Thanks :) But I literally tried painting that fine crinkled line and that grid effect. A combination of my eyes not being sharp enough, my brush tip not being pointy enough, and my hand-eye-coordination not being good enough prevented me from achieving it. But practice will get me there, I'm sure.
After a bit of an absence, I'm coming back to my Nomads as well. I had been delaying expanding my Zond force for a long time, knowing that a resculpt of the old Zonds was imminent. But when they finally came out, I really didn't like them. On top of that, they were plastic, and my experiences with the Vostok had been meh. Then I remembered that which REM models you take is basically a free-for-all with the proxy rules, so I went shopping for the ones I liked the most. And since I've been using the old Dronbots for my NCA, I landed on the new ones. They look super cool, and being newish releases, I knew the assembly would be a breeze (which it was). It even makes sense fluff wise, since it wouldn't be there first time Nomads "borrowed" PanO tech. As these have to work for all three of my Nomad sectorials as well as vanilla, I went for a neutral main color of my scheme that I hadn't used on other REMs before, cream. To make them not too bland, I added a little bit of blue, but that's it. The freehands were especially fun and helped break up the chassis a bit more. Transductor Vertigo
I just checked, and apparently I never posted my Duroc/McMurrough here. Duroc McMurrough Since I didn't like the current McMurrough model, I decided to save myself some work and simply magnetize the good boy onto two different bases, one KF, one Corregidor. As always with my Kosmoflot troops, the color scheme inspiration came from Nivanh Chantara:
Thank you! I had the good luck to grab this guy immediately after he was added to Tunguska. Seriously one of the coolest models ever made imo. I thought a long time about what colors to give him. As he is a priest, I thought maybe to give him a purple or red stola. But in the end I felt that was too bright. So instead I opted to add some gold to his coat to give him some baroque splendor. Also, no idea why that face looks so grainy. Must be the camera. It's honestly the smoothest face I've painted pretty much ever.
Someone once told me that for each line troop in the game, CB sculpts one trooper with the same pose: Standing up, gun raised, aiming. Apparently, that's true: I think the reasoning went along the line of having a model to demonstrate LoF on, but who knows. The important thing is that it makes this pose the quintessential line troop for every faction. Following that logic, it would make sense to make this mini the first one you paint for your army. Well, I seem to have failed to do that. This was one of the minis I had already sold away (just like the male Interventor), just to get them back again when the guy decided he wouldn't play Tunguska after all. He would have stayed in my painting queue even longer, had the new fireteam rules not made a 5-man Securitate core much more viable – so viable that I built a list with them for my next game. So this guy's time had finally come. Also, with BS15 B3 being somewhat competitive now, a Securitate Feuerbach suddenly became part of my list as well. So I decided to make a post-painting conversion, using the Spitfire part from the Tsyklon: Good enough, I'd say. For that same game, I added a paramedic. And so I also finished this lady. Had her converted from the standard combi loadout, because I don't need four combis. With her, I now – finally – have all the Securitate models painted. Consequently, here's the family shot:
We could play the game of finding the bases poses, there are more than one repeating over the full range; the base soldier one is the most obvious as it goes in the same kind of troop. It's like CB used some kind of plan, but not for conversions (unless you want to mix across factions).
It's pretty common (not Infinity specific) and, to me, there's two main reasons : - from a game purpose it could ease identification of specific profile (ie; arm pointing a direction is usually a squad leader or any sort of higher rank) - there's also a limited set of "making sense" postures for combat (even if CB like to propose ballet dancer sniper aiming on one foot and even more cinematic poses)
I'm up for that game :P I mean, yes. But there are also a lot of poses CB could do but doesn't. If you look at the STL landscape out there, you see some crazy (cool) stuff. I'm not really complaining though. Give me "one leg up, facing left, aiming with sidearm" any day of the week. Will never get old for me. In any case, I've finally started up my Kosmofem project again. More Ariadnan ladies coming these next weeks. First up: Margot Berthier. With Mr. Duroc, that's 66pts done. I gave her a Kaplan helmet to tie her in with my Paracommando and because I still prefer not painting faces. Also, how's she gonna drop into that Deployment Zone without a helmet? Come on, guys :P Here's the team:
I would argue 'how would the enemies know that they're facing a hero if they wear a helmet' ? That's also a common trend, not only for miniatures but also in movies. But yes, I understand and agree your point.
CB had some crazy poses in the past but not anymore, like the sneaky Nomads. And still lacks some you can easy see in "boring" WW2-to-now models (or I have not been paying attention latelly and they finally copied all them).
Again, I'm not even mad. I still love all the models. So to keep in line with that, here's another "one leg up facing left" ;) This is my female Unknown Ranger. It's the Tankhunter model with the right arm from the Ariadnan Spec Ops and a spare plastic shield I had from... somewhere. Again, I tried to emulate the color choices of an artwork by Nivanh Chanthara:
I miss the super-fluid, interesting poses of the hand sculpts: The crouching ninja hacker had a pose based on the diskobolos of Myron, one of the greatest movement-capturing sculptures of the ancient world. That’s the mini that got me into Infinity. The old Zeros -still- stand up to the test of time. The cutesy/ridiculous catgirl Daktari, the pinup-style Lizard pilot, etc etc… great sculpts that the 3Ds just can’t touch, IMO.
That the current design policy do not want to continue, IMO. There is nothing in the 3D process that makes impossible to repeat them; what is more, the new system allows tweaking over and over with less issues than before.
Thank you! I really like the process as well. Gives me the chance to get creative with colors on my wet palette :) I'm not sure what you mean with the Ninja hacker and the Diskobolos. These two seem to me to be two very different poses. Which doesn't mean you're wrong about the Ninja – it's one of my all time favorites as well and the first infinity mini I ever painted :) Speaking of Zeros, however, I totally agree. Had a lot of fun painting my favorite of the three again as part of another commission last week: Spoiler: More pictures I put another pop culture reference in there, for those of you who enjoy guessing what it is ;) (hint: it's on one of the Moderators)
The diskobolos was resculpted by a lot of greeks, then etruscans and romans: the one you have there is one of the most fully rotated. The ninja is in a similar pose, just less rotated up top, more splayed-out on the legs. It’s not the exact pose, just reminiscent enough that I thought it looked like a reference. I’m not catching the pop culture reference btw… is it in the coloration of the male Moderator?
And yet somehow 95% of the poses are really static and echo the same pose across factions. It’s probably less a matter of potential than of productivity. Using the same dollies for multiple sculpts is easy and must be satisfying in some ways: breaking or radically reposing dollies is not as easy and doing it for single sculpts is inefficient. Also you have to get mold and metal flow right, and those fixed boring poses do at least have known properties for casting. Compare that to hand sculpts, where you had cast skeletons at most, more often starting from scratch on each sculpt. Experimentation would be easier there… not always successfully (vaulting Wulver sculpt for example) but frequently with good results as the sculptors got better. For some reason skirmishers worked out way better than line troops. Here’s hoping that more experimentation with poses gets encouraged as they try to find ways to sell new model lines and sectorials. An MRRF full of Metros who are mostly doing parkour like the SoF Massacre vault pose would be a great way to sell people on buying line troops all over again instead of proxying, for example. Or some reintroduced Exrah which might have more-human features, but scary bug-like poses. Etc., etc.
