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This is such an amazing thread. The gs work on the coats and stuff inspires me a lot for when I do my plague marines I think. but of course their coats will be covered in goo and filth. The poses are great too and the sculpted fist with flames?! Skills man. I would love to play against this.

Whoa. Okay. The oblits are sounding pretty cool already. Your first pic wasn't showing up for me, but I copied and pasted the pic address and it worked. God warrior from Nausicaa, right? Not what I envisioned from your description, but I think it'll end up being pretty awesome all the same.

Looking forward to the oblits. I've seen youy sculpt before (well, the pic sof the results anyway), so I'm curious. I still have 6 unassembled oblits, mainly becasue I don' tlike the minis, so maybe I'll be looting some ideas for them here

Cool army you should show everything with the fur even the raptors that would look awsome

"If there was a guy in that suit of armor, his nuts would have to be rubbing up on his nipples."

lol

I would put this in my bio thingy but i have no idea how.

Cant wait.

Have you considered pipe cutters for the alluminium tubing? Not certain you would get one that goes that small but you would have a perfect cut every time.

omgitsduane wrote:The gs work on the coats and stuff inspires me a lot for when I do my plague marines I think.

So, dirty little secret, the gs work on these models was also designed to look good in a nurgle army. I knew straight away that I wouldn't be making a slaanesh army (best fluff, awful models/rules), or tzeentch (I wanted a choppier army). I hadn't yet decided by the time I was working on my first model, and only finally came to a decision right before it was time to paint him. As such, while I was modelling, I wanted something that would go well with either khorne or nurgle. Skulls obviously fit both of them pretty well, and I figure that fur would make a nurgle model look GROSS, while still looking brutal on a khorne model.

Zefig wrote:God warrior from Nausicaa, right? Not what I envisioned from your description, but I think it'll end up being pretty awesome all the same.

Yeah, shows me to hotlink. I've got it up on my server now.

Basically, I was thinking of making tech-monsters, which is what that picture is in reference of. We'll see how much of that I actually pull off, though.

Olenos wrote:I would put this in my bio thingy but i have no idea how.

Click on your name in the large orange block letter menu near the top to adjust your settings.

Perkustin wrote:Have you considered pipe cutters for the alluminium tubing? Not certain you would get one that goes that small but you would have a perfect cut every time.

I have a pipe cutter from when I once accidentally bought stainless instead of aluminum (oops), though I don't like it for aluminum tubing. Firstly, as you note, these tubes are small in diameter, and even a small pipe cutter is a rather cumbersome instrument, and I'd like to see what I'm doing. Secondly, it's not necessary - aluminum is soft enough to just use a knife for. Thirdly, and most importantly, pipe cutters work by applying normal stress (by winching the little knob to lower the blade), and then using torsion to turn that into shear stress to cut the tube. Basically, you have to twist the rest of the pipe with enough force to get the blade to cut it. The problem with this method is that thin, small diameter aluminum tubing can't really have any torque applied to it, or the rest of the tube will just bend and mangle horribly.

As such, I need something that applies shear force without also requiring torque on the fragile tube itself, thus rolling it under a hobby knife.

So, the saga continues...

The first thing I was going to have to do next was to get the pieces of large-lower-leg tubing into some sort of shape that's a close approximation to what the end result will be. This means that I'm going to need to make two cuts. The first will be at the top to accomodate the knee pit. The second will be at the front to accomodate the front of the foot. Basically, I'm trying to turn a tube into a regular CSM lower leg.

For the top, I started by wanting to make a cut that came JUST in from the absolute front of the tube down at a roughly 45 degree angle towards the back. I didn't go all the way to the front in part because that would have made it more difficult to cut, but also in part because I actually want a partially flat face on the front (looking at the terminator armor again).

Interestingly enough, to make this cut I didn't actually have to have the knife perpendicular to the tube. I guess perhaps because I wasn't scoring all the way around it. In any case, I just needed to put the knife down and gently rock the tube left and right until it punched through.



Once I got to here, I did do the no-no of just pushing down a bit to lightly score the inside of the other half of the cut. Once I had it in a bit, I actually cut along the line with the tip (like cutting plasticard) until it was scored enough that I could just peel off the remainder with my fingers.

