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Bucnasti posted:Yah, all space marines should just be openly gay. I really want a Tom of Finland chapter. This IS the kit bashing thread. Be the change you want to see in the world 
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Apr 12, 2024 15:17
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Done (for now?)!    
Muir fucked around with this message at 19:52 on Apr 12, 2024 |
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Apr 12, 2024 19:40
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this is insanely high quality. holy poo poo
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Apr 13, 2024 20:00
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In this house, we love and cherish the zoidburg marine.
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Apr 14, 2024 13:12
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Muir posted:Done (for now?)! God drat that's cool. And you said you used contrasts on this? Did you use some special primer for the contrast bits or what? For me whenever I try to use them the end result is not nearly as good as others are getting, and I just use airbrush primers. I realize this is more of a question for the painting thread but here we are.
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Apr 15, 2024 11:55
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Thanks all! This model is now my first ever model on display in a store case, so that's pretty cool.Shaman Tank Spec posted:God drat that's cool. Yes, I used contrast for the genestealer bits - Magos Purple for the skin, Volupus Pink for the tentacles, and Akhelian Green for the chitin. No special primer. It was airbrushed Pro Acryl Ivory like the terminator armor is, and then I brushed on the highlights with Pro Acryl Bright Ivory, then I did just one coat of the contrast paint. IMO contrast paints are excellent for anything with texture like faces, skin, fur, etc., and not great for big open smooth parts like flat armor or broad pieces of cloth. I've painted a fair number of models entirely with contrast paints and I'd be happy to have more contrast chat over in the mini painting thread. Bucnasti posted:Yah, all space marines should just be openly gay. I really want a Tom of Finland chapter. CerberusXt's pride marines are being featured in White Dwarf 499: https://www.instagram.com/p/C5eAY5lNox0/?hl=en Muir fucked around with this message at 17:56 on Apr 15, 2024 |
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Apr 15, 2024 17:49
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Okay. Humor me please, I'm fresh off of 3 hours of sanding and filing models (and my sanity in the process). So I decided to get back into 40k by way of Kill Team - small teams so not a ton of painting, visual customization room, all the good stuff for the hobby. I was thinking of a theme and stumbled across a "xenos mercenary" conversion I had saved years ago by a now-deleted Reddit user:  I like the design, minus the topknot. I figured sure, why not. Some minor xenos race that had scavenged, traded, and stolen its way into a kill team worth of Imperial, Tau, and Votann gear. Good enough concept for a Legionary list to work with (minus the psyker which is a future problem). So I spent a few hours today, now that my intercessors and assault intercessors came in, and I started filing down the bodies to remove the worst of the Primaris design and give a canvas for greenstuff. Improvised a bit and got test heads together, improvised a bit more when my plasma gun was missing the power cells and nobody had replacements in stock at a reasonable price (or at all, locally), and blu tacked together the plasma gunner and the shrivetalon to see how they look with just the plastic, no greenstuff work on them. I have work on the chest and legs to do on both of them, and on the plasma gun magazine well, so they look a bit rough but won't (as bad) when they're finished.    And I learned two things in the process:
  I tried bare heads instead. Wouldn't you know it, the bare heads that look fine on my 30k stuff look strange on these bodies. I also tried normal helmets, which actually look fine, telling me that the problem is the heads and not the bodies. I'd rather use bare heads than helmets if the custom helmets fail, so we'll see what that entails to restock on ones that fit Primaris size... What would you guys do? Am I barking up a fundamentally flawed tree? Will they likely look better once the greenstuff fur, cabling, etc is in place? Modify the helmets further, or call it good and just switch to bare heads entirely? Just looking for insight, I've been out of the game a while and may have put myself back in over my head a bit. SkyeAuroline fucked around with this message at 00:45 on Apr 16, 2024 |
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Apr 16, 2024 00:38
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SkyeAuroline posted:What would you guys do? Am I barking up a fundamentally flawed tree? Will they likely look better once the greenstuff fur, cabling, etc is in place? Modify the helmets further, or call it good and just switch to bare heads entirely? Just looking for insight, I've been out of the game a while and may have put myself back in over my head a bit. Honestly, I think the Space Marine armour (primaris or otherwise) is just too iconic within 40K to work as anything else. I think if I were you, I'd go the bare head route, but add the fur and cabling you were talking about, maybe some chains or other little bits. Have them as renegade Marines that haven't gone full Chaos, but are no longer part of a loyalist chapter. A bit like heresy-era Blackshields.
