The Warforge Miniature Modelling and Conversion

WTB Chaplain Dreadnought

Just taking a brief break from studying for my finals to throw this out there:

I'm currently looking to get my hands on a Forgeworld Chaplain Dreadnought. I'd order from Forgeworld if I wasn't entirely sure it'd take 2-3 months to get to me. I'd vastly prefer something that's new and unpainted.

I'm happy to buy it for cash, or trade for marine or ork bits! Anyone with one they'd like to unload, please contact me.

Electro-spinners!

Hey guys. Not back from my hiatus yet, since I've got exams 'till the 15th, but I wanted to mention this for those that have asked.

The front prong bits I made during my Mega-SAG project are now available from d6hobbies.com - I wasn't really planning on having them cast up, but enough people asked that it seemed worthwhile. It comes as unpainted resin, with  3 separate prongs and a central turbine hub.

I'm looking forward to some hobby work over winter break!

Intermission

A quick note.

If it hasn't become completely apparent due to the lack of updates, I'm inundated in work right now as finals come up. This semester, in particular, has been a huge demand on my time due to the subjects I'm taking. I will likely not be updating until after finals in December.

Sorry!

I’m not dead yet!

Rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated.

As I'm sure many of you may have noticed, this site has been without updates for a significant time. I can do nothing but apologize for the downtime. Law school being what it is, I find myself with very little free time this semester, and ontop of that my fiance and I have been working out the essential nuts and bolts of our wedding plans.

With that said, not everything has been crickets and tumbleweeds. I've been doing a very small bit of painting as I've had the time, and I haven't gotten around to photographing and posting anything yet. When I'm done with my classes today, I'll have a go at getting some of my projects up-to-date.

On a related note, I should mention that I did pick between Mercenaries and Khador for my dabbling in Warmachine. The glorious motherland shall have my axe, for I am pitching in with the mighty Khadoran nation. The decision was primarily motivated by Privateer Press's final MK II rules, as I felt that pirate mercs really hadn't gained a tremendous amount; the themed warjacks were still really sub-par and required a lot of finesse to play to any sort of effectiveness - finesse which I, as a very novice Warmachine gamer, sorely lacked. Khador is delightfully straightforward with it's 'advance-and-smash' playstyle, and as an ork player I can sympathize with such sentiments.

I recently had the chance to order a couple Khadoran jacks from my buddy Andrew over at D6 Hobbies, and I'm waiting with bated breath for the models to make their way to me from Texas. I'm a bit sticker shocked at the retail prices of some of the Khadoran jacks, but I guess I should be used to it now after playing 40k for so long.

One last tidbit to mention for now: I'm working on a new product for sale, which will hopefully be a delightfully modular custom tread assembly, for those of you looking to add beefy, spiked tank treads to your vehicles. It's coming along nicely so far, and I expect to be done with it by November.

More updates later today.

Giving Warmachine a go?

Avoiding the long story that has led me up to this point for now, I have about $240 in credit to spend on just Warmachine models, and I've been giving some very serious thought to what I might want to play, if anything. The game itself seems pretty good, and I've played a very tiny bit via VASSAL to get a feel for things. I like it because it seems like you can play a decent-length game (hour and a half) with very few models - a warcaster and a handful of warjacks is sufficient. This'd let me go wild on the models, since I'd only have a few to work on before I have a decently-sized force.

I've narrowed my choices down to two general interests, but I can't decide between them because I don't yet know enough about the game. I figured I'd post 'em up here and get some feedback.

Option A is Privateer Mercenaries, a.k.a. pirates.

These guys have some of the coolest looking warjacks.

My initial thematic plan for these guys was to do undead pirates, just to be cool, but I've discovered that Cryx actually has undead pirates already, so doing that would cause a good deal of confusion. Instead, I'd probably opt for Bioshock-esque conversions similar to what one might find here, only with substantially more lights. I'd probably base 'em on wood planking and paint them up to be close to the stock scheme because I do like the colors very much.

Option B is Khador, a.k.a. the armored Russians

These guys appeal to my orky side. They are heavily armored, slow-moving, hard-hitting bastards who excel in beating your face in once they get close enough. I'd probably light as much of these guys as I could, too, and base them on snow. I don't have much of an explicit theme in mind for these guys, since they already have a pretty strong iconographic background of being red or olive-colored and somewhat soviet in theme.

Menoth, Cryx, Cygnar and the Retribution don't particularly interest me as far as their units and theme go, so I'm down to these two. I like the pirate merc models slightly more than Khador, but from the little I've played, it seems like pirate Mercs can be incredibly hard to use appropriately. Khador, on the other hand, is 'run at X, hit X until X is dead, then run at Y', which I can sympathize with after playing orks.

