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That still of Bee, Hot Rod, and Cheetor together: Attack of the Kid Appeal Characters!!! ?

That's just it though, I reckon the process of using cad and 3d printing over the traditional approach of initial engineering sketches, sculpting et al, is significantly cheaper, even from a man hours perspective - especially when you consider that edits and revisions can be done to the existing model with relative speed and ease, while previous design revisions can be saved if there is a misstep at any point along the process. I honestly wouldn't be surprised if this cut the costs on labour down by anywhere between 33%-50%.

The material costs are probably relatively low, but you have to keep in mind there's a ton of labor-hours also sunk in the various design stages this already went through to get to what seems effectively to be an engineering sample. Like, it may not be durable like a production toy, but for what they're showing us, I'd assume damn near everything on there does actually work. So there's already been a lot happening on this between Hasbro and Takara. I'd bet the printing is actually the cheapest part of the process so far. You can see that they've walked this a long way through already just based on the time table they have. Funding to be secured by the end of August, and delivery in early 2021. They're allowing for just a bit over a year from a process known to take as much as 24 months. And doing something this massive for the first time, I don't doubt they'd end up using an entire two years when it's all tallied up. They may not have laid out the hundreds of thousands of dollars (or more, maybe) to have the molds cut, but if the campaign fails, they are still looking at some decent loss on this. I hope it does succeed, for all the people who want to have one of these. But I can't help coming back with a skeptical feeling every time I step back and take an objective look. Hopefully opening the campaign up in Japan will give it a healthy boost toward the goal.

Exactly. The fact that they still need to crowdfund $4.6M for this to go ahead means that the moulds for this haven't even been tooled yet. What is interesting is where this leads to in terms of the future of prototyping. Even if you allow $20k for an industrial 3d printer, which is a drop in the ocean for Hasbro, they and 3d scanners do mean that it's incredibly easy these days for Hasbro to produce full colour protos or protos of any colour. Add in some creative accounting for the R&D budget on a line and suddenly it's not only the reason you have offerings like this even being considered, but also the reason they're so fully fleshed out as finished products, before funding has even been secured. In fact I wouldn't be surprised if there isn't one piece of resin in either proto and that they're so far along that they could effectively be considered product samples, rather than prototypes, in terms of what we're traditionally used to. This R&D process has to be costing Hasbro significantly less than the traditional R&D process - enough that this gamble potentially failing is still cheap enough to work as a PR exercise at worse. I highly doubt this would even have been attempted prior to 3-D printers. The great part about all this too, is that if the protos ever go astray, as long as the digital files haven't been lost, it's realistically only costing them whatever they pay for 9kg of extrudable plastic to produce another. In the end, we're the real winners, because it minimises risk, allowing designers to be more adventurous with ideas and if something doesn't work for the time, the design can easily be reproduced down the track as a proto when it has a better shot. There are definitely some interesting times ahead.

The TakaraTomy Mall campaign launch is supposed to coincide with the start of Summer Wonderfest, which is July 28th. So basically there's just enough time for the prototypes to be shown off during SDCC, then get express shipped to Tokyo to go on display at Wonderfest to promote that leg of the funding drive, before probably going back to Rhode Island to be stored away until it's time to go to New York in a couple of months. The beauty of using 3D printing is that they can run off as many as they need as long as they've got the time and material to sink in it. Even whatever resin parts there are in this could be coming out of limited-lifespan silicone molds, allowing them to replicate those parts at least a few times. Especially with these needing to be passed back and forth between Hasbro and Takara, I'm sure they want a backup solution in case one gets damaged or even lost along the way. How you lose an entire planet, I don't know, but I still wouldn't want to be caught without my secondary backup just in case.