The front cut was much the similar. Instead of going from nearly the back to a cut up the front, I went from about halfway to the front. I want there to be more bulk in the back of these, and the ankle pit needn't be so large as the knee's.

The end result was something that doesn't look terribly dissimilar to penne pasta:



Looking at this at this point, though, it was clear that I would be needing to do more work. All CSM power armor flares out at the bottom, and these legs don't. I came up with a few concoctions to make a faux-flare, like having pistons attach at the bottom or something, but I just couldn't quite see it in my mind.

At this point, I fell off the sanity wagon. Surely, there must be some way to just add GS to 3/4 of a tube in such a way where you still get the nice front curve of the tube, wile also having a flat, even, smooth curve over the rest of the tube in the way that I wanted it, right? Of course, if I mucked it up, I'd basically be restarting this whole project, and I hate restarting things.

But, of course, this project was designed to make me a better sculptor, to show what I CAN accomplish, not just what I'm currently capable of. Flaming power fist debacle be damned!

I broke out the GS and applied roughly equally portioned blobs onto the backs of the legs in roughly the shape I wanted it.



Of course, this looked awful. Not only is it not smooth due to the finger prints, but it was also lumpy, which simply wouldn't do. I did a little knife work, using the flat of the blade to smooth out the most egregious breaches of smooth. The problem, though, was at this size, my xacto knife blade just wasn't big enough to handle everything on its own. It was time for my secret weapon.

What I did was to take a pristine piece of plasticard that I knew would be smooth. Then I put down the leg on it's side and ROLLED it. Just like a blob of dough on a rolling pin. Not only did the smooth surface of the plasticard obliterate any fingerprints, but the flatness caused the lumps to get smushed out, leaving me with a perfect arc of greenstuff on the back of the leg.

Believe me, though, the whole time it was me going between "why do I possibly think this will work?" to "how can this possibly be working?"

Once done, the front where the GS gave way to the aluminum would need a little work (and probably will until this project is completed), but the end result was gold. 8 little shakos on my desk.



Once that was cured, I went over them and cleaned them up some. I also noticed that they didn't quite look right. Looking back at my berzerkers, I quickly discovered the problem. CSM power bell-bottoms not only come up in the front, but they also come up in the back. I quickly got to work with my knife (which had been RUINED by cutting the aluminum), and cut up the heel of the lower leg.



Once I got to this point, I felt I could safely put some of the armature together a bit more. I'm still not at the point where I can glue it down without a bit more work, but I'm close enough to do more assembly.

While putting the rest of the leg together would be easy, they needed to attach to something. As I don't have tubing nearly wide enough to build the pelvis, abdomen, or chest, I usually make crude plasticard frames for the GS to sit on top of. This case was no different.

I started by screwing in a fresh blade and cutting a strip of plasticard 1.5cm wide (my crappy ruler has had the imperial side's numbers all but rubbed off), and then out of that strip cutting pieces 2cm long. I then measured about how tall I would want the pelvis, and cut that out, leaving a thin strip left.

Then I cut down the front and back pelvis pieces to an angle that I wanted. In picture form, this looked like this:



At this point, I realised that my pelvis would be way too wide. Not, perhaps, for the legs, but because I've also got to put fur on the outside, and then a second layer of hip armor (a la terminators), which would make the model way too squat, or way too big in general. Remember, you can always bulk up, but you can only ever cut down to the armature.

As such, I actually narrowed the with some to about 1cm. After that I cut off a few more strips at how wide I wanted the pelvis to be on the balls to butt axis. This was actually something that I could make rather wide as it would be bulking out the model against the legs, rather than making the legs too far apart. Oblits need junk in the trunk.

Once those pieces were chopped up and glued together, I got a basic pelvis onto which I could attach my legs.



You will notice right away that these are pretty crude. Firstly, I've never claimed much skill with plasticard compared to GS. Secondly, and most importantly, this is going to be structural. No one is ever going to see this. I used to be that guy who was so meticulous that I would paint the bottoms of my model's feet, even if the shoe would then proceed to be glued down flat to the base because "I would know" if I cut corners.

