12/19/2024 Merch: Iria Drama Books, Lorna Mouse + Monitor Figures, and Milletian Figures

I'm excited to be able to say we got our hands on 2 of the iria drama books not too long ago. While this batch of merch was honestly interesting for many reasons a lot of people seemed particularly interested in these being translated. I'll be sure to post translations here as I find time.

In other news we picked up a Lorna mouse and a set of monitor mascot figures. I'm not entirely sure how Ryu wants to split these up but I'm happy with anything regardless.

Speaking of Ryu she actually won an official milletian figure way back in the day for a contest and we've been looking for more like it ever since. She managed to find a couple for pretty cheap on an auction website so now we have two more of the figures, I'll be sure to keep you all updated on what these become.

07/08/2024 Merch: Tarot Cards, and Music Box.

We recently got our hands on a collection of official Mabinogi Tarot Cards released for the 20th anniversary event in Korea! These were released to celebrate the Astro Talent announcement and they're so good! The quality is honestly top notch and I love the details on them. I am a little sad we didn't get a card for Ruairi or Tarlach because it would have been cool to see the original trio. However I also noticed we got a Merlin and not any of the other Aces. Apologies in advance this is going to be a LONG image. I've recently been made aware that this image is remarkably blurry if viewed on Chrome. I have no idea why this is or what's causing it, but it can be viewed on Firefox just fine.

Of course I understand these images are kind of small and hard to see in detail, I do have plans to either get scans or at least some better images so don't worry I am thinking about these things.

The cards also came with a couple bags, which; of course they did. It's Mabinogi, everything revolves around bags. Jokes aside, these are actually pretty nice! I kind of wish they stuck with calling Astro "Star Seeker" because I think it sounds really cool.

Aside from that, it all came in this super slick box, I really love the design on this. As usual with website image hosting like this, the image displayed here is only 650x366 the actual image itself is 4000x2000 or so and can be viewed by just opening the image in a new tab. It kinda sucks but as I get better at this whole website thing I'm hopeful I can make this easier to look at.

In addition we also got a really cool music box, it plays Kristell's theme "Song of a Black Rose" I personally really like it.

I've gone ahead and attempted to find a way to host this video, so hopefully this works; again new to the whole indie website thing. Sorry about that.

10/14/2023 Goddess Statue Printing!

As you know my wife and I love to collect Mabinogi merch, but there's not a lot that really speaks to us here in the states. Most of what's available from the NA merch shop isn't exactly that interesting and importing goods all the way from Korea can be expensive, especially when we're forced to shop on a lot of 3rd party auction sites to find the merch people are putting up for sale. Given my background in 3D modeling thanks to years of engineering school, and my wife's background in art we have worked tirelessly to make our own Mabinogi statues, figures, and other various goods. One such project was to print out a Goddess Statue often seen when entering dungeons in Mabinogi. After a lot of trial and error, plenty of restoration work; and a fantastic paint job, the final results were actually fantastic!

May I just say this project absolutely killed me with how many prints just didn't survive the process? We have a lot of suspicion as to why this was, and a lot of friends have tried to offer their support as well. The thing is; we've tried a lot of different solutions and I think at this point it might just be coming down to the print speed, and the infill. That being said, I've not given up on making these far more consistent to print. My hope is that I will be able to either distribute the finished prints to those who want them, the only problem with that currently is that I already know a lot of people who want them, and well; most of the prints end up in the Goddess Graveyard so to speak...

Now I know many people have already heard this story, they've seen all of this conversation already via tumblr posts. I've not shyed away from discussion of my 3D printing woes there however, there's a lot that people haven't gotten to see or hear about this journey. I'd like to take a moment to talk a bit about the process behind this model. Primarily I think it's worth mentioning that the original print was actually done with PLA, not resin. Now I apologize because I will fully admit that the documentation of this was done via short form videos because I was documenting the printing and production process for pretty much exclusively just some close friends who had an interest in it. It was quick and easy while I was doing everything to stop and take a 30 second video as opposed to typing everything out, getting pictures, and trying to convey why I was or wasn't worried about something. The problem with that is that due to this being something intended for just some close friends and not really you know, social media or the viewing of a wider audience; I didn't much consider the overall quality of the recordings. More so I didn't worry about minor things I'd have redone if I figured people outside of my friend group would be seeing it. In other words, sorry for the poor quality phone camera videos.

