I apologise if this has been questioned and answered elsewhere, I'm not keeping too up to date just at the moment. How will this change affect the costing of the miniatures? I've a preference for metal, but a good quality 'plastic' can be much nicer to work with. I know of an excellent company who had some of the best metal models on the market at the time, they went to pre-painted plastics and flopped (very sad, thankfully for me Infinity filled their void). But that hopefully isn't the case here - so I shall be interested in seeing how this goes. I think the Vostik remote is a great way for me to test the water here providing the price is right. *edit: #Mob of Blondes - wasn't finecast just a poor quality (soft?) resin that looked like swiss cheese due to the air bubbles all over?
I've had some time at home now and I've gone with a comb over the comparison "can you tell the difference" picture and unfortunately I can. Also not sure who primed and assembled them but either they've done a terrible job or both models have weird issues. Left model is the metal one, right side is the not-Siocast. To start with, who the hell assembled the metal model, is that bubbly nonsense on the left side of "head" overspilled glue, weirdly dried polyurethane primer or what? Also, nice mold slip on the model's right wing :| Going over to the Siocast one though, what the heck are those weird droplike protrusions all over the place? More primer leaks or plastic that was not cleaned up? What's up with the huge loss of detail and basically meltdown on the same side of the "head" as the bubbles on the metal one? Why the loss of three-dot detail on the left "wing"? What's the weird "connection" at the neck and how are we supposed to remove that without damaging the edge? The treads have more of the "droplet issues" and the right front leg has a clearly visible mold slip that goes along all of the leg, is still visible in the "X" of the detail, as well as a shadow of scraping across the whole mid-front of the leg - even though the image is even more overexposed and unfocused than the metal mini's. There's also more of the "mold leak" kinda stuff under the right wing. It's really weird. Hope the final versions will be better.
I think it would do CB well to market this as "high performance polyamide/nylon plastic". I remember the disaster that was the GW finecast release and I think plenty of people have that kind of knee-jerk response whenever they hear that a metal mini is being replaced by plastic. If I remember correctly, finecast was a 2 part, cast polyurethane. Casting allows for fine features, similar to why metal cast models have so much detail, but it is very prone to bubbles due to the mixing process and the fact that it gels fairly fast - so if you didn't get the bubbles out fast enough they end up trapped in features of the mold. Polyurethane is also chemically attacked by acetone and isopropanol, so quite hard to strip I imagine (never had any of them myself). According to this chart, nylon should resist acetone, but its probably not a good idea to use isopropanol. Interestingly though, it resists ethyl alcohol (vodka :p) as well as methyl alcohol (denatured alcohol/methylated spirits). The issues you point out are more to do with the silicone mold that the polymer, especially when it comes to the small "bridging" between features that you point out. As mentioned, the polyamide flows very well, which means if the mold doesn't seal perfectly then the injection pressure will cause some polymer to escape. Luckily, since these are plastic, you just need a small pair of wire cutters or your hobby knife to clean them up. Silicone molds enable significantly more feature complexity, such as undercuts and other features that would lock a part in a metal mold, but at the cost of reduced tolerances and small leaks. Assuming this is early days for CB with this process, I expect they will improve as they tune their clamping and injection pressures, as well as develop design standards for molded features to reduce leak paths.
Yeah, it's interesting to see how one mold uses a circular layout, same than spin casting, while other uses a grid-like layout, which is what I have seen in Siocast demos.
I don't mind the "droplets", etc, but the bubbling or incredible loss of detail on the plastic model are very concerning. Like, this? This is horrible and I hope this is glue or just a semimelted model or whatever.
Doing a little bit of research... Siocast's website has photos of sample molds that look very much like the ones in this thread, they're based in Spain, and they have some photos on their site of the kickstarter orcs by Fausto (sculptor of Morats, Chaksa, and a bunch of other things). It all adds up for me. Now I just need to see if I can buy any models in that material in the immediate future.
Some random speculation. Could the move to plastics open up CB’s side games like Defiance to general game store release? Could we see the first S2 models in the form of an Aristeia update? Interesting times.
Check out the very first post in this thread - you can see the parts breakdown and the pieces in an unassembled and unprimed state. The entire center is one piece, which I don't love, but could explain some detail loss on the sides of the "head" area. The little bits sticking out look like they're standard pinprick vents in the molds that weren't properly trimmed.
Siocast blog has pictures of color casts, so boardgame minis are possible. Plastic Soldier Company sells old CB 15mm. Siocast site sells a sampler box. And I'm trying to remember brands that also uses the system... EffinCool & Dark Maenad mention it in their KS... but general release to shops?... Hungry Troll and Scale 75 (these two I can confirm with the Siocast gallery)... probably Yedharo and Last Sword Minis, oh, and Avatars of War (they say it clearly in the shop pages).
This hits too close to homeConfrontation blew my mind back than, and then I was devastated by the events that followed...so it's obvious I'm extremely doubtful. I don't know why, but for some reason I have this exact "itch" On one hand I understand why they decided to utilize this material - cost effectiveness, etc. This will probably also give opportunity to huge miniatures such as Megalodron (other question is do we really need it in skirmish game). On the other hand I would much more prefer if they continued to improve assembly of metal miniatures, rather than wasting energy and resources on new material. Even new miniatures sometimes needs to be bended in some way or another, dunno how this plastic will behave. Looking forward to future updates!
I checked out the Yedharo store; I’ve got some of their resin orcs from a kickstarter, and their models are heavily featured on the Siocast page. Everything on the Yedharo store is labeled as being resin, however. I sent them an email asking about the material, and I’ll see if they get back to me.
Creature Caster also jumped on the Siocast freight train. There are videos of miniature assembly on youtube if people are interested.
I don't mind at all. Assembling big heavy metal TAGs and fiddly metal three way joins (arm, rifle, arm) was never my favourite part of the hobby. If this keeps costs down, great. If this helps get more aristeia stuff out, even better
The price doesn't change, quoting a Bostria's post: "Price will stay the same. This allows us to avoid increasing the price due to the whte metal becoming crazy high these days. We really did not wanted to increase the price of our products."
I had few fine cast minis during my 40K necron times. It was the most brittle shit ever. Super hard to clean up mold imperfections, and believe me there were many. Wouldn't take glue, one arm just kept falling off from my overlord. Not easy to paint also.
It was a sort of "plasticised" resin that was supposedly a lot safer to work with than normal resin. Forgeworld did a lot of resin at the time (probably still does) and I didn't have much problems with that so it was odd to me that they'd throw away the expertise the had through Forgeworld to launch an inferior product in every way I can think of, including price.
The only thing that concerns me is the lack of detail on the plastic model, where the "bubbly nonsense" lies on the metal. There's something weird about both of these features. I can potentially chalk the one on the right to some image post-processing too but well, it is weird. Everything else takes more time to write about than to fix. Still, you have an amazing eye for details and I'm jealous of it.
Naw, it's physical and it kinda looks like a poor cast unfortunately. The images are blurry and overexposed, as well as the minis are primed, which doesn't really help to check for differences because a lot can hide under the light and the primer layer. Can't wait to see the raw cast models, pre-cleanup. Cheers, it's probably more of the experience with tons and tons of models of different companies and materials. You start seeing the same kinds of stuff here and there. I hope the loss of detail area is just an unfortunate casting mistake while CB is learning the process and they just didn't cherry pick the best possible model for the comparison, which seems like a fair thing to do.