Firstly, I can't remember which models I did this for, and secondly, you really can't take this attitude with scratchbuilding, at least not at this stage of it. Burnout is your enemy, and your sword speed and your shield efficiency.

Once this was done, it was a simple matter of gluing the two parts of the leg together. Basically, I put in a big blob of GS, dabbed lightly with glue, and smushed the small tube into the lower leg at the angle that I want. Of course, I'd like not to have to do this, instead waiting until I can do a better job with the pose, but in this case there are just too many uncontrolled variables. I have to curb the chaos before I can start doing meaningful posework. As such, I just bent the legs at common angles, and figured that it would all just work out from there.

Once done, I now have the beginnings of assembling the lower part of the model.



Of course, before I put things down on their bases, I've got to do some finishing work. The base of the legs looks nice, but the ends of the tubing still look awful and need to be cleaned up, which I figure will be easier before the model is glued down. Once that bit of detail work is done, I'll be able to put down on the bases, and start working on these models in my more customary fashion.

This is way out my league but I'm following along closely, I have seen your work on other threads and know this will be as amazing.

No pressure or anything. It's not like you have any sort of rep on Dakka as a premiere scratch-build sculptor or anything. Just relax and have fun!

lol. No pressure at all.

Actually, I've found over time that working with GS is mostly mental. Once you've gotten down the basic skills, whether or not you can do something is more based on intimidation than on actual difficulty. Something looks insanely challenging, and then you actually do it, and find out that it isn't.

Anyways, more work to show...

As mentioned, now that I've gotten the structure of the lower leg down, I feel like I can assemble everything below the waist now. Having more bulk around will make things easier to do the details with, as it will give me more to hang onto while I work with my knife. I'm still not gluing them to the bases yet, though, because I'm not certain that said detailing will be possible (or, rather, easy) without being able to have free range with the knife.

Aluminum tubing, plasticard, and greenstuff, when they're all superglued together, are pretty tough, especially when you have a couple of layers. You can't do said layers, though, without the layer beneath it being strong enough to resist the stresses put upon it when you're smearing GS around. As such, when assembling the armature, you've always got to have an extra sharp eye for stability.

What stability means in this case is making sure that GS is combined with other materials, rather than being freestanding. What it means is that plasticard gets glued with lots of surface area to other plasticard, and aluminum tubing.

To start with, I've paired up my legs and then spent some time thinking about how I want to attach them. It's still not as good of posework as when working with plastic, but I still sort of don't have a choice. I've just got to go with posing intuitively, remembering how other things were assembled that also looked good.

Once I know how the piece of tubing is going to attach, I first start out by carving a notch in the plasticard. This will give me a little bit of surface area of tubing directly on pelvis:



Of course, the location and shape of the notch is dependent on where the leg top will be, and at what angle. The point is to make sure that it's not just the rim being glued down to plastic.

Once that's done, you need to have some sort of a way to really put some support in there. In this case, I'm going to be using little pieces of plasticard and GS to act as the "head" of the "ball joint".

To start with, I put down a whiff of superglue, and then put in a glob of GS. Then I put down some superglue on the piece of plasticard and jam it in there, right through the GS. The point is to have the plasticard piece actually make contact with the aluminum, with the GS to hold it all in place.



Then I basically do the same thing on the pelvis, putting down some GS, putting glue on the other side of the plasticard piece, and then jamming it into the pelvis piece, making sure that the plasticard piece actually touches plasticard, with some glue in there



Then it's a matter of getting the legs into the pose you like (adding more GS as necessary), and then laying down a light amount of superglue. The superglue does not cure the GS, but it doe sort of "fix" the outer surface, preventing distortion from things like gravity, but still being pliable.

Then you just do it with the other leg and let it cure.



And then do it 3 more times, in my case...



Once the GS cures, the joint will be strong enough to pack a lot more GS in there to really fill it in. Once that GS is cured, the joint will be stable enough for me to do whatever I want without the legs just sort of ripping off at the hip.

While the second round of GS on the hips was curing, I also did the ankle. All of these models will be in such a way where one of their legs is sticking up off of the ground. That means, like with the hip, you've got to do some work to really anchor that stuff in, or else the model will just flake right off the base the first time you drop it.