What do you guys think? Anyone familiar with the game that could give me some advice on choosing? I know MK II is coming out soon, which is basically like Warmachine 2nd ed, and that changes a few things about the game, so I'm trying to plan ahead.

Upgrade complete!

1,800 pictures. 423 posts. Hours upon hours of work later, our upgrade is finished!

It took quite a while, as I had to basically copy and paste and reformat all the old posts from the previous site design by hand; there was no compatibility with wordpress. Unfortunately all the old comments were lost in migration, but that was unavoidable.

I've designed the new site to navigate largely similar to the old one via a Projects link at the top. Additionally, there is a Quick Navigation in the new sidebar that will hopefully serve as a shortcut when necessary.

One of the biggest problems I had with the old site was that the front page and the projects pages were separate and divided, meaning that the only time the front page changed was when I had a general update to add. The new design, however, will provide everything up-front; anything that gets updated or posted will show here, making it less of a task to see what's being worked on currently. At the bottom of each post will be a link to the project's category that will allow quick access to all of the posts in that project.

A new commenting system is in place now which should allow you to subscribe to any comments on a particular post or project. It is no longer necessary to register to leave a comment - I tried to make it as easily accessible as possible.

The gallery on the site has improved a significant amount, and any images that are thumbnailed in sequence can be flipped between like a slideshow. I'm also going to make it my goal from here on out to provide larger images, as well - my previous gallery images were 600 x 400, but I'll be increasing my standard image resolution up to 800 x 532 henceforth.

I've added in a new Articles section, but I have not had a chance to put the content up yet. There will be additional content in the sidebar to the right shortly, as well.

All told, the new site's been a ton of work to put together. I want to thank my friends Zach and Brian for their assistance while I slogged my way through making php work. As a last little note, if you spot anything missing, incomplete, or broken, please do not hesitate to let me know or leave a comment.

Edit: August 29, 2009 - I am aware that the site doesn't work that well for IE6 and 7. There's a simple reason for that - I couldn't be bothered to try and slog through all the crap needed to make it work the same. However, I've tested the site in Firefox, Safari, Chrome, and Opera and it works fine in all of the 'newer' browsers. If you're running IE6 or 7 and the site looks strange, I would suggest you switch to one of the browsers listed above for a massive improvement in your general browsing experience.

In the mean time, I've noticed the time and date do some strange moving around in IE, so I'm going to look into fixing that. Be aware that it's current behavior is not intended.

Back from the Alaskan Wilderness

It's update-o-clock!

I imagine it's probably apparent that I was not, in fact, consumed by ravenous moose or other wild animals during my brief stay in Alaska, but I feel as though I should dispel any doubts as to that point.

I've been roped into attending a 40K Doubles Tournament at The Gamer's Realm in West Windsor, NJ on August 15, so I have been very occupied in the past few days with getting enough stuff painted and in playable shape to run. To that end, I'll be adding a new project to the Orks section of the site very shortly, and my lootas can expect an update soon because they are being assembly-line painted right now.

Speaking of painted orks, I have to also give a hearty thank-you to Dakkabu at The-Waaagh.com for his ridiculously generous assistance in painting some of the rank and file infantry and I have lying around. He took a mob of boyz off my hands, painted them up wonderfully for me, and returned them to me to be based and indoctrinated in the proppa way ta bash 'eadz in.

Thanks, Dakkabu!

As a last note for now, I just wanted to mention that I have received my first set of casts from D6 Hobbies yesterday, and I'm quite pleased with the results. As a reader, I would certainly not take my word on this as unbiased, because I've made it clear that I have an obvious stake in the sales of my product that go through D6 Hobbies. However, in the interest of disclosure, I thought I'd share a few pictures of their product, right out of the bag, in the same shape and condition you'd be receiving them.

My heavy automatic cannons are cast very well, without any warps or distortions in the barrel or ammo cartridges. The vents where the resin pours in are evident along the top of the gun, but cleanup on those flat surfaces should prove to be completely negligible. I'm comfortable stating that these guns require vastly less cleanup and work than any of the half-dozen pieces I have ever obtained from Forgeworld.

I also received a set of D6 Hobbies-brand lava bases, pictured below.

There's a little bit of darker particulate matter that seems to be mixed in with the resin, creating a 'flecked' sort of appearance, but this is obviously a non-issue on base terrain that gets primed over anyway. I am seriously excited to put some of my Salamanders on this terrain, as I have been looking long and hard for lava-themed bases that looked right. I know a couple other manufacturers make their own lava base brands, but I've really never been a fan of what I've seen, because usually it's a very tiny rock sticking up out of a sea of lava; if you base your whole army like that, they look like they're just about to sink into a firey abyss below. This is a more conservative 'cracked earth' appearance that lets me include some lava around the edges but make it look as though my Marines aren't on the verge of being cooked in their armor.

