It’s a general problem with S2 heavy infantry in power armor, that there proportions doesn’t work most of the time on most miniatures. If the body underneath the armor would be modeled first, the proportions will be right. But once the power armor is added, the figure won’t be looking too human, as the armor is widening every part of the body, while leaving length more or less untouched. Modeling the armor first, the miniature loos human, but once you try to figure out the person underneath it, things won’t add up. Even S5 Heavy infantry has this problem, even though you can say that the human inside only covers parts of the arms and legs.
I can't find the image (I think it's got lost on the old forum), but at some point Bostria had a diagram showing how the S5 HI designs start with a standard human figure and layer everything on top, with the feet being in the 'shin' of the armour's legs, and the hands being halfway up the armour's forearms.
I know. Bostria even talked about it, during the Wildfire presentation. The problem for S5 comes with the head and neck. In general CB covers this up to a great optical extend and you have to take a really close lock.
Thing is that the head is off-proportion to the rest of the body, even if the miniature is an S2, the head is too large and very round which makes it more reminiscent of how a non-digital sculptor of slightly less experience might do it. The original render was a bit off size as well (very off given the assumption that it was going to be an S5), but not to this degree. Unless Defiance offers something extreme in terms of gameplay, this looks like a hard-pass and hopefully they won't make character units out of these ones.
The render and the painted model appear to be identical apart from the viewing angle and camera position. My guess (as someone who used to be a professional photographer) is that the render was 'shot' with a longer focal length so that the comparative sizes of the parts is shown better, while the painted model was photographed from a closer viewpoint which will distort the comparative sizes of the parts. The camera position is clearly much higher for the painted model as you can see the top of the HMG and ammo box.
Well, the Qiang Gao was sculpted by Javier Urena. I haven't had a single miniature from him that I didn't like (luckily he mostly designs Nomads and YuJing). So even if the head might look a bit big I would wait till we see the miniature in action (maybe at Gencon?). I myself liked the render.
The render's eyebrows seem to be at a more... V-shaped. I'm more than willing to accept that the painter that painted it flattened a lot of details, but I've got Sun Tze v1 in front of me and the proportions are elegant on Sun while on this dude it's... blunt.
You can see him properly again in the new defiance video from different angles: I didn't like the render to begin with so for me it is certainly a taste thing.
Looks a lot better in the video, so must be an issue with the photography setup then. So he's essentially an S2 HI with a weird HMG that we haven't seen in regular game (yet)
Well, that’s what his starting Equipment card says anyways, if you look at 1:37 minutes into the video. This also kinda explains why his, assumed, HMG doesn’t look like a normal YJ HMG. The new boarding shotgun from YJ took inspiration from the Spas12 shotgun, so one could argue that the heavy shotgun is (kinda?) like the AA12 Full-Auto shotgun, with a belt-fed ammo, rather than drum but that’s pure speculation from my part.
Haha he's got an automedkit. Just what we wanted another one of those because Krit wasn't garbage enough as it is.
He looks much better in the video! I was a little worried. This is one of those times I get envious of anyone with money.