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Apr 16, 2024 11:06
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Gravitas Shortfall posted:Honestly, I think the Space Marine armour (primaris or otherwise) is just too iconic within 40K to work as anything else. I think if I were you, I'd go the bare head route, but add the fur and cabling you were talking about, maybe some chains or other little bits. Have them as renegade Marines that haven't gone full Chaos, but are no longer part of a loyalist chapter. A bit like heresy-era Blackshields. Yeah, that was the backup plan. I'll see how many bare heads I have that fit the size - most of these are Stormcast and are a little small.
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Apr 16, 2024 12:31
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SkyeAuroline posted:What would you guys do? Am I barking up a fundamentally flawed tree? Will they likely look better once the greenstuff fur, cabling, etc is in place? Modify the helmets further, or call it good and just switch to bare heads entirely? Just looking for insight, I've been out of the game a while and may have put myself back in over my head a bit. Some of this is stuff it looks like you know but being complete JIC: The marine body shape is all about the shoulders, lower legs, backpacks, and bold-color armor. As long as you do something about at least two or three of them, they'll start to read as just armored soldiers. For advice on the heads, look to that epic of our times: Star Trek. A funny-looking head says alien. Multiple funny-looking heads says everyone is an alien. An alien head can be as simple as a sphere painted silver (if you squish it into the neck area, it can just be a space helmet!) or a human face painted blue or green. You can get as weird as you want with this, though: have a tentacle sticking out because it's a starfish wearing a human suit. A little spider leg with the tip posed and pointed like it's looking around. An inscrutable mechanical apparatus. A human head on a neck that is just too long and flexible. Etc. Unless you want them to look like they have imperial armor, do something about the shoulders. Even Reddit guy kind of looks like power armor. You can just do fur or scales or straps or some other fun simple texture, cover them with other pieces (esp if it's asymmetrical and/or not curved), or just completely redo that part of the arm. Do something about the backpack. Marine backpacks with the symmetrical vents will always read to 40K players as power armor. You will not believe how much of a difference just cutting off the vents will make! You can trim down a lot of the other details, too. You can also use different backpacks (including actual rucksacks), use any sufficiently-sized bit of mechanical tat as a backpack, cut a hole for an appendage or orifice or sensory organ, use it as the base for a mechanical appendage, cover it with a cloak or more organic texture, cut it down and smooth it, and/or cover it with miscellaneous crap. Speaking of smoothing, were you trying to take off that detail with just sanding? Scraping with an xacto blade held perpendicular to the surface is imo a lot better for taking off large details that are nonetheless too small to cut/clip off, like imperial aquilas. To polish, you can also brush on extra-thin plastic cement, smooth the surface with the brush, then don't gently caress with it until it dries. I generally only use sanding tools for very fine adjustments or squaring things up. For the actual chest, you don't have to round it, either. You can give it an angular shape, too; looking at the fronts of WWII tanks can give you some inspirations for shape. This is also a good place for mechanical or storage tat. You can also just drill holes for pipes (wrapped guitar strings look great but can be hard to flex), syringes/sensors (just stick a bit of rod in a drilled hole), or plugs (much shorter bit of rod, with or without an indentation in the end). Straps or organic surfaces work here too. Marine models are made to be dismembered with a craft saw, with lots of nice flat joints made specifically to conceal joins. You can slice between the shoulder and elbow pad through the humerus, through the elbow joint below the elbow pad, through the wrist above the wrist gauntlet if the armor has one, through the waist above or blow the belt, through the hip-leg join, and