Welcome To My Dragon Body Alteration's Page

With the bodies that I use for my kitbashes I want to try to get as far away from the standard boxed figure as I can, and have found that the cheapest way to get the poses I want, is to use the Dragon Neo 2 bodies and alter them as below. The original idea for these changes came from a fellow modeller 1stLooey, which are shown on my Body Modifications page. I have also found that with a little alteration, I can also use other company's headsculpts with the Dragon bodies as well as shown on my Adapters page. So this is a page I have made up regarding the changes that I have made to a standard Dragon body. Therefore that I can get more movement and as a result a better pose.

Note: I know that there are other body types on the market, some of which do look very good and they also have the ability to hold a pose well. But I just cannot really justify spending up to £30.00 - £35.00 + shipping on just one nude figure for a kitbash, so this is why I am staying with the Dragon bodies at the moment and I have mainly based this page around them.

Standard Dragon body compared to an altered Dragon body

In the pictures above I have a standard Dragon body on the left, showing how I have tried to copy the poses as shown with the altered body on the right. To get this pose with the altered body I have removed some of the plastic at the following joints - neck, elbow, abdomen and the knees. And although it looks very untidy as it is, once I have the clothing on the figure the alterations cannot be seen, but I am able to get a better pose with what I want with my models. With the standard Dragon figure as shown above, some of the poses that I have tried to replicate have put the joints under stress, and over time this may cause some weakness in the figure. Whereas with the altered body, there is less stress on the joints, because of the plastic that I have removed.

Standard Dragon body shooting pose

With the poses above, I have tried my best with the standard body to get a shooting pose for a figure. And if you notice that with the legs I cannot get them folded up any closer to make the figure sit lower in this pose. This is because the legs behind the knee will not allow me to close the gap any better. There is another problem with getting this firing pose right, this is where the rifle butt goes into the shoulder, because if you look you can see that there is a gap between the rifle butt and the shoulder joint. I have got around this with my Shooting Pose page.

Altered Dragon body shooting pose

In the poses above with an altered figure, I can get the leg behind the knee closed up better, which helps to get the whole figure to sit lower which in turn allows the elbow to sit on the raised knee better. The head can also be brought lower to look down the sights better, in these pictures the head is at the maximum that the connection inside the body will allow. But there is some extra movement downwards if the head is pushed down.

To get this I would normally tape the neck into the position that I wanted. Again once the clothes are on the body, changes like this would not be seen. On this body I can get the head closer to the rifle, plus with the way that I have removed the plastic around the neck, it allows me to close up the gap slightly with the rifle butt and the shoulder.

Unaltered DiD body pose

The body poses shown here are of the standard DiD body alongside the altered Dragon one, and as you will notice the DiD one on the left in the pictures has a lot of movement in it to get the poses that I want. The only problem is that the body is very heavy, the height averages out to about 6 foot and the body style is of a body builder on steroids. I can get also get some more articulation from the body by removing the area above the legs, and from the area above and behind the knees.

With these figures I am tending to stay away from them as they are of the standard 6 foot muscular body type, and I have found that it is a lot of work to alter them down to anything else. Especially with the moulded chest muscles, because to me they make a tunic stand out too far in this area.