Our first video actually comes from after a few hours of desperately trying to get the model to be large enough to be recognized by the printer. It might sound weird but essentially the way the printer software works; if it doesn't believe the printer can do something it just won't even try. Meaning if an angle was too steep (even with supports) or if the size of something would go under the nozzle size (.4mm) the printing software would outright refuse to attempt it. I had to do a ton of work to just get it to the point where I could even get this model to be considered for printing, which wasn't really interesting nor noteworthy but of course, when I finally got it working I was thrilled.

Now you might not fully understand just how slow this printing process actually was, see the printing program was estimating that the print would take 2 days and nearly 7 hours. However that's an estimate according to the program running at 100% speed. However because of the actual printer we're using, it's recommended to print everything at 50% speed, which means the print would actually take just over 4.5 days to fully print. This being done with PLA meant it could easily screw up at any moment and would need to be absolutely babied to make sure the print was successful. Not only would it be a massive waste of time, it would use up a lot of PLA to get halfway through the print and have something go wrong. That being said, things were looking optimistic.

At this point I had spent a good couple of hours with the print watching over it to make sure nothing would go wrong enough to warrant stopping it early; I had to be up early the next morning and it was nearing midnight. So I took a few pictures to report the current status of the print to the group, and did my best to get some rest.

It wasn't until roughly 7 hours (a whole 1% of the print) had gone by that I noticed a problem, somehow the print speed got adjusted to go well above what it was intended to be. I'm not sure entirely how this happened nor why. This resulted in most of the actual print not adhering to the raft. Having this happen somehow seemingly randomly after 7 hours was devistating to me, I took it well enough but I was a bit annoyed with it. The thing I try to explain to people about 3D printing is that despite what people might say about it, nothing in 3D printing is honestly truly actually random. It may seem random, it may seem like something just happened for no reason, but that's not the case. That's what I love and hate about 3D printing, it's all a machine running a specific code to print a model. Which means under the proper conditions it will have the same result every time. Now this of course takes into consideration everything from how level the bed is, to how hot the nozzel is, to even just how fast the print was being printed. We've had times when the ambient air tempature cooled down the filament too quickly and caused issues, or wouldn't let it cool down fast enough and that caused issues. So sure it's easy to say "something RANDOMLY went wrong!" But that's not the case, something somewhere told the program to do this; it made a mistake, and the best yet worst part of it is that it's a mistake I could have caught and fixed if I was more aware of it.

Thankfully a lot of my issues with this printer, and this print in particular would be solved in the coming days when we obtained a resin printer. Both Ryu and I were extremely excited to see what the resin printer could do, and thanks to the fact we were struggling so much with the amount of time the PLA printer took to actually print anything, we made sure to get a speed printer. The new resin printer could actually print several whole prints in a matter of a half hour to an hour as opposed to several days for a single print. I cannot express how genuinely freeing it felt, and it's amazing having both a PLA printer and a Resin printer as each have their own strengths if I'm being entirely honest.

10/08/2023 Trick and Treat Pumpkin Pet Prints

As Halloween rolls around we wanted to try making the trick and treat pumpkin pets. Ryu had the idea of making them large enough to fit a candle light inside.

I finally tried my hand at painting, and learned I'm quite bad at it but this little guy seemed happy with the results regardless, and I admire that positivity.

In the end I think they came out quite well and I'm happy with the results! I'll need to get better at painting though, currently my skills are quite lacking next to Ryu's.

9/29/2023 Nine-Tailed Fox Print

Ryu made this nine tailed fox from the MapleStory collab. It came out really well and has lead to me considering making a few of our favorite pets as 3D prints. Top of the list would likely be the corgi and cats.