through the leg behind the knee. You can also cut below the kneecap or under the greave through the ankle, but this has a tendency to destroy the lower parts. You can just rotate on these joints or shave them a bit to repose. You need to be careful not to give people extra joints in the middle of their arm, though! OTOH, doing them intentionally wrong can give an inhumanly flexible appearance. (It helps if you go really hard on this or have some other signifiers of alienness, since otherwise it's just a janky-looking kitbash.) You can also shim joints, by adding small pieces to help hold them in place further apart. This does a lot to make power armor feel taller and longer, without adding a significant amount of actual size, and extended limbs usually convey a feeling of sudden, swift action. These sorts of adjustments also work a lot better if you drill and pin, which makes it easier to precisely pose a model without as much need for shims. You can even do the pinning early in the process, to experiment with posing in a way that's more rigid and replicable than blutac. You can cover joins with tat or organic textures but you can also just recreate the ribbed joint covers that marines normally have pretty easily. The dull edge of an xacto blade, lubricated with water or hand lotion, is pretty much the perfect tool. This does not have to look super precise to look good!  This is a crop from a larger photo, but it does convey how  my sculpting was. And it looks just fine when painted. You can also use these cut points to just leave the armor off! You can reform (part of) a limb with an armature and sculpt it yourself, or you can swap in parts from other models. Boots/feet and arms are obvious places but you can replace the upper legs, upper arms and shoulders, have someone wearing one arm's armor (pauldron optional) like gladiator's armor, have mismatched armor, etc. Have a crab- or octopus-man who lives in a terminator torso like a hermit crab. Hopefully some of this leads to some inspiration. I have a bunch of weird mutant guys from my own CSM army that I can post when I get home, too. Obviously I am going for having them look like actual marines but there should be some ideas you can steal if you want.
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Apr 16, 2024 19:34
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Cease to Hope posted:Some of this is stuff it looks like you know but being complete JIC: I appreciate the thoroughness. I'm pretty sure I'm just going to end up going the "bare headed human Marine" route rather than double down on the xenos stuff, but a lot of insightful commentary here. quote:Speaking of smoothing, were you trying to take off that detail with just sanding? Scraping with an xacto blade held perpendicular to the surface is imo a lot better for taking off large details that are nonetheless too small to cut/clip off, like imperial aquilas. To polish, you can also brush on extra-thin plastic cement, smooth the surface with the brush, then don't gently caress with it until it dries. I generally only use sanding tools for very fine adjustments or squaring things up. For the aquilas, I cut them most of the way off with the knife and then was sanding them with a series of files/sanding sponge (collar was the same on the one I removed it on, just with clippers before the knife). For the legs, there was nowhere to really hold it that I wasn't going to cut myself if I tried to use the knife; removed the knee crests with clippers, then sanded from there. The latter was what took most of the time. quote:For the actual chest, you don't have to round it, either. quote:Marine models are made to be dismembered with a craft saw, with lots of nice flat joints made specifically to conceal joins. quote:You can also use these cut points to just leave the armor off! I've done this with plastic parts from Goliath and some gap filling, but boy I do not look forward to from-scratch sculpting stuff like limbs! Eventually need to get it in the repertoire though. Especially hands, given how many old guns I have that don't have both hands like the new Primaris arms want... quote:Hopefully some of this leads to some inspiration. I have a bunch of weird mutant guys from my own CSM army that I can post when I get home, too. Obviously I am going for having them look like actual marines but there should be some ideas you can steal if you want.