Like with the hip, I'm going with plasticard and GS, but that alone isn't going to cut it. I don't have any aluminum tubing that I particularly care to use for this, so instead I'm going to use steel wire. This will mean I'm basically pinning the model to the base.

To do this, I cut more small pieces of plasticard. I couldn't find my usual steel wire, so I just used some guitar wire I had lying around instead.



As you can see by the picture, you basically use GS to attach the wire to the plasticard. Not shown is that I also wrapped the GS over the wire after taking the picture. Once done, I lightly glued the ends of the plasticard piece and put on two little blobs of GS. A bit more glue on the GS balls, and the whole thing was crammed into the bottom of the leg.



Because I cared less about how the wire sat than how the hips sat, I just went ahead and packed it with more GS, pulling the wires back out when they got too far smushed in.

When it comes time to attach them to the base, I'll just bend the wire in a bit and drill out a hole(s) in the base and stick the wire through. More glue and GS, and the model will be firmly anchored to its base. As for the other foot, well the wires will still help that sucker stay on there.

Said attaching to the base will come soon. What's next is putting on the borders of the armor, and then putting in some general detail work on the leg. Once that's done, I'm not going to have nearly the same need to get in there at strange angles, so it will be time to finally put the things on the bases. After that, things will be much easier to work with.

Now that the base of the legs was complete, it was time to do the detailing. Usually I do all the detail work at the end, but as said before, I'm not sure how much detailing I'm going to be able to do once I don't have full access, so the details are going to have to go on before the model goes to base. Time to get cracking!

The first thing to do are the coarse details. Time to turn the bellbottom-shaped tubes into some armor. As this is the part that I want to make sure has the most contiguity with my berzerkers, I had no compunctions with basically ripping off the way the berzerker legs looked, except in plus scale.

To start, the leg armor needs edging. Not only will this make it look more like armor, but it will also plug those holes still gaping, and cover the overall ragged appearance of the ends of the tubing. The edging was actually as straightforward as you'd think it would be. Put down GS, smush into the rough shape, use knife to cut clean lines.

We begin where we left off:



First went the bottom edging:



And then went on the top edging:



When I explain it like this, it looks so easy, and while it certainly wasn't complex, this took a lot more work than might be let on. It may have been straightforward, but it still took me 45 minutes per edge. If I would have played it slightly smarter than I did, I would have done all of the lower left legs, followed by all the lower right legs, etc. In that way, by the time I made it back to the first model, the previous work would have had 3 hours to cure, and thus been basically proofed against smudging. Unfortunately, I didn't do it quite this way, which meant that I had to go back and redo some of my work after it took an errant thumbing.

After this, it was time to do cleanup. Several things need to be fixed as you go. For one, you will notice that there wind up being little globs of GS everywhere where they shouldn't be. As well, GS is only SO tolerant to being worked. Overworked GS will kill you every time. As such, sometimes it's better to just leave a mistake, and then cut down or build up later, once the GS is cured (and thus more manageable), and once you've had a chance to refresh yourself. In all, I spent about 20+ hours this week working on this, and by the end, my hands were starting to cramp so badly that I was starting to put down shoddy work. Once you get to the point where work will have to be redone, rather than just cleaned up, it's time to stop.

Anyways, the third, and probably most important part of cleaning up GS is that the stuff has a tendency to "mellow". As GS cures, it attempts to reduce its surface area, and sort of shrink back down into an orb as best it can. This means that flat surfaces become bowed, and nice crisp angles become soft and round. One way of handling this is to let the GS cure a bit before you start working with it, or to keep coming back every half hour or so as it cures and push it back into shape. With the sheer scale of what I'm doing though, that's impossible. Instead, I just let it mellow and then go back in and file down domed surfaces flat, and actually cut out new corners with the blade of my knife wherever I want a nice crisp angle. Of course, with models and curves and angles this friggin huge, that makes more of a challenge, so I sometimes cut something wrong and would have to fill it back in (and then re-cut it).