Before tomorrow evening, I'll have those promised ork updates on the site! For now, I sleep.

Warforged Miniatures

Frequent visitors might well have noticed my update rate has dropped off a bit in the past week or two, and I figured I may as well explain myself because there are two reasons, one trivial and one very good.

First, the trivial reason: I formatted my computer. It took me a day or two to back up everything I wanted backed up, and another few days to actually get all of the essentials back onto the machine. Without something like photoshop, scaling pictures down to a reasonable size and working on the site becomes substantially harder, so I focused on getting my machine to 100%.

Second is the much better reason! Whenever I pursue a project that requires any degree of casting, a few people inevitably approach me with the idea of selling copies of my work. My typical answer is always something along the lines of "I'd love to, but I simply don't have the time" due to both family and my legal education. However, this is all about to change.

I've started working with a company located in Forth Worth, Texas, named D6 Hobbies. The company has some great people, quality casting equipment, and excellent materials at its disposal. Accordingly, I've negotiated a deal for them to produce and sell the resin casts of original parts that I send them. Therefore, I'm pleased to announce the creation of...

Warforged Miniatures is the new brand of the resin-cast products I will be offering through D6 Hobbies, with it's own section in the webstore. The first product I'm happy to offer, by popular demand, are my Heavy Automatic Cannons, available for purchase individually♦ or in sets of four. Nozeminer joins me in this endeavor with his own, unique brand of miniature bitz, offered under the moniker of "Nozeminer Studios". Those of you who browse The Warforge regularly know that I sometimes outsource sculpting projects to Nozeminer, and to say that his sculpting talents are amazing is an understatement. He's put up a selection of useful bitz for all sorts of 28mm miniatures: Peaked Officer Caps, Savage Voodoo Masks, and Abhuman Gas Masks. We're going to have fully-painted pictures of our products in the next few days, and D6 Hobbies is restocking constantly.

Are you ready for dissapointment?

A lot of the time, when I get e-mails or comments from people, they chuck in a request asking me to show them my whole ork army together. I've thusfar refrained from doing so, largely because I think people would be pretty dissapointed. As it stands right now, I don't even have 1k of painted, playable stuff! I tend to go overboard on building the big or exotic models, and I've completely neglected essential things like troops. I usually get around this by borrowing the store ork army to supplement my lists, or by playing Apocalypse, where I can put a lot of my still-unpainted big stuff on a table and easily reach over 4k+.

Anyway, I figured a video would be easier to show the stuff with than photos, although you have to stomach my incredibly ugly mug a bit!

So there we have it. I've a massive deficit of actual, painted boyz that I need to work on desperately, but first and foremost I am going to finish painting all the crap that's in bits and pieces around my work area.

Back in the saddle

So I wanted to just throw a few quick things up here.

First and foremost is a big thank-you to the ominously named 'Mr X' over at The-Waaagh.com's forums. This fine fellow caught wind of the fact that I am basically swimming in Assault on Black Reach Orks to paint, and offered to lend a hand from halfway across the country by painting a batch of orks for me in return for unpainted ones to replace them. I might have been a little skeptical at first, as the offer seemed far too good to be true, but lo and behold, Mr X came through with an incredible squad of Orks!

They're busy striking a pose with my Big Boss. The orks are fantastic, and there's even a Nob hidden among them there with an all-too-helpful Power Klaw. Thanks, X!

On an unrelated note, some of you may have noticed that I sort've threw my 'make infantry' plan to the wind. After enough people talked to me about it, I figured starting more projects was probably the wrong approach, because that invariably leads to me just piling more onto my half-finished backlog. Instead, I've started trying to tie up some loose ends. First and foremost is the Stormboyz project, as a lot of you have expressed interest in seeing at least the first ten done and finished. I've also gone ahead and primed my 'Ard boyz using an old Games Workshop Boltgun Metal spray that I dug out of my basement, so I expect them to be the next project that gets painted and finished after the Stormz. I have no idea what comes after that, though if I had to guess it'd probably be my loota mobs so I can get them reassembled and on the table.

I recently got some Ork Pirate Heads and Big Post-Apocalyptic Guns from Maxmini.eu. I've got to say, the quality of the heads is fantastic. There's no mold lines or flaws that need any sort of attention. The Big Guns that I got are a bit wonky - some flash in some weird places, and a bit of cleanup will be required on them. All told, though, I'm pretty thrilled with the quality of product they're putting out, as it makes my life about a thousand times easier. Once I've caught up some on my backlog, I'd really like to take the guns and heads and some nob bodies and make myself some proper pirate-themed Flash Gitz.

I've finally finished organizing my terrible disaster in my basement. I'll take some photos a bit later once I have everything cleaned up and presentable!