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Apr 16, 2024 19:53
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SkyeAuroline posted:For the aquilas, I cut them most of the way off with the knife and then was sanding them with a series of files/sanding sponge (collar was the same on the one I removed it on, just with clippers before the knife). For the legs, there was nowhere to really hold it that I wasn't going to cut myself if I tried to use the knife; removed the knee crests with clippers, then sanded from there. The latter was what took most of the time. This isn't quite what I meant with the knife. Apologies if I'm explaining how to suck eggs here, but scraping is a lot more effective than sanding to remove the bulk of a detail that is inappropriate to clip. And there should be no risk of cutting yourself scraping things. I usually use scraping for the bulk of my crude reshaping in situations where a saw or clippers are inappropriate, including taking off mold lines and gate marks. Take this piece of sprue that I was using for paint tests, looking at the cylindrical stud.  Disregarding my ring finger holding the piece in place, I hold the blade like this, perpendicular to the scraping motion. Like scraping paint off of glass or tile.   I just scrape away, focusing on softening unwanted corners or edges, then scraping those rounded corners into flat edges. I keep turning and repositioning both because I'm just a fiddly sort of guy but also to keep getting better angles to scrape it down, not always starting from the same spot. Normally I would not rely on scraping for a detail this large but this is to demonstrate. (Also the piece broke midway so I had to switch to a different, identical cylinder on the larger broken piece. No real lesson here, other than that a piece of junk sprue you use as a paint tester and spacer and prybar and knife catcher is gonna break easily.)  (I reapplied grey primer so it's more visible.) This took me about nine minutes total, using scraping motions to take it all off (plus a few minor shaving slices with a paring motion to check the straightness). It's significantly less time and work than trying to do the same thing even with very coarse sandpaper. This was ice-skating up hill to boot. Normally I'd want to saw or clip off a piece with such a pronounced right angle. Scraping can take off or (crudely) recreate a sharp edge or corner easily but it does very poorly with inside corners. Ideally, grip permitting, you want to put your knife in the middle of the undesirable detail and radiate the scraping motion outward. You'll apply the most pressure at first, so if there's a place the blade catches, or you need to pass over something rather than scraping it fully down, you can risk leaving a trench right in front of the unwanted detail. (You can see it a little bit above; normally I'd be more careful but this is just to demonstrate.) The best way to prevent that is to slice or clip or saw any interior angle sharp enough to stop a scraping motion, then start in the middle so any trench forms on the detail and can thus be removed with finer-detail methods. From here I'd be looking to even it out with paring cuts with the knife or using sanding sticks, as appropriate. I do want to mention that this dulls the poo poo out of your blade. It doesn't matter to me because I'm using an Xacto knife but maybe maybe don't use it if you use surgical scalpels or a proper knife or whatever.
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Apr 17, 2024 05:15
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Cease to Hope posted:This isn't quite what I meant with the knife. Apologies if I'm explaining how to suck eggs here, but scraping is a lot more effective than sanding to remove the bulk of a detail that is inappropriate to clip. I'll give it a shot tonight since I have another 6 torsos to clean up still. Appreciate all the detail. Yesterday's prep was the Butcher and Anointed, which I think I got solid poses and outlines for to build on:   Not sure if it's foolish of me to do all the cleanup on all 11 guys before I do any sculpting at all, but right now that's the path. I still have to clean these two up more (the knees on the Anointed are very ugly and both of them have some rough patches, plus some mold lines are still visible) but I'm happier with the trajectory now.
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Apr 17, 2024 14:54
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SkyeAuroline posted:What would you guys do? Am I barking up a fundamentally flawed tree? Will they likely look better once the greenstuff fur, cabling, etc is in place? Modify the helmets further, or call it good and just switch to bare heads entirely? Just looking for insight, I've been out of the game a while and may have put myself back in over my head a bit. I actually think the issue here isn't the head, it's that the model is 90% Space Marine (and mostly from the same kit, I think?) and so with that 1-second-glance first impression it doesn't come across as a minor xenos scavenging race, it comes across as a Space Marine. The head then looks out of place because it's the only different part of what is actually an otherwise coherent Astartes model. You can do a lot with incorporating Marine parts into conversions - there's such a wide range of models available that they're hard to ignore as a source of bits - but mixing in a few more parts from elsewhere would go a long way here. Take this guy I made for my anti-Imperial secessionists:   Still mostly Space Marine parts, but because those parts are from all over the range, and the legs from the Necromunda Enforcers are different enough, they pull the end result towards something more distinct. Find some different legs and remove/swap out the powerpack, and you'll have something that stands out a lot more.
