Materials Testing
May 31, 2010

One of the great things about the Blender community is they like to give stuff away. Blender is an Open Source program which means the code and application itself is freely available. This engenders similar acts from Blender users. Many people will make their models, animation rigs, textures, etc. available to anyone. I spent some time looking for a good plastic material and came upon the Blender Open Material Repository. I didn't find a plastic that I liked, but some of the materials made for interesting Minimates.


Gold


Hot Metal


Ice


Soap Film


Mixed Metals


Honey


Red Tinted Glass

You'll notice in some of the transparent images that I didn't model the interior of the torso block. It's on the task list.
 ADV Films Extraction
June 22, 2009

For me, the most frustrating thing about promotional Minimates is that they aren't always formally announced. Companies would contract with AA (or now DST) to produce a special Minimate just for them. AA/DST would do the manufacturing, but the company would then distribute however they saw fit. Sometimes promoting it, sometimes not. In some cases it takes a random Minimate fan to discover them and share their existance with the community.

That was the case with the last three-inch promotional Minimate, from ADV Films. There was a post on the old AA message boards that basically read, "Does this look like a Minimate to you guys?" Sure enough it was, and it came packaged like no other Minimate before or since. Oooh, a teaser.
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