This news is strictly not G.I. Joe related; but perhaps one day it will be. Hasbro is giving us an inside look at their new Photo Real Technology.
With this new technology, the action figure characters are more like their celebrity counterparts in real life. Although the faces are not super realistic as the offerings from Hot Toys, it’s a huge leap forward without having to empty your wallets.
Dwight Stall (Hasbro Marvel Senior Design Manager): Once we have a 3D sculpt that we’re in love with, that matches our design spec, it gets turned over to the model shop. They will cast it, which is a process of taking the files, growing the files, taking those pieces, casting them in rubber molds so that we can make duplicates.
Sam Smith (Hasbro Star Wars Design Manager): So a lot of it kind of relies on on-set photography, especially for kind of getting some of the character likenesses. Really just being able to capture every angle of the character, every angle of the costume, and really being able to accurately recreate that in a digital sculpt.
Currently, Hasbro’s Photo Real Technology is being used on Marvel Legends, Star Wars Black Series and the upcoming Power Rangers Lightning Collection. We hope to see this same tech on future G.I. Joe figures as well.
You can read the full article on Business Insider.
What do you think about this new technology and its uses for G.I. Joe? Leave a thought on the thread associated with this news post. You can also find a video of the process, after the jump.
Photo Courtesy: Sister site ToyArk
- Black Series Tarkin 35
News Post: An Inside Look At Hasbro's Photo Real Technology
I say embrace the technology.
This may be the best way to get excellently sculpted likenesses of the characters in the Snake Eyes movie.
Even better, Hasbro could offer this to consumers as a mail away for generic troops in the film.
Buy five 6 inch black series Snake Eyes figures and with 20 bucks and S&H you get yourself as an Arashikage ninja.
It could reinvigorate the field of action figures as we know it.
Cobra troopers, Vipers, Greenshirts, Hydra troops, Asgardian warrior, all with your head on the body.
There are some ways to do this already but the results are shoddy and incredibly expensive to say the least.
Corporations need to embrace technology sooner rather than later to improve their operations and efficiencies.
Imagine if they did the original card art photos onto the sculpts of ARAH figures (if they throw that era an occasional bone)
Sounds neat theoretically, but the figure of Ant Man doesn’t even look like Ant Man. They need to improve the paint apps if they hope to improve the likeness as well.
There is a printer near me, who prints on flat plastics. I have had him do some testing printing on LEGO bricks for me. It was $20 for 1 square foot. His printer cost him about $50,000, but is made for large format printing, onto any flat surface. The printer adds toner from the left side on one pass, and then the right side on the next pass. The art I took in was flat artwork.
No doubt in the near future, I will be able to take in a 3d object, with a 3d wire frame matching that object, and the artwork to match up to the 3d, and have it printed. I really do look forward to that day.
Yeah, face printing tech doesn't do it for me. Or rather the printing style used to face print that Hasbro has used. The technique's strengths are it's own weaknesses.
Besides the business angle, which I will mostly ignore. (Hasbro is leveraging the Face Printing tech to sell repacks of older figures and to anchor the price to the modern MSRP for short term gain)
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Traditional paint jobs have dimensions and result in crisp mono colors and their own textures (for good or bad). Notice how all the comic book and animated based Marvel Legends almost never use the printing technology used for Face printing tech for textures and the bodies.
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The printing technology used has massive limitations in that the resulting paint job has no texture so when printed it looks like you tattooed some ghetto 2D image fanart on figure. To compensate for this, the figure must require very detailed sculpt work, hence it's effectiveness on the face.
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This is however VERY limiting in that you are now dependent on the photo and video of that actor, and any sculpting details missed in the sculpting phase affects the final product and the Face Printed head significantly. Also, when there is no sculpting, the figure suffers HEAVILY.
Pay attention to how ugly the Face printing tech was used to print the mud on the Vintage Collection Mimban 3.75 Trooper. No texture results in a very flat looking "mud" texture.
Stormtrooper The Vintage Collection
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Most people use figures at elbow length. Face printed tech uses a micro detail printer that's not fine enough to hide the individual pix elated paint at elbow length, which is where most figures are played or handled at.
In addition to this being an issue, chipping the surface removes all the paint, it's very difficult to repaint and repair. Did I mention it looks VERY flat?
I'm not as technically-aware as you are, and I've seen some bad photorealistic sculpts, so what you're saying makes sense. I will say, the latest few waves of SW Black series figs (6 Inch) have had very good likenesses. TLJ Rey compared to TFA Rey is night and day. The Hoth and Bespin Leias are really nice, as is Bespin Han. I wish they'd go back and redo Jyn Erso and Cassian, because those headsculpts leave a lot to be desired. I think the Captain Marvel figs look pretty good too. Maybe it's because the paint apps are actually pretty good on those. As for 3.75" figs, I don't know how good it would look.
The Star Wars Black Series faces look good, but however, the Marvel ones usually look really glossy and quite off (just look at 10 years Tony Stark).
Yeah, I've only really noticed the Captain Marvel figures, mainly because I couldn't figure out why they made that one where she's holding a cat or whatever. The face looked like Brie Larson, almost eerily so. It's like one of those bad photoshop jobs where someone puts one head on the wrong body, but in this case, the body is a plastic action figure. I haven't seen the other ML figs.
Stormtrooper The Vintage Collection
Keep reading: An Inside Look At Hasbro's Photo Real Technology - Page 2
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