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Apr 17, 2024 18:38
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So here's a weird one. I got the les grognards for my imperial guard army and keeping in the theme of napoleon in space how do I napoleon up the walkers and the tanks in my army. Trains? Do I trains them up? Make them kinda navel shippy?
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Apr 18, 2024 01:07
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Make the walkers look like balloon baskets on legs.
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Apr 18, 2024 01:15
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Ominous Jazz posted:So here's a weird one. I got the les grognards for my imperial guard army and keeping in the theme of napoleon in space how do I napoleon up the walkers and the tanks in my army. Trains? Do I trains them up? Make them kinda navel shippy? Add elements that make them look steam powered without becoming cheesy steampunk. Look at Warmachine for inspiration. Lots of pomp and unnecessary colours.
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Apr 18, 2024 04:45
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Muir posted:CerberusXt's pride marines are being featured in White Dwarf 499: https://www.instagram.com/p/C5eAY5lNox0/?hl=en That's incredibly cool, and I'm sure it's going to make some of the shittest people in the hobby extremely angry. Good. And I'll take you up on the Contrast chat offer in the painting thread. I'm gonna figure these things out if it kills me.
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Apr 18, 2024 09:47
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Ominous Jazz posted:So here's a weird one. I got the les grognards for my imperial guard army and keeping in the theme of napoleon in space how do I napoleon up the walkers and the tanks in my army. Trains? Do I trains them up? Make them kinda navel shippy? I've always liked the idea that tanks and heavy equipment are issued, and made to STC, so you don't need to do much if you don't want to. For my Vostroyan conversions I try to keep the core of the kit the same, but change out smaller details that would be replaced frequently, like wheels or treads. For instance I made a new gunshield and larger ww1 style wheels for my Bombast Field Gun. I think your impulse towards a naval theme could work really well too. Some nice ornate details, especially adding wood where feasible, would really sell it. When I think Napoleon I think battle standards. Maybe drape a flag over a portion of a tank?
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Apr 18, 2024 22:15
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Boney was all about cannons and masses of men. Strap big guns on your tanks and walkers, and surround them with le grande armee.
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Apr 20, 2024 09:02
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Some sort of set piece tank that's carrying around an elaborate guillotine diorama would be the poo poo
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Apr 20, 2024 12:49
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I still have to do greenstuff for the the plasma gunner (hence why they're not in the closeups) and pick out a head and shoulders for the comms operator, but I got the minimum viable kill team built for my renegade "Legionaries". I also have a meltagunner and a shrivetalon that have already had their greenstuff work done, but they're already pinned for painting, so I couldn't put them in the base lineup easily - I'll post them when they're actually finished. It's a bit of a hack job, but I haven't been working on minis in a while and I haven't done this much work to them in longer, so... I'll take "finished and looks acceptable" as a victory.      
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Apr 21, 2024 02:14
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love it love it
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Apr 21, 2024 02:21
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Some basic reposing work on my inceptors and suppressors  All 10 HH missile launcher Desolators  A Malanthrope with some rubble to lean against 
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Apr 21, 2024 02:57
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Cease to Hope posted:love it love it Thanks! Not my finest greenstuff work, but also got their Aspiring Champion built:  Just leaves the acolyte I think. Pretty close to starting on painting, maybe as soon as mid week. edit: The whole crew, minus eventual acolyte and missile launcher:  Heads come for the headless ones tomorrow, and then I'll be able to paint. SkyeAuroline fucked around with this message at 18:53 on Apr 21, 2024 |
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Apr 21, 2024 15:57
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