Project: MS-07B3 Gouf Custom Part #3

So battle damaging the Gouf Custom. The first big thing I decided to undertake was the physical damage, the scratches, the cracks, and the bullet marks. The bullet marks were first on the list. I wanted to emulate the sort of damage that the Gouf custom would have suffered from its actions in the 08th MS team series. What kind of damage am I referring to? Well let’s take a look..

So, first notable sort of damage the Gouf Custom suffered in the series: Bullet damage! Yes the majority of those bullet shots were against the shield. That doesn’t matter. The shield can only take so much damage and then the shield will break. Now I know I know, they didn’t animate the damage in the series to save time and animation budget because anything that is one screen needs to be drawn. With all the moving around the Gouf Custom was doing that would mean they would have had to animate the battle damage in each frame. In a major multi-million dollar animated movie, sure they can commit the time and efforts to animate the damage. In a 13 episode series they have to deal with the budget constraints.

What other damage did it suffer? Well how about smashing through the ceiling of a building? Granted the damage from such an act would amount to some minor scratches on the armor, it still provides damages. In the case of the model it provides texture that could be spots for weathering pigment to gather providing additional shadow and coloring.

Oh and there is also the damage from the close range fire it took, like when the Gouf Custom was charging the EZ8 to point blank range. Yeah, that’s going to inflict more damage not too dissimilar to the earlier bullet damage, though in this case the damage would be greater. 

So what have I worked on today? The bullet and explosive damage of course. So here is what I did to achieve the damage from bullets, minor explosive and the environmental scratches and such.

First thing I did was use a 1/2mm drill bit in my pin vise and drill out bunches of shallow holes in the shield, the shoulder armor, the right fore arm, the helmet and the left leg. Once the holes were drilled I came back with my exacto blade and stressed the edges of the holes by carving at them with the tip of the blade. With the holes widened and stressed I then came back and carved out further deformations from the bullet marks to show the explosive damage as well as the impact damage. I also used a 3mm drill to create a couple larger depressions to show damage from larger weapons, perhaps mobile suit sized grenades. This was basically the same process as the smaller marks, with the difference that once I used the 1/2 mm drill, I came back with the 3 mm drill and re-drilled the space and then used the exacto blade in the same way.

So with the physical work done I made use of some Tamiya black paint to fill in the deformations with just solid black. Nothing special.

I gave the paint a good 25 minutes to dry and then I came back with a 0/5 brush and used Tamiya Titanium Silver to paint in the deformations leaving some edges of black.

I went too deep on a bullet mark on the side of the leg and actually went through the piece.  I decided to run with it and made a second hole on the back side of the section to make it look like the shot has passed right through. I them came back with the black paint and painted a line of fluid leaking out of the hole. I used the Silver paint to touch out the edges of this mark but not cover the leaking fluid.

Almost purely on a whim I decided to go with the oil splattering as blood effect from when the Gouf attacked the second GunTank. This was achieved in a couple steps, one of which is covered while the second will be covered in my next post on this project. The first step was to use the black paint and make the oil splatter marks across the head of the Gouf, it’s chest and it’s left shoulder. I tried to emulate the pattern as it appeared in the anime. Moderate success I’d say. Next time, my first effort using weathering pigments.