9/24/2023 Far Darrig Print

The resin printer is proving useful already! While the old Far Darrig prints would take upwards of a day each and still have plenty of work that needed to be done after the fact, now we take a total of 40 minutes for 2! Not to mention these little guys come out looking amazing. We've done some testing as to what kinds of supports need to be used and what the best angle to print them at is, and all in all; we can consistently mass produce Far Darrigs now. I'm not sure why we'd necessarily need to do that, but we absolutely can!

You can really see the improvement over the PLA for these guys, the PLA prints by no means were necessarily bad. They just took a lot of work with sanding delicate parts to make them smoother and even then it often still came out looking jagged and fuzzy. They do stand on their own though and they're fairly large all things considered. So I'm more or less happy with these silly little guys.

The only problem is that even the cats like them, Shrimp wouldn't stop running by the coffee table to bat at them while we were trying to sand them. However I'll let it slide because she was very cute about it.

9/20/2023 Dark Knight + Paladin Armor Prints

As someone who has always had an appreciation for some cool armor, I've always wanted to print out a small figure of the Dark Knight and Paladin transformations. I've admittedly never cared much for the look of Infra Black because it's just kind muscles? But I love the other transformations in the dark knight line, and of course I love (the majority) of the Paladin line as well. However without a doubt I think the first transformations for each are honestly the most iconic. Sure Champion gets those cool wings, and I will fully admit that either Black Knight or Chaos Knight has the best armor design for Dark Knight. There's just something about the original transformations that feels nostalgic, and especially understanding that my painting skills aren't quite where they should be, and our PLA printer can't do a great job on details. I figured having a more distinguishable silhouette for each would be best. Of course as with most of our prints, while the final results came out pretty cool; it was more of a learning experience than anything.

As you can imagine it was in fact not fun to learn that spending hours actually getting this thing printable as a model didn't in fact make it printable on a PLA printer. For those who don't do 3D printing and may not understand what I'm talking about. You can't just make a 3D model and then slap it into a printer program and expect it to print, I understand that you probably know that much; but what might not make sense to a lot of people who don't participate in the hobby; is how to actually make something printable. In this house we have a saying that everything needs to be "Thick and Printable" because as you can imagine, when it comes to a 3D print actually existing in real space, it needs to be supported in such a way that not only can it stand on it's own after being printed, but also that it can all stay together during the printing process. Yes, that's primarily what supports are for; but on the internals supports can often be too weak when you're dealing with thicker parts that need a much heavier infill. It's important to note that I have a background in engineering, and not 3D modeling specifically. My engineering experience for 3D modeling was mostly spent making parts, modifications to existing technology; and assembling everything after the fact, rather than making a singular concrete structure that can handle being printed. In retrospect there were much better ways to go about printing this. However at the time I was still new to printing on my own PLA printer, and I was still fairly new to using 3D modeling programs outside of just modeling small parts, or modeling things for virtual spaces; where parts can float or be thin planes rather than having to be, as we say; thick and printable.

If you're curious what I mean by "the video" here I was actually learning all of this alongside not only Ryu, but a few of my close friends who were also taking interest in this craft. So we were sharing a lot of tutorials on how to better use blender specifically to model things for printing. However given that we were all still fairly new to blender, it didn't go very well lol. That being said however, the print itself was coming out very nicely, after about a day and a half we finally had the finished print, it was absolutely encased in supports which was a little stressful to free it from. Though the only parts that snapped off were minor pieces on the side that could easily be reattached, and I didn't mind too much on account of the fact one of the two parts snapped off during the print.

You might be wondering why the title of this includes the paladin, and yet we havent seen the paladin yet. Well, let me enlighten you as to why that is; you see unfortunately the paladin wasn't so lucky. While the Dark Knight absolutely had some issues it still came out as a solid model that at least resembles what it was meant to. The Paladin on the other hand... well,

Needless to say, it had a lot more issues. However this project has inspired the idea of potentially making Mabinogi chess pieces based either on Dark Knight and Paladin or Elves and Giants, or even maybe just Milletian/Erinn vs Fomors. I think it could be cool to have either transformation types, or key characters as chess pieces if I could figure out how to best represent them in a way that didn't make them annoying to pick up, and troublesome to balance. To explain what I mean, while they stand on their own both of these models are extremely unbalanced and I feel like having something heavy in the base or perhaps maybe a magnet could have fixed that. However that would also require hollowing out a place for those weights or magnets, and also that might get expensive. I don't really play chess, at least not in person; so I don't think I'd have enough of a practical use for a chess board like this, but who knows; I still really like the idea.

