Showcase · Completed

Kyashan and Flender

My non-canonical tribute to the Tatsunoko hero: Kyashan reimagined as cyberpunk and Flender redesigned as a drone, sculpted between Nomad and Plasticity and printed in resin.

3D

72 viste · clay

In almost every cover of the series, Kyashan has his arm outstretched, pointing at something ahead of him, with Flender at his side, and it’s the pose I chose for this piece too.

First rough sketch in Nomad: Kyashan with his arm outstretched and Flender at his side on a round base

As a kid, Kyashan was my favourite hero; those were the years when Tatsunoko heroes ruled Italian TV, and ever since I had wanted to dedicate a piece to him. When I finally committed to it, I chose not to make him faithful to the original series or to the reboots: I wanted my own interpretation, with a design closer to how I imagine things today, somewhere between cyberpunk, post-human and Ghost in the Shell.

The design

For Kyashan I kept the elements that make him recognisable: the two pistols and the helmet with the crescent moon. With Flender I took more liberties: the design is completely reworked, more drone than robot dog, but I think you can still recognise him.

Print detail: Kyashan's crescent helmet and chest

The sculpt

Kyashan is sculpted entirely in Nomad Sculpt on iPad. The final sculpt is made of about a hundred components, for a total of 22 million vertices, and Nomad handles them without much trouble. To streamline the sculpting I used Nomad’s face groups: they’re the coloured areas you can see in the photo.

Kyashan in Nomad, front and back, with the face groups in different colours

The print preparation is done in Nomad too: the model is split into parts, with pins for assembly and decimated meshes.

Kyashan in Nomad split into printable parts: head, torso, arms, legs and holsters separated

Flender, on the other hand, was born in Plasticity. What you see is revision number who-knows: the first versions were simpler and less detailed, then one piece at a time came the “vertebral” tail and the details on the chest and legs.

Two printed versions of Flender side by side: on the left the tail and head of an earlier revision, on the right the vertebral tail and head of the final version

Printing

No real problems this time, and this section is short.

As I usually do, I first printed a scaled-down version and then the full-size one.

The two Flender prints on the bench: the scaled-down test and the full-size version

The slicing is done in Lychee Pro, for its new support placement features. All the parts are hollowed in Lychee, with a 1.5 mm wall and drain holes for the resin. If you use Lychee, the slicer handles the hollowing and the holes directly: there’s no need to prepare them in the model.

The printer is an Elegoo Saturn 4 Ultra, with 0.03 mm layers and the classic Elegoo Standard 8K Space Grey.

Kyashan parts fresh off the Saturn 4 Ultra build plate, still on their supports

The project list

Kyashan and Flender had been on my dream-project list since I watched them on TV, and with this piece I can tick them off. There are already plenty of canonical versions around, and often very good ones: I wanted to make my own, as a fan.