a cape painted with a nebula design. It carries a large lance with a gradient of white at the tip to pink to navy blue at the base.

It turns out this is easy to do!! I took 6-8 photos using my galazy s21+'s Pro camera to let me manually focus. Braced against the table, I incremented the focus a bit each photo, then took them all to photoshop to combine.[1] I found instructions online here to make a focus stack and slapped each of these together. I color corrected/whitebalanced two of them, poorly. And here they are!

A closeup of the mech in its cloak, showing off the stars and blue and pink gas clouds of the nebula The robot, dashing forward with its lance, cloak swooshing. The whole picture from lance tip to toes is in focus

This robot is the "exclusive" version of the Real Grade Crossbone gundam. I had to get this p-bandai recolor version because it had a lance, and I think the ideal giant robot combat situation is a joust. I was waffling on trying some gradients and space effects on it, but then saw this amazing space paint job[2] and it pushed me to Try New Things and I think I did good.

Uncloaked, the gundam is performing a high kick; a red-hot knife blade has emerged from the foot The robot hovers uncloaked and with its body side on; it points a large laseg gun at the camera

As an RG this one has more details, movable parts, and color separation compared to the HG kits I usually build--while still being roughly the same size. I loved building and painting with all the teenytiny parts! It was a lotta fun.

The uncloaked model robot hovvers limbs spread wide open, pointing its lance towards the forground. Its other hand has a bright pink energy effect erupting from it

The best part of this guy tho is how he's a pirate and a giant robot at the same time. That's just Correct.

  1. past me used student pricing to buy an adobe 5.1 suite. I think adobe can pry this out of my cold dead hands and I will try to run it in a VM if it ever breaks in a windows update. ↩︎

  2. I saw an earlier wip post; linking the complete job 'cuz it's so cool ↩︎