Forbidden Stars Ultramarines!

Hey,

I finally forced myself to get the smurfs painted. They look pretty good, I'd have done this sooner had I known how well they're going to turn out.

Onto the pics, and thanks for looking.

Praetorian Tails 3D Printed!

The package arrived! They look great.

The sprue is very thin and bends easily. That's ok, it's only there to keep the parts in one piece. The tails themselves are firm. I can apply some flex to the tip of the tail by applying pressure to it, I have no doubt that these are going to hold the torso and other bits in place. There are no blemishes that I can see, and the surface is pretty smooth. I think I'll basecoat these a bit thicker and paint them as they are, with no prior sanding.

I think I nailed the size. Especially considering I'm going to remove those balls hanging from Praetorian backs.

You can read here about why and how I designed these.

And if you like what you see, I also made them available to buy here.

Here are the pics, and thanks for looking!

Triarch Stalker Conversion & Magnetization

I finally started working on my Triarch Stalker. I bought this model almost two years ago, when I started collecting. I was waiting to get hold of some conversion bits for weapons, and later, to decide what I'm going to do about my Praetorians since one of them is driving the thing.

Onto the conversion!

As usual, the pilot has their spine integrated with the vehicle. Instead of assembling the chair and legs, I used some extra Wraith bits I had lying around to create a terminal for his spine. I had these bits available as extras from my Scythe conversions.

As for the weapon magnetization, I had waited for a very long time before I could get hold of an extra two of this thing. It made weapon magnetization easy and straightforward although more expensive. I'm fine with that, considering the insane amount of fine magnets I'd have to use to magnetize weapons without them and how finicky the result would be.

Here's what that looks like:

Pretty nice and clean!

I started using Milliput instead of Green Stuff on this model. It's a putty very similar to Green Stuff, but it's not as rubbery and dries much harder. It sands smooth much better than Green Stuff. I primed the model since taking these pics and it looks like Milliput absorbed some of the primer. You can tell where Milliput was, as the primed surface appears to be a bit less glossy when over Milliput. I think this is ok? I don't know, we'll see, but the surfaces are perfectly smooth. It was a pleasure to use.

On another topic, my 3d modeled snake tails have been printed and are on their way.

Triarch Praetorian Snake Tails in 3D

Pretty much since I started collecting Necrons, I had the idea of making Triarch Praetorians into snake men instead of people with glowy butt-balls.

Glowy Butt Balls? Really GW?

As usual, people had this idea before I did. There's another person who did this, and please take a look. It's easily one of the best Necron armies ever made.

That is definitely the direction I wanted to go in. I looked into different ways to make this work, including buying PVC pipes of different diameters to bead around a brass rod, using tape to build up a taper, nothing came close to the texture I wanted. I wanted to create snake tails that resemble the texture and feel of Wraith tails:

So I started learning how to model things in Blender, to eventually have them 3D printed!

Here's what I made. This is a fully straight tail, about 6cm long with a ~1cm blade at the tip, tapering from 5mm down to 2mm.

And here is the armature I can use to bend the model above. Blender even has an engine that will make the entire tail bend naturally based on these 4 control points you see on the side.

And here is one of the tails, put on a 32mm base for reference. I was afraid that the tails are going to be too long, but they ended up being a bit too short. Oh well, not a big deal I think.

And finally, here's all 10! I sent the order to Shapeways already. These tails will run me about $30 with shipping, printed in some high def material. Hopefully they turn out ok. It will be a few weeks before they're done and delivered.

EDIT: They are done! Here's how they turned out.

Deathmarks Done!

Not much to say here. These were a joy to paint.

On to a new model, working on something big...

Thanks for looking!