Anyways, once this was done, it was time to make this look more like fancy berzerker leg armor. This meant putting on some familiar patterns as applique. Some triangles here, some arrows there, a skull made it in there, as did a khorne symbol. Compared to what I did before, this was actually pretty easy. Just put down a thin layer of GS and cut it. Easy peasy.



And voila, khorne berzerker legs that are 50% larger than your regular berzerker legs. After this, of course, was more cleanup. Much, much more cleanup.

Because once I got this done, it was on to the fine detail phase. Though the most futzy, it's what separates medium quality models from nice ones (and also is usually what separates blatantly scratchbuilt from something that looks converted).

Now that I've got the basic legs, it's time to make them look like tech-monster legs. The most obvious thing that came to mind was ridiculous tubing going everywhere. I'm talking like under the olympic stadium in Akira. Actually, I'm talking about where my wife works, come to think of it. Until I can find a better picture, here's one of her adviser.



Except in a dark room, with several of these MBE systems and an endless nest of tubing descending from the ceiling.

For this, it was time to go to guitar wire. Now, I did not know just how frustrating this stuff would be to work with. Guitar wire isn't one of those things that you just bend into place and leave it at that. It's made of steel. That and it has all of this bronze wound around it, so it behaves like a spring. There is no way you could glue this stuff down on one end, and then work with it. Instead, you have to bend it into the shape that you want it, and then put the whole thing down in one go (still with GS required to get the darn stuff to stay on).

Needless to say, this was HELLA futzy, and it definitely caused some hand fatigue crimping all of this metal with pairs of needle nose pliars. In the end, though, it was done.

Once the wire and its anchors were down it was time for one last cleanup (it won't be the last cleanup, even on these legs - there's just too much room for minor improvement), and then put on the rivets. This was done with a little bit of VERY small scale plasticard rod, along with some narrow gauge aluminum wire (which thankfully didn't just smush into ovals as I feared it would) as I didn't have more of the plasticard I wanted. The "open" ports were done with brass tubing.



These legs (except for perhaps a little more cleanup) are now friggin done. This means it's time to put them on the base. The wire I had put in on the ankle will do a good enough job keeping the leg attached to the foot, but it won't be enough to attach the foot to the base. For that I would basically need to to the same thing as the ankle again.

I GSed a piece of plasticard to the wires on both legs:



And then drilled the holes in the base and smushed it all down into a big wad o' GS. Unfortunately, this caused it to ride a little higher than I'd wanted, and I'm not sure that there is a solid connection between the base, the plasticard, and the bottom of the leg, but in this case I'm just going to have to get what I get.

Which is certainly good enough.



You can see here by this picture already how my endless wrangling over making sure the model wasn't too big is justified. I'm up to the waist here, and already these models are head high on regular berzerkers. I'm going to have to keep a tight lid on height going forward.

Speaking of, the next thing is to finish off the rest of the other 4 legs (which are nearly done, but not quite), and the feet. Once that's done, I'm going to move onto the torso. Now that I've got things on a base, it won't be so bad to leave the armature still somewhat unfinished, as once again I'm going to want to make sure I have the space to do things under the arm. Certainly this project is winding up being a lot more complicated than my ogryn, where I could just assemble everything and then just work the GS directly on.

Of course, complicated doesn't necessarily mean more difficult. With the exception of the guitar wire, everything I've done so far is something that I've already done at some point on some project (if not all in the same place). Really, this complexity is just adding time. So long as I can keep things up and keep putting the hours in, this should finish out as a pretty straightforward project.

I'm sort of burnt out a bit on the legs, but as a whole, I'm still pretty eager about this project. Look for more updates soon!

That's some amazing attention to detail, and I like how clear your explanations are. Will be lurking/following/commenting!

Nice stuff - they are going to be huge. Look for to seeing more.

Fantastic work! they are really going to look awesome! and bloody huge! :-) I can't wait to see them birthed into destructive beauty!

NF09

I cant wait to see your terminator next to a guards man

Well, it's an oblit, not a terminator, but you request, and I provide:



bwahaha!

Amazing work. Genuinely inspiring. 'Bout time I picked up my daemon prince project again...

Wow your obliterators are looking amazing so far.

Thanks!

