It's well known that the "sculptors" in Trumpeter's figure department have only a passing familiarity with the proportions of the human body. The majority of Trumpeter's figures look vaguely human and require extensive plastic surgery to bring them to H.Sapiens standards. This would be understandable if the sculptors were one-eyed gelatinous blobs with only grainy interstellar fax images of what humans look like.
You buy Trumpeter figures for the weapons or other non-figure bits.
I bought their
1/35 African Freedom Fighters at a discount, mainly for the various AKs and RPGs included in the kit. I already knew that the figures were very, very bad, even by Trumpeter standards. See the example below; not a knock or comment on this modeler's work, since they did a pretty good job with what they got:
https://www.reddit.com/r/farcry/comments/xpk5tv/135_far_cry_3_somewhere_on_rook_island_miniatures/The guy with the RPG is one of the worst:
I wanted to build an African soldier for a future build. Something like this:
I also want to stay current with heavily modifying figures and get some experience painting darker skin tones. The guy with the RPG is hopeless, so I started with the wispy bachelor behind him, just standing there with an AK.
This figure - as built - would be tall for 1/35 but not unreasonably so. The legs, from the ankles to knee and knees to hips are correctly proportioned for a 1/35 figure - the torso, arms and feet proportions are completely off. I carved into the upper body so that the legs would fit a little higher. The feet were big, even for 1/32 so I replaced them with roughly normal feet from - ironically - a Trumpeter CH-47 crew member. Comparing the arms to other 1/35 figures, the upper arms were OK, but the forearms were far too long. I trimmed about 1.5mm from them. The right hand is a little large but OK. I replaced the left hand because the fingers were just a blob of plastic.
I'm not sure about the face - the head looks roughly in proportion. I'll see how it looks with some primer.
Not much can be done with the static pose but here he is is with some friends - French Mechanic, Zombie John McEnroe and one of my first figures, from the DML motorcycle set:
With the French Mechanic, who's a 3D scan of a real human and scales out to around 5'8":