8/22/2022 Merch: Mabinogi Magazines + Manga

Today I bring you some official magazines that distributed in Japan, everything from fashion catalogs to game guides were printed in these back in the day! Back when I played the game in my youth I would have absolutely loved to actually follow these guides. I fear the game has changed far too much for many of these to actually be useful, but as something of a time capsule they're still really cool. For example, here's a walkthrough for Generation 1!

I find it interesting how often they use English in these magazines, certain titles and npc names will be written in English but otherwise mostly everything is written in Japanese. I haven't gotten around to fully translating them completely yet, but it's something I want to properly document when I do. Likewise it's really cool to see projected timelines of when things would be coming out or when things had come out. Some magazines had these dates listed with plenty of graphics and blurbs about the updates from what I could tell.

As per usual if any of these pictures are too small go ahead and open the image in a new tab to view it at it's original size. I'm eventually looking into getting some scans of these, since I'm fairly sure our printer can actually do scans. Then I could upload high quality images that would be easier to translate than these. Sorry for some of the bad angles and such, admittedly most of these pictures were taken for the purposes of sharing them quickly with some friends who would be more interested in the pictures than anything else.

Of course fashionogi is the end game and before the era of the dressing room it could be difficult to know what clothing options were available to you, hence why some of these magazines were dedicated to displaying various items you could obtain in game, along with which genders and races could actually wear them. I love how every item is given a number, and it's interesting to me that the characters shown wearing the items aren't necessarily the default male and female characters. So it seems like they at least gave them unique hair styles or colors, which is a neat touch.

Next up something I found particularly interesting, the official guide book actually has a silhouette of Rua rather than Nao along with it's logo. I'm unsure why this is, it looks similar in shape to the Rua figure they also released. It does make me wonder about the development of Mabinogi, because the other major figure release was a Succubus. I've had a bit of a hunch about that for a while, wondering if the succubus in question was intended to be Kristell seeing that she has more story relevance. Likewise I believe Rua was meant to play more of a central role throughout the main storyline, but just didn't end up being involved as much as originally planned. This is all speculation mind you, nothing in these books would have given me that sort of idea outside of the fact that Rua and the Succubus in question seem kind of odd to make into figures. The only other explanation would be that it's the early 2000's and "sex sells" marketing was the bread and butter of the MMORPG genre. That's not judgement mind you, it's just the only other explanation I could think of. Of course that doesn't mean it's the only possibility, I may be way off the mark and if someone actually has any information about this I'd love to know!

Speaking of Kristell I gotta bring up the unofficial manga for Generation 1. At least I don't believe it's official, it came in the same merch haul as the magazines so I figured I'd talk about it here; I've yet to finish translating it but the art is really good! In particular Ryu sent plenty of images regarding the panels featuring Kristell back before she met Tarlach. I will truly never forgive that man for what he took from us.

It's also really cool to see Kristell depicted using a chain blade, while it's true that Succubus and Incubus in Mabinogi tend to stick to basic swords; I've also not seen them literally kicking the ass of an orc wearing a ball gag... something we DO see in the manga. So I mean, hey why not? It's a great touch that helps to differentiate her from other Succubus as well; not to mention it falls in line well with her kind of BDSM theme they gave her for the manga, since it operates closely to a whip in a lot of cases. No matter what the thought process behind it was, it's cool as hell.

The last thing I want to mention here is that in one of the magazines there was a guide to each of the towns, that explained travel time assumedly using actual in game time, which was kind of amazing to me because it blew me away to think about how the scale of this game is so different when you account for how long these trips are supposed to take. Is this what they meant when they said Milletians experience time faster than normal people?