So, I've got my second oblit on its base. This one had the super-triangles for the coarse detail. For the fine detail. the lip on the top of the armor stuck out so much, I figured I could put something bigger in, so I decided to go for a pair of pistons. Very steampunk.

Those are some sexy lookin' legs, Ailaros! Really coming together nicely.

Ailaros wrote:Well, it's an oblit, not a terminator, but you request, and I provide:



bwahaha!

lol

Cant wait for more

^ me neither

Damn thing is going to be as tall as an Ogryn. Scary stuff!

I enjoy your threads so very much. Not only do you do amazing work, but you show your work as it progresses and give detailed explanations about how you have been able to do what you've done so far. Even "smaller" details like the tendency for GS to want to reform into a shapeless blob or realizing how you could have done something differently for better results are what makes -stalking- following your work worthwhile.

The scale you have achieved here is exactly what the fluff has been about the entire time but stock models rarely represent. That Oblit looks massive but not OTT by any means. I'm always impressed by the work you do and appreciate how you share the process as well as the finished product.

So, I just got the last two legs done:



This one I actually wanted to have the other leg up in a run position. Not only would you be able to see the right leg better, but it would also prevent me from having two legs with the same pose. Unfortunately, I just couldn't make it look good this way.



This one also obviously had problems. The back leg is back at a pretty sharp angle, but if I brought it up to normal, then the other leg would be really high up. That or put the other leg down, and then I'd only have two leg poses for four models...

Not only does it look a bit odd, but some of the detail is lost as well. There's actually a GSed skull on the right lower leg that you basically can't see at all...

In any case, I'm now finally done with the legs, and I can start getting on with this project.

What's coming up next is doing the feet (hooves), and chopping up the pelvis a little bit. I've been having problems with size as I'd feared, so things are going to have to be a bit more low-riding than I'd have liked.

To demonstrate, here it is compared to one of my ogryn. Now, these aren't real ogryn models (which I suspect are smaller by a fair bit), but already these things threaten to tower over this already large unit.



Ideally, I was going to make sure that these models had a real abdomen, rather than the chest-into-nuts problem of other GW models. Unfortunately, I don't see how I'm going to be able to pull this off. I don't want the model to be any taller than 50% more than its current height, or it will be too large. In fact, I wanted these models 50% bigger than my metal terminator, and the hips are already as high as the top of his head...

The legs look amazing, the final product is just going to be outstanding at this rate

Fantastic work! I was always very impressed with your guard, but look forward with to seeing more of your stuff.

So, after spending a week battling a triple digits fever, I finally got back to working on my oblits. There were only a couple of things that needed doing and the legs of these models will FINALLY be done.

The first was to do the foot. As mentioned, I wanted to do hooves for these. This started out with just putting down a hoof-sized/shaped blob of GS down to get it out of the freestanding stage.



Then I cut a notch out of the front to make the hooves cloven. I then went on and put some applique texture on. It looked great, like really old, rough hooves, heavily grooved and textured.

Then I had to put something at the back of the heel, as hooves really don't fit well into this armor. I decided to just continue with the fur motif:



Of course, it wasn't until I was done that I found I had a serious problem. Firstly, the texture of the fur looks a LOT like the texture for the hoof. They will be different colors, but this has really shaken me. It's to the point where I'm glad the hooves will be black (I'm not actually sold on the texture itself all that much anymore).

It's to the point where I'm considering either redoing the foot to be armored, or redoing the fur to be either tubes, or armor. Plus, this all makes the feet look HUGE, which is yet another example of me screwing up on the scale of something on this project. As tempted as I am to redo them, I know that if I do, I'll be broken on this project. I have to either take them more or less as is, with only one change, or I'm going to get so burned out on the detail work I'm not going to be able to continue well on the non-detail part. I just wish I knew what to do.

Oh, and it's kind of hard to see, but I've rounded off the edges of the pelvis plasticard piece and drilled some holes in it in anticipation of accepting a torso.

It will be the torso next. I'm hoping I can get going quickly enough to get my morale back in place after doing all this leg work just to end on a low note.

