asgardianboy wrote:Thanks to everyone involved for your insight, that Tropic Thunder flick, which I wasn't aware of, being the most precious!! OMG!!
- the ADD Toys War Wolves body: as far as internal proportions go, there is something very wrong about this body, and it is not only the heads being way too big... It is the legs. Way too long and thin for a dude of this caliber. Don't you think guys? Just look at the body as a whole on one of those pictures and you'll see.
BTW: can anybody report on colour matchability of this body with common headsculpts? The Tom Cruise is clearly paler than the WW body. Even the original Wolverine head is not a perfect match (too yellow wrt the body).
- TBLeague in general: even if they have come a long way on male bodies (the only iterations I have witnessed, I got too late to the party with female bodies), I would only consider the latest entries as more or less realistic. I mean M34, M35 and the 2 M36s. From there backwards, I find them lacking even when compared to older entries such as Hot Toys Hell Boy, which in my view still is breathtakingly realistic and a benchmark for seamless bodies. Then, there are other issues that seem to be unsurmountable, such as nonexistent nipples, long-term durability (lower than it seemed, by recent accounts) and above all, overall body colours. Not that I am an expert, but after some years loosely monitoring these things, I still have to see a picture showing a perfect match of a Phicen male body with an off-the-shelf head sculpt, Phicen bodies being way too rosy to match the yellowish skin tone headsculpts usually sport.
I am still waiting for TBLeague to release another milestone fixing these problems and enter a new era. I could use the M33 (for its arms) and the M34/M35, but not until the fix skin colour (which they don't seem to be inclined to do). Meanwhile, and luckily, other players are certainly hitting Phicen hard with nice innovations: this ADD Toys body is way more realistic than any of Phicen's attempts, and the painted details only add to its superior quality. Unlickily, very wrong internal proportions keep me from picking it up. I am dying to buy seamless bodies, but I won't until they are more mature.
- Edation body: I had missed this one! I can't afford it, especially in the light of bad reviews, but in my view, this is the way to go. No visible ankle/wrist articulations is the grial, not a doubt about it in my head. Needless to say, bendy hands have always been the way to go for me too (all those replacement hands in HT figures... :-( ), me hoping that better sculpts and engineering might help bendy hands to become more easy to pose, and above all, realistic when bent (they are not yet). Alas, durability concerns are certainly scary. Losing a whole body because of a single finger's rubber cover breaking, would be too much to swallow. On the light side, the benefits sound like a wet dream: poses with bent feet (if shoes are flexible enough to allow this), any hand pose achievable (for increased expressivity), no seams in sight... wow......
I do hope Edation further iterates their bodies. And if anyone in the room can shed more light on these, please do!
Finally, I'd like to call your attention on this body
https://bbts1.azureedge.net/images/p/full/2015/12/WOB10010_i.jpg
Has any of you tried it? How good was skin colour match? Is there an actual paintjob on the seamless arm sleeves? What about articulation? And durability?
ADD - The legs are long, possibly too long. They certainly do appear too long given the way they end: with this type of (unusual) ankle peg and this type of footwear. If the foot began just where the rubbery skin ended, it might look closer to natural. I did pick up an extra parted-out body to experiment with and can confirm this. It is difficult to put together any workable alternative to what they have done, and the practical one (extracting the ankle peg from the footwear and finding feet that will work with it) results in an equally elongated look. Not to mention the ankle pegs sticking out like a sore thumb (even more than the wrist pegs do). The length of the overall legs (legs+ankle pegs+feet or shoes) certainly does not help the body's stability and balance. The limited articulation and limited ability to hold poses remain very annoying. Like I said, if only TBLeague could apply this type of paint work (but more complete) onto its existing bodies (though these, too, could be improved -- as long as there are no steps backwards), we would get something better in the realm of seamless figures than we have had so far. The Tom Cruise head was not selected because of matching the body's skin tone closely -- it was the most convenient head to try at the moment to check whether the head sitting lower on the neck would improve the slight giraffe neck and baloon head effect we seem to have with this set.
I was discouraged by the reviews from picking up the Edation body. It does look great in principle, and if that were a TBLeague product with a stainless steel skeleton and the fairly hard-wearing silicone rubbery "skin" (really, "flesh"), I would. That said, perhaps I'm jaded, but I think real seamless wrists and ankles would be too limiting for many practical purposes, and it may take a long while before a major company invests in that. What I mean is, you'll be committing to a base body on which you will probably have no way of applying gloved hands (there are removable gloves, but few and far between, and will they fit the seamless hands?), or most types of footwear (unless they decide to under-size the feet; the current TBLeague male feet, in particular, are near impossible to fit into sixth-scale footwear designed to take entire feet). So, in essence, you would be looking at a body that is stuck being an artistic nude or a scantily-clad beach (or whatever) bum/bunny. Nothing wrong with that, necessarily, but it does limit the potential applications, and therefore arguably the potential profits, of the company that would make them. I think it would be neat, although I would wish it lent itself to greater customization. And let's not forget that those bodies still wouldn't be completely seamless, unless they came with a seamless head. Then you will be stuck with whatever head sculpt they chose. As far as head sculpts not matching the TBLeague bodies, there are plenty that do and plenty that don't. If nothing else, you could pick up some TBLeague head sculpts (granted, there are far more female than male ones in that category). A range of other companies head sculpts would also fit, although it may make a difference when they were made. For example, newer HT and DAM heads seem to be getting paler in color, but older ones would be closer to the TBLeague male "suntan." Jiaou does better with its wider range of skin tones (by contrast, TBLeague has settled on two for the females and one for the males -- excepting that M36 version), but even those have their limitations, and some are substantially different from what they advertise (most notably the "black" which is at best medium tan). Look around the
Clothing TBLeague Seamless Bodies thread or others on this forum to see some examples -- though not all the head sculpts used were necessarily chosen to match perfectly (I know that in my posts, I try to change up/rotate head sculpts so things don't get too boring, and that often means not worrying about a precise skin tone match). (That thread also has the ADD seamless body with a different head in a recent installment.)
It might help if you provide the model number of that World Box body. I think I have it somewhere (it's not their newest), but it would be a while before I can check. If I recall, it is quite good, like most of them. The muscle bodies (which have less articulation as they prioritize look over poseability) are the most durable ones, and in my experience the World Box bodies that allow attaching/detaching arms at the shoulders do so a little too loosely -- but that observation is based on a different model that did not come with seamless arms options. These more slender models with detachable necks, etc, are generally decent base bodies, allowing for more articulation, but they too can have a higher center of gravity (or maybe it is just density/weight) making them potentially unstable. Anyway, I'll look for it before I comment further.