Hi everybody. I'm brand new here at DAKKA DAKKA alhough I'm not new to he
40K world. I was big into Space Hulk as a kid. Recently I have been toying wih the idea of converting some Space Marines. I'm into sculpting and it would be a lot of fun to try my hand at some 'artscale' marines. This has been a very interesting thread to read so I hope you guys will bear with the longwindedness that follows.
By trade I'm a mechanical designer, so I use 3D
CAD every day and I've worked on rapid prototyping machines. At the pinnacle of my experience with the
RP printer I worked on, I made a working lab pipettor prototype (ironically wih the aid of lots of filing and an eye for small details that I had developed in part from converting & painting some Space Hulk and
40k figures back in the day.) Quite a fulfilling experience although anyone who hates trimming flash would probably disagree with this level of enjoyment... You don't know the half! It gets an order of magnitude harder when the parts have to fit AND mesh / turn / interface with other parts propely...
The other day I stopped by the NYC
GW store to window shop and check out some eye candy. Standing there, turning an Ultramarines figure over in my hand, I had the thought, 'wow these guys seemed bigger when I was 12.' This led me to find out about some of the excellent 'art scale' conversions people have posted here on DAKKA.
Personally speaking, since I'm generally pretty low in the hobby fundage area, I will want to find ways to cut costs if I begin building and converting again. I had the thought of
doing the conversions on the individual parts and then casting muliple copies of the parts. This would cut the workload of sculpting the same stuff on every single mini, and it would instead allow me to easily increase the size of my army. It would also make for novel parts combinations for each squad just like an out-of-the-box kit. Win-win-win.
Then I had the thought... Well if I want to convert some regular marines to 'art scale,' expressly because, on seeing some minis again I really disliked the scale...
Why not go to a bigger scale altogether? (disregaarding the significant amount more hand sculpting that would take...) I guess my line of reasoning was, if I'm going to put so much work into this, why not make them in a lager scale altogether? Yay, visually discernible discernible from more than 3 feet!
I would want to do this mostly for the fun of modeling again, and for the purpose of making a collection that has a unique identity. The scale-playability isn't that big an issue to me for that reason.
I don't know if GW would ever go for this but, how cool would it be to have the 40K range available in, say, 2X size for games of Kill Team!! (reverse epic scale? 
)
So I began to think - assuming I had my special-scale sculpts finished, I could use a 3D scanner to make 3D files of the sculpts, and then an
RP printer to make the 'mold masters.' File down, smooh out and clean up the masters, and then Blue Stuff them to make the molds.
As an artist and inventor I totally understand the need to protect ones' intellectual property. So the ethical / IP issues are important to me and are a bit of an impasse. While I can see that there would be a market for them, I wouldn't want to start selling, say, 2x scale figure kits, or for that matter, kits, bits or complete figures in the conventional scale. I'd have just spent a ton of time making the models and casting replicas of those parts, for the sole purpose of them being within the
40k universe but distinct from the off-the-shelf models, so I wouldn't necessarily want others to have them. Also I wouldn't do it because, while I will still be a
GW customer regardless, because I have respect for the skill of the artists they employ, and because I know that they could argue infringement in court (the 'substantial likenes' clause if I'm not mistaken).
I'm not looking to get in trouble, and I don' want to step on other peoples' toes; I just want to make some cool stuff.
As for the idea of GW changing their business model to include supplying digital files for RP printing -- I think it's an excellent idea, but it's not the best 'out the gate' idea, because DIY
RP printing is still relatively new. Instead, they could start out by offering exclusive, limited-run variants of conventional figures, and custom posed variants of exising figures.
'I can get ten different Terminator leg poses in the RP parts? Hellz yes! Might as well pick up one of those new limited Techmarine Forgemasters too while I'm at it!' The ONLY problem I can see here is that they'll get botlenecked with orders in the first week.
One last thing. There's a stupidly easy way to get around the possibility of a 3D file being posted for free on a Torrent site, like this Dreadnought I found:
http://www.3dfuture.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/dreadnought-printed-mounted_display_medium-300x234.jpg
....That possibility would be for
GW to outfit each store with a Printbot (assuming acceptable resolution can be had by that point.) It also means I could get a job as the '3d printer guy' at the NY store, LMAO...
Why would this work?
Because, why would you spend eight hundred bucks on a machine you might not have much use for, when you can spend three bucks a piece on a Marine with exactly the parts and bits you want? There's also no learning curve -- understanding that not everyone geeks out on manufacturing-related stuff like I do,
LOL -- and I think the in-store convenience adds to the appeal.
Great post and conversation thus far! Was this an acceptable first post? What do you guys think about all this?
Cheers!
. Generally, I think 
)
)
. Will let more experienced folks answer more, although maybe it's not close enough to the surface to lay down the material in the right spot?