Glad to see you're feeling better, Ailaros. I think you may be a little harsh on yourself. I think the hooves look pretty solid, even with the fur. If you wanted, you could smooth the hooves down and then paint on the details. That may prevent having to do the whole thing over again. Excited to see you get to work on the torsos, though.

After "finishing" the legs. I fixed the hooves a bit by slathering a bit of superglue in the creases and then filing down the ridges a little bit. Now that the legs were done, it was time to work on the torso.

My plans for the torso are, like the original models, to look more like terminator torsos than berzerker torsos. The one real exception to this is that I still want to have the power pack vents coming out the back. I've got 4 sets of dragon head bitz from my vehicle acessory sprue that I'm just dying to use on them.

Also, I have an idea for how tall I want them. In order to keep their height down, I don't want them any higher than 50% their current height.

This wound up being sort of tricky, though. On the one hand, they can't be too tall, but on the other hand, they can't be too squat, while on the mutated third hand, I also have to have the torsos riding up from the pelvis a little bit to ensure that I get the fur in underneath the belt properly.

In the end, I went through three torso designs, with the first two being too wide and too tall, and the second being too tall. In the end, I got a torso with dimensions that I thought would work.



Note the measurements in millimeters. Anyways, the point is that this is going to fold up, leaving the top and bottom, but providing a nice bit of volume that will wind up getting covered in greenstuff eventually. As such, I wanted to make especially certain that the torso wasn't too wide, as I might be putting a fair amount of fur on it.

Anyways, after tapering the edges a little bit, the whole thing glued together nicely.



As you can see, I also added a couple of horizontal struts. The first support bar was put at the very bottom, flush with the bottom edge of the torso. The other was put about 2/3ds of the way up. I don't want to have it at the top because I need a pit in the torso to stick a head in later.

Once this was done, it was time to make the front of the torso smooth. For this, I repeated my technique of flaring out the legs. Some GS went on the front, and was smoothed down with the knife. Then I rolled it around on a sheet of plasticard to get it smooth, and then fixed it exactly how I wanted it with more knifework. Easy peasy. On to attaching it to the legs!

If you've been following since the beginning of this scratchbuild, you'll know I'm sort of obsessed about structural integrity. In the case of connecting the torso to the pelvis, though, this isn't much of a concern.

The biggest reason for this is surface area. There wasn't much between the lone attached foot and the base. There wasn't much between the aluminum tubing and the pelvis (indeed, I actually had one fracture while working on the leg). Between the bottom of the torso and the top of the pelvis, though, I've got two large, flat surfaces. Furthermore, this is going to be packed in with at least a couple of layers of GS, both internally, and externally once it's done. That and the higher up on the model you go, the less stress load it needs to bear.

As such, the way this is going to get attached is with a few holes drilled in the top of the pelvis, and in the support bar. I then mixed up blobs of GS, and kind of teased out a "hook" on one side. This I used to go over the torso support bar and link back up with the main GS blob, making it so that the torso bar was entirely wrapped in GS. I also made sure to poke some GS into the holes in the bar from the top.

Then I put some glue on the bottom of the blob and smushed it into the pelvis. In this way I have GS through the holes, the pelvis plasticard, the blob of GS, the torso support plasticard, and then more GS through those holes to a small amount on top. This kind of layering of plasticard and GS along with a superglue will give it a tremendous amount of surface area, and thus connectivity.

Once this was down, it was just a matter of twisting the torsos into the positions I wanted them and then applying some more surface superglue to set it for curing.





Not too shabby, actually. I overshot on height by just a little bit, but the rest of the dimensions are just like how I want them.

I know that attaching the torsos makes these models look sort of tall and skinny, but once I fill out the torso, and especially once I get the arms on, it's going to take a lot of the lankiness out of these. Also, just for reference, these minis are now just a little shy of 2" tall, making them 4/5ths the size of the current demon prince models. I would take more angst from this, if I didn't know that I'm going to be "truescaling" the demon princes up in size, so the oblits won't tower over things too badly.

After how messy the legs got, I'm glad that the torso is starting out so smoothly. My only problem from here is that I have only a very vague idea for what I want to have going forward. I guess I'll just sort of start working on it and see where I end up.

Awesome.

The stuff here is amazing! I'm totally subscribed!