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I've come to thinjin about how I wills made my riptide and liked the idea of circuits but I had mixed responses so far. If younshined that the riptide was fully painted and assembled and that under circuits was dark sanD; what would you think of this base for this model?

It looks pretty cool, but I think the problem is justifying why there would be giant circuit boards just lyin' around on the floor on a battlefield.

That's exactly what I've been told... So if anyone can think of a good enough justification if be pleased to here it since my tau knowledge is very limited

because you are ripping through a mechanicum complex, and the fight rolled into the memory bank/STC storage silo. A recovery mission went out of hand and turned into an orgy of STC/memory bank or whatever else destruction.

You will need to place some type of suitable forge-world flooring/debris/basing on all of your models.

I think you could pull it off if you painted the boards so they looked more like high tech debris.

@ poda_t. Unless I'm missing something that only explains why there are circuits but not why they're so huge.

@ depraved, so how would I do that? Rust effects maybe?

olim wrote:
@ poda_t. Unless I'm missing something that only explains why there are circuits but not why they're so huge.

@ depraved, so how would I do that? Rust effects maybe?

it's 38'000 years into the future--why do they even continue to use steam engines and inefficient mechanical components, and why is the cloning and genetic technology so badly developed? Look at the models. The bolt-gun is massive by comparison, competing with an IRL SAW for size, and then the IG lasguns.... is there a reason why the standard infantryman is carring a fire-arm 5 feet in length from barrel to stock? is there even a reason that heavy bolters have a muzzle so large it looks like it should actually be an anti-tank weapon?

Nothing has to make sense. It's a fantasy future, and a very badly scripted one. Nothing needs to be explained.

edit: OH! OH OH! and the tau rifles which are 6 feet long. because handling a 6-foot long weapon isn't the slightest problem when you're struggling to be 5 feet tall.

Hahaha, you have a definate valid and amusing point there.

The key scratch building is not just picking what would be interesting to use, but making it unrecognizable.

You want viewers to think that Riptide is standing on some destroyed computer system. Not "oh look, RAM from his old laptop"

Figure out how to chop/cut/paint to accomplish that, and it will look good. Your painting skills are obviously up to the task.

You could stick some lumps of GS/clay in there as molten slag, pepper them with the smaller pieces from the boards to give the appearance of larger machines/computers which have just been blasted. Maybe slot one or two of the larger chips from the ram in there like server blades/towers. As larger panels for flooring though, I think the chips etc are just too large for the scale.

Personally, I'm not a big fan of it. I'm just not seeing circuit boards that big as fitting visually at that scale. Maybe having them inside of a large piece of wreckage, like a chunk of the crashed Aquila wreckage? Don't mind me if you like it though, since that's the most important thing.

what just occurred to me is maybe tau ship wreckage might be an idea. Ships need one heck of a lot of gizmodos to keep themselves together, maintain all of the systems and keep everyone on board alive, breathing and informed.

one or two tau dead would be okay, but the real kicker would be to take advantage of the fact that tau take allies: dead humans, dead orks, and whatever else, and your force is what managed to scrape itself out of the wreckage intact.

I like the idea, but when I look at it, all I see is a Tau model standing on top of memory sticks I can't suspend disbelief to imagine them as anything other than out of scale memory sticks.

If you integrated it in to some actual wreckage it could be interesting, though green circuit boards look very "80's/90's" rather than "futuristic" to me.

I dunno, I like the idea, I'm not sure how you could implement it well though.

my thoughts too, a random riptide standing on some random chips.

Transformers showdown?

I think they're simply too recognizable, at this point. They needn't be computer chips - they can be entire computers, servers, control panels, or completely unrelated machinery. In scale, those pins could carry fluid instead of electrical signals, making the chips filters, heat exchangers, etc. We don't know and we don't need to (40k is future-fantasy; anything that looks like it could have a vaguely plausible function works, even if we can't identify just what it might be). We only need to lose the idea that they're full-size circuit boards slapped under a ~28mm model.

Paint will help, in that regard, as will modifying the shape. Break out a saw and redefine the edges of the boards. If they're to be wreckage, take clippers and pliers to them to really drive that point home. The pieces look too intact right now to be scrap, but they're not piled neatly enough for their placement to appear intentional, either (unless the Riptide was some sort of salvage mech, in which case why is he standing on his profits? ).

Also, consider their incorporation into the rest of the base. If they're sitting on top of sand, is the model in a desert or on a beach? If so, how did the [whatever the boards represent] get there? Ancient tech emerging from the sand as wind erodes a dune? Fell recently from a destroyed ship or off a crumbling building? In either of those cases, time or their own impact would likely bury them, at least partially, in the sand. Building the basing up and over the edges will help create a more cohesive base than a pile of boards on top of flat grit, as well as hinting at a deeper logic for why the scenery exists (again, even if we don't know the reason, the mere suggestion of one still works).

I think they should be broken up and and scattered around, then once painted they wouldn't be so in your face computer parts but just broken bits from a factory or something.

boda t is spot on, nothing has to make sense, its so far into the future who knows what the hell sort of things they would have lying around on the floor.

So what about bits of cut up circuit like this, except the sand will have an ink first and I could submerge the circuit scrap in sand at one end or have it partially burried.

I think that looks much better and will look even better once painted. Once the circuits are painted it will blend better with the model.

I wasnt intending on pairing the circuits, I thought they looked exactly how circuits should already... Does it really need to be a different colour?

I think it will help to bring them into the 40k world instead of looking like a chopped up computer. The difference in sheen and texture between the model and the circuits is kind of jarring. Paint would bring them together into a single piece. But if you like the look then go for it.

If like to hear some suggested not too slow ways of painting them if anyone has any ideas? Maybe about two / three hours tops.


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Edit: I'm a slowish painter

good stuff good stuff! I'm thinking you'll actually NEED to create a few pieces of "armor" from plasticard to finish the look of the chips.

EDIT: or, more specifically not, armor but casing. And cables.

Even though the client of this commission gave me free choice of how i paint it, I decided to discuss this with him as how it would be based.
The end result was this:

Just like sand looks better when you paint and drybrush it on a base, priming and painting the circuits will make them seem more 'tangible' as a part of the same world the model walks in. It reduces the suspension of belief.

A propane torch would do some interesting things to a pile of memory sticks. But dear god don't do it inside. And get a respirator mask. This whole idea is cool, and having a mess of outdated computers in the closet makes me wonder what kind of conversion/basing goodies I could get out of them. But... still looks pretty much like random computer bits on dirt. It needs structural debris of some kind. As in, the stuff the circuit boards were in before they got all blown up.

JWMarines wrote:
A propane torch would do some interesting things to a pile of memory sticks. But dear god don't do it inside. And get a respirator mask. This whole idea is cool, and having a mess of outdated computers in the closet makes me wonder what kind of conversion/basing goodies I could get out of them. But... still looks pretty much like random computer bits on dirt. It needs structural debris of some kind. As in, the stuff the circuit boards were in before they got all blown up.

rip it apart, buy yourself an imperial sector or two, carefully mix the two together and you have yourself a mechanicum data storage facility. Either that, or administratum complex.

That looks much better now. I still think you should paint them, maybe it would be too time consuming for you though, it's up to you how much time you want to invest.

As far as "how" to paint them, you basically need to just pick a colour scheme and paint them to a similar standard to the rest of the model so it actually looks like part of the same "scene" if you want to think of it that way. Basically, at the moment, the green on the circuit boards is flat, but the model itself has highlighting/shading, so I think if you paint the circuit boards to have highlighting/shading similar to the model itself, it'll blend a lot more smoothly.