One day, a lone little Cobra SNAKE was on patrol in the featureless wastelands of Cobra Island:
When all of a sudden, his sensors heard a sound:
He suddenly found himself face to face with a monster of a robot! He searched his memory banks to see if he could identify it. The data came back "Affiliation: Dinobot Name: Sludge Hostile: Yes"
What was our little SNAKE to do?
That's right! Run, little SNAKE, run!
With 20 oz. soda bottle lid for scale:
This was a proof of concept, printed in the filament (yellow) that happened to be in my printer. I wanted to see if I could reduce a 3D model of a GI Joe vehicle down to a tiny size and still have it be recognizable. I chose the SNAKE because it is the smallest thing I will most likely be printing, so if it turned out reasonable, I knew the other vehicles would be fine. I painted it white, gave it the black details, then painted the red triangle on the face, lower abdomen, and "DANGER" on the chest. Unfortunately, you cannot make any of these out very well and I cannot zoom in enough to get them. I then gave it a wash of gray to bring out some of the detail. It's blobby in a few places, but held the detail remarkably well for its size.
Every since they came out in 2003, the "Smallest Transforming Transformers" (called by fans "World's Smallest Transformers" or "WST") have had a special place for me. I loved having tiny versions of the TFs I had as a kid, even if I had to go the Third Party route to get some of them, such as the Dinobots.
A big part of the draw for me is the world-building ability. You can have a massive battle in a really small space with them, and they scale well with the city-bots, such as Metroplex. They're also close to the HO scale of model railroading, so I can pick up scenery and bits and pieces from it to fill out a dio.
I'm also always looking to combine my GI Joe collection with my Transformers collection, as has been seen in my MegaBlok GI Joe customs partnered with Masterpiece Transformers. So I've decided to take it a step further and start adding GI Joe to my WST collection, calling it my WSGIJ collection. I already have Micro Machine and model railroad soldiers I've painted into various Joes and Cobras (I've posted them previously), so it's time to start adding vehicles. Currently, I'm pulling models from the various libraries that offer them, but there are some vehicles I will have to design myself if I want to add them.
Stay tuned for more...
