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Okay.
You were warned.
I threw it together fast.

The scale isn't right or anything... just the idea. Obviously, the base would need to be built up higher so that the model was higher off of the table surface.



Edit: Oops! I forgot his rocket pack... I guess you'll just have to imagine it (while you're imagining the rest of the details LOL).

Eric

That would have complications, like base to base contact being one of them.

The landing pose would have to have Zagstruck leaning backwards to compensate for the motion and the eventual krunch of "da uuver boyz". If hes leaning back he won't be really going about with his choppa or slugga.

Perhaps have his choppa in a chambered position (aka the ready position like his arm across his body) with him leaning back to emphasize the klaws. Because if you have him looking forward and not down, he may as well be charging head first like the classic super hero pose. Which would look just as cool.

Hi there, Been a lurker for some time and felt it was finally time to rear my ugly head.

I have a suggestion to overcome the weighting problem, if you were to flip the rocky outcrop (so the pointy bit is on the left hand side of the drawing, and have zagstruk attached in the same position) he would be roughly centered on the base, and so is less likely to topple over.
I'll stick in some crappy ASCII art to describe what I mean (no good graphics prog on current computer lol)



pointy bit => |- <= zagsrtuk
base => |___

http://www.dakkadakka.com/s/i/gallery/70-Team%20Bloid%20-%20Adepticon%202007-10.JPG

The Grot Bomb as a jump pack worked well for us at Adepticon. Very well.

Another sweet project Ein, digging on all that you've done thus far. That bionik leg is looking the business, as are the lad's weapons and comissarin' hat.

- Salvage

If you follow the basing approach MagickalMemories suggests you could just use a smoke trail to hide the brass rod. Like Zagstruck's rocket was flaming out as he came in on approach.

Shadow_Strike wrote:That would have complications, like base to base contact being one of them.

The landing pose would have to have Zagstruck leaning backwards to compensate for the motion and the eventual krunch of "da uuver boyz". If hes leaning back he won't be really going about with his choppa or slugga.

Perhaps have his choppa in a chambered position (aka the ready position like his arm across his body) with him leaning back to emphasize the klaws. Because if you have him looking forward and not down, he may as well be charging head first like the classic super hero pose. Which would look just as cool.

Well, you've got to keep in mind that the outcropping would be higher so that his victim.. err... OPPONENT would be stationed right under his extended foot.

The horrible exceuse for a drawing is definitely NOT meant to be in scale. LOL

That is why you need all those metal bits to weigh down the base... so it doesn't topple. The higher the mini's positioned, the higher its senter of gravity will be. thus, the more prone it will be to toppling.

As for arm position... those are just there so the mini had 4 limbs.
The important thing for me was to give the idea of where the body would be in relation to the outcropping & the base.


Leigen: The idea here was to keep him over "open space", so that, when in HtH, the model would, literally, hover over his opponent. If that bit of detail is less important to our Master Sculptor here <G>, then your idea is, indeed, sound (and that base wouldn't need to be NEARLY as heavy).



dogma: Good call!


Eric

It doesn't exactly have to be over 'open space' as far as posture goes. I'm not planning on having him fall at a straight vertical - remember, these guys are dropped out of an ork fighta's bomb bay. They'll have a fair bit of forward momentum.

I think if center him over the base I can still have him coming down at a hard angle enough to make it look like he's dropping on a model on an adjacent base.

I plan on sketching this out before I resume work on Thursday or Friday, but right now I'm working on a christmas present.

Apologies for a bit of a delay since the last update - I only have time to work on models on the weekends anymore, it seems. Still, I thought I'd make the best of the hour or so I had free while my girlfriend watched Grey's Anatomy (ugh...), so I worked on Zagstruk's other leg. I don't have the other foot yet - still waiting on the mail to deliver it to my door - but I figured there's no harm in creating the rest of the leg. I left a bit of extra tubing down past the ankle so I had material to work with when I do get the bits.







Again, these are just mockups, but you get the idea of the pose I'm going for. I'll probably shift his hips around as needed while I work on it.

I've been saying I'll sketch out the pose I wanted to do for Zagstruk and how I imagined his base might work, but at this point, an actual model mock-up is the best approach, so here is a photo I thought might be a little fun:



You can never have enough guardsmen getting mauled.

Basically the pose he's in now, and the angle he's coming down at, means I can pose him vertically using a clear plastic tube like a flying base normally has (but longer). Then if I want to take some fun photos it's just a matter of setting him up next to a model he's in combat with, so it looks like he's plummeting into the melee.

I'm going to delay a bit if I can, since I'm waiting for the bitz to arrive. In the interim, I think I might work on his jetpack some; he could use stubby wings on it and some extra cabling and worky bitz, and I think I'm going to use that plasticard plate I put on the back as a good spot to put a 'corrupted aquila' of sorts, with an ork glyph between angular wings to symbolize the vulcha boyz. These guys are sort've blood axes anyway, what with Zag almost being a commissar, so I think it'd make decent enough sense.

Looks good. If the legs are symetrical it might be a good idea to switch them around (so his right leg is tucked and his left is poised to strike) so that you have some space to point his gun towards his target.

dogma wrote:Looks good. If the legs are symetrical it might be a good idea to switch them around (so his right leg is tucked and his left is poised to strike) so that you have some space to point his gun towards his target.

