Time to revive this topic!
Last time I worked on the project I had a few bottlenecks that were driving me crazy and decided to lay it off and cool down.
One of them was the Tamiya XF-75 paint, I had a bottle that was not the same shade, it looks almost the same, but it's more cold, has more blue in it, and since it's a long project I painted some stuff before, some after and in the meantime swapped jars. So the problem now was that I had some part of the superstructure painted in the more blueish/cold tone, other in warmer "proper" IJN kure color. It can be really seen when you put 2 connecting parts together. That thrown me off a bit and after repainting the bridge 4 times and getting the same result (that was before I checked the jars) I gave up.
The second problem was the supporting structure under the stern deck, no matter how many measurement I took, I end up doing 6 iterations of 3D test prints, changing stuff on the go but nothing seemed to work and give me a fit I was looking on, so gave up.
Fast forward to today, I think I resolved both issued and brought my mojo back, there are still a lot of things to sort out but it's going the right way.
I manage to borrow a 3D scanner for testing, it's a Creality Raptor, I've been thinking about it for a long time and how it would help during the 3D modeling of complex parts that need to fit to an existing geometry.
I was pleasantly surprised of how good it worked, the details it picked up are very usable, you still have to replicate surfaces that matches the mesh file scanned but it's much easier and faster and most importantly precise.
Some other example of how a 3D scan can be helpful, even if it's a 2D surface.
The next post will feature the paint problem and how I plan to resolve it.