The Warforge Miniature Modelling and Conversion

Lights, Camera, Burn the Heretic!

I decided to keep my life simple and just use the yellow/orange LED. After a lot of harrowing drilling through the body, trying not to hit anything vital, I got the LED fitted comfortably into the head and down into the body. I actually drilled a hole in the cloak's back by accident, so I had to pop off some scales and smooth it over. I'll be re-scaling that later.

Anyway, here he is.

Once I fix the cloak a bit, I'll put his backpack on. The gaps between the gauntlet arm and the body are taken care of. The shoulder pad's sitting at a bit of a strange angle, admittedly, but it had to be positioned like that so that it wouldn't interfere with the backpack or the helmet's line or sight. (He looked a bit silly, since he couldn't see over it, so I had to tweak it a bit. )

I may end up putting him on a larger base involuntarily, just because I need to cram a coin-cell battery under his base properly. Probably going to be 35mm-ish, and a couple mm higher than a normal base, but it shouldn't be too big of a deal.

Eye contact

Up to my electrical shenanigans. I hollowed out the helmet and eyes so I could install lights in the head. It's still being cleaned up and worked on a bit, but you get the general idea:

The 'light bleed' that you guys are seeing is partly due to the thinner plastic where I hollowed out the head. Fortunately, that sort of thing is easily fixed with the application of paint - a bit of black paint on the interior of the hollowed out helmet, and the normal Salamander green overtop will completely conceal all of the unwanted glow.

Interesting thing to note is that a 3mm LED does actually fit inside a marine's head. Quite nicely, actually. I intended for his eyes to be a bright yellow/almost green color, and I fished a yellow LED out of my pile for that purpose, but it seems to be orange instead as you'll see in the pictures. I think that may actually have something to do with the LED getting too much voltage - it's probably meant for 2.5v and I'm feeding 3v into it here. Either way, I may not even use the 3mm LED, as I have ridiculously, ridiculously tiny SMT LEDS that are the right color and about half a MM wide. I can probably install one behind each eye if I do that, though I'm not sure if I want to deal with the hassle of that.

Anyway, just thought I'd show this.

BBQ time!

Here's a wee bit of update for this.

First thing is that I finished off his spear. I decided to go with the old rune priest blade, and I think it fits pretty nicely, actually. I thought it'd end up being two small, but currently it looks at least manageable. I also filed the styrene part of thehandle a little thinner, and added an eagle head to the bottom of the thing because, well, because.

Secondly, I completely retooled the Gauntlet of the Forge. Gone is the 'power fist with flamer stuck on' approach - now I'm using the 'apothecary arm with some sort of gun nozzle stuf on' approach. I think it actually looks pretty good - more integrated with the arm, for sure, and the existing tanks and wires and doodads on the arm give it an appropriate look. I hacked a 2nd ed marine pistol apart that was on my desk and stuck the nozzle where the chainsaw part used to be on the fist. It needs a bit more cleaning up and work, but I think this one's here to stay. The other options I've seen are all based around power fists, and let's be honest, Vulkan hasn't got one. He does have digital weapons, though, which is what I'll probably try passing the other fiddly bits (see by his hand) off as.

 

There's some gaps to fill with greenstuff, but I don't expect that to be too big of a problem. I'm seriously giving thought to lighting his eyes a yellow-green with SMD LEDs, but I've not made up my mind yet. I ordered a hundred pack from some company in Hong Kong via ebay, so god knows how long I'm going to end up waiting before they get here.

Anyway, there you have it for now. I will do more to this after my finals are over.

Scaling the cloak

Not much in the past few days, because, well, exams.

But, I've been trying scales again.

 

There's a few spots where it's a bit too linear, but overall, I'm not going to stress out about it. This stuff's going to look better with paint on and a backpack covering it.

Ambivalent as usual

I smoothed the back of the cloak down a bit more, and plucked off some of the more uniform scales. I'm going to try filling them back in so they look a bit better varied. The flatter area on the right of the cloak now should make my life easier doing the scales.

I dug a MK8 helmet out and put it on here just to get a look at it. The details on the one I have in particular seem a bit soft, but it's still a better head than what I had on there, I guess.

Looking at the gauntlet, I may make one or two other variants before I settle on a final version, because this does look a bit slapped on and clunky.

Forging a Gauntlet and Cloak

Here's some scales liberally smattered on the back of Vulkan's cloak. I'm going to need to add about twice as much as what's on there before I'm done with the cloak, but I think it's looking alright. I'm considering just going over the whole cloak with some really watered down elmers glue before I paint in the hopes that it'll help these little globs of greenstuff stick better to the cape, because I'm worried that they might come off through handling.

You can also see the Gauntlet of the Forge I've been working on. I've gone pretty simple with it. After digging through my older edition marine parts, I found a power fist that looked like a nice fit on power armor (rather than terminator armor) and an old flamer bit. I hacked the flamer up some and stuck it on the back of the glove, and with a bit of twisted wire 'attached' it to the mechanisms of the arm. Here's more pictures of it, as well as the shoulderpad I think I'm going to use on that arm:

 

I may consider sculpting tiny flames onto the back of the gauntlet, but it's such a small area I might be better off painting it.

Anyway, what do you guys think?

41st Millenium Treasure Hunter

I think it's silly that Games Workshop hasn't produced a miniature for Vulkan He'stan. His new rules in the 5th edition Space Marine codex are fantastic, and I know a couple people who picked up Salamanders based purely on that alone. Rumors have been bouncing around that GW might release one torwards the summer of next year, but who has that sort of time?

I figured I'd go ahead and see if I could convert this character from one of the other new ones. I've decided to use Sicarius as a base for the conversion for a couple reasons. First off, Sicarius has segmented MK 8 armor, which is similar to what appears in Vulkan He'stan's art. Second, Sicarius has a pretty impressive cape/mantle going on, which I figured would be useful for using as a basis for Vulkan's special wargear cape. Third, Sicarius is slightly larger than your average marine, which means he has the sufficient stature required for a 'leader' type character.

I'll start by throwing down some photos:

 

The first thing I set about doing was hacking off the left arm entirely at the shoulder. It's a hard cut to make, even with a jeweller's saw, because of how integrated the cloak and shoulder pad are at the shoulder, but it's nothing that can't be fixed later on. Next, I grabbed my dremel and set about grinding off the ultramarine buckles on the front of his torso, as well as the roman-esque tassels that extended below the gutplate. This was covered up with greenstuff to make Vulkan's 'loincloth' and scales were then added overtop.

The cloak on the back is another matter entirely. I've come to realize that it's way, way too 'rippley' to properly sculpt scales on, so I've been working on smoothing the cloak out in larger sections.This should enable me to add scales to the back similar to like what I have on the front.

The spear is something I've been working on. I did some digging in my bitz box and came up with what looks like an old force weapon from a 2nd-ed librarian that looks rather interesting:

I'm considering using that weapon as the 'spear' part of Vulkan's weapon, because it's rather elaborate looking. The alternative would be to make and detail a styrene blade, which might be the better choice in the long run so that I can make the blade larger. Obviously the spear has a lot of work still to go, in any case.

The 'Gauntlet of the Forge' is a bit trickier. I'm looking at a couple different power fist variations that might work, but I'll come back later with more about that, because I'm not sure what I want to do yet.