I don't know if I'm going to do that, actually. It's a cool idea to have him coming down firing, but it causes a number of problems - for example, I plan on sculpting a jacket and flight harness across his torso, and an arm reaching across to fire downwards can cause all sorts of complications not only there, but at the shoulder where I need to make a torn sleeve. I may keep his arms out to the sides like they are now.

it is looking very good, and going by the stompa gargant project should be an impressive model.

just a suggestion, but you should make a terrain piece of a huge bullseye that the orks painted on the ground so the fighta-bommerz have somewhere to aim for lol

jamsessionein wrote:

dogma wrote:Looks good. If the legs are symetrical it might be a good idea to switch them around (so his right leg is tucked and his left is poised to strike) so that you have some space to point his gun towards his target.

I don't know if I'm going to do that, actually. It's a cool idea to have him coming down firing, but it causes a number of problems - for example, I plan on sculpting a jacket and flight harness across his torso, and an arm reaching across to fire downwards can cause all sorts of complications not only there, but at the shoulder where I need to make a torn sleeve. I may keep his arms out to the sides like they are now.

Now that I'm seeing him more complete, I think the current arm positioning is actually quite good for what you're going for. And you are completely right that it would just cause untold headaches in the end to do the firing pose ^_^. Diggin it more and more man. Keep it goin.

Well, tiny update on my Zagstruk. I got home today and felt impatient, as the nazdreg claws I'm waiting for in the mail have yet to arrive. I sort've wanted to still get something done on this project all the same, so I pulled the arm off my 'Ard Boy Nob and started sawing it down to size. Thanks to my efforts, he's got a proper pair of feet now. Photographed this in a bit of a different aspect ratio than my usual since I wanted to include the guardsman for reference; turning the camera 90 degrees worked best for shooting these. I probably won't do that again, as it's a pain to view compared to a normal horizontal image.











I think I'm going to get working on the rokkit next until I work the nerve back up to get to sculpting this guy. It's not 100%, but I think the current position of the legs in relation to where the waist is/will be is pretty solid.

yup, that leg pose is looking fine

Another tiny update today.

I'm not going to lie, this project really lost speed when I found I had to seriously get to sculpting. There's nothing I dislike more, simply because I can almost never get things looking right. Still, my buddy Brian managed to get me off my ass and convinced me to give the jacket a(nother) try. I'd made one previous to this, but it really looked... terrible, so I pulled it off, and tried again. That one came off too! Really not all that motivating when you can't get it right.

Anyway, I gave it one more try, ditching my usual greenstuff for brownstuff in the hopes that it might cure into something more adequate. I think it's.. alright. I only did half of the lower jacket so far, but I suppose I have an obligation to put pictures up periodically to prove that I am still alive.







Was just aiming to get the basic shape of the jacket down on this side. It'll get a couple extra things sculpted overtop, I think, so it looks a bit more like the forgeworld fighta-bomma pilot jacket... and then a harness for the jetpack gets sculpted over all of THAT. The hands have been removed so they don't get in the way while I work for now.

The area around the shoulder isn't really all that refined or complete. I left that mostly undone so I could sculpt a tattered upper sleeve around the arm later. Same goes for the back - there's going to be a / split in the back of the jacket so that it looks like it can flap open like that, and I'll probably put a belt going around the outside of the jacket as well.

Like I said, teensy update, but I figured I might as well. We'll see if Brian can motivate me into sculpting the other half any time soon - I'm already feeling lazy again.

It took some doing, but I got what might be the other half of the lower coat section made.

I must have put it on and pulled it off close to ten times before I gave up on it for the morning, but after lunch I figured I'd give it another attempt and the first try was what you see now. I'm not entirely sure I like the way it looks, as I think I botched some of the places I attempted to put creases in, but I'm hoping these mistakes will be covered up by what follows - for example, the rokkit harness and the fur collar 'round the neck area. We'll see.

Anyway, pictures!









Next part is the upper jacket area, I think, just to thinly cover the metal over and then the sleeves and collar. I should probably be doing the pants first, as sculpting underneath the coat is going to be a pain, but... oh well.

wow, that is great stuff, or was it bron, I don't remember. I never could have pulled of something like that.

but I would propose to make the coat a little longer, right now it seems like a too long jacket.


and, yes, it would probably better if you did the pants first...

I have a lot of pictures, considering not much has been done to the model, but I took the pictures primarily so I could later sketch over them and figure out how the harness might sit across his body. I feel like posting these up anyway, though.















I sculpted the top half of his jacket, but it's really poor work. I tried putting all sorts of creases and folds into it, but they didn't come out as I had anticipated. Fortunately, I imagine most of that won't show, as it will be covered by shoulder armor and the harness for the rokkit. He needs a furry collar and torn sleeves, still.

Speaking of the rokkit, I simply pinned the rocket onto his back for now so I could keep it in a consistent place for pictures. Beats balancing it on there, anyway. I'm concerned it might be too big and sticking out too far, but I'm hesitant to dremel down either zagstruk or it to get it to sit closer towards his body. What do you guys think? Does it stick out too far?

Thanks go to grey_death for that handy little conceptual sketch earlier. I started to put an icon on the back of the huge rokkit for Zagstruk and Da Vulcha Boyz - some cross between an ork skull and aquila - based on the doodle he had on page 1.



I'll be doing the other half of it once this part dries, since I don't want to accidentally screw it up. I think it fits nicely, though.

I'm actually not entirely sure what to do with the legs right now. If I don't think of anything particularly clever I guess I'll simply try sculpting torn trousers that go down to mid-thigh so I don't cover too much of the legs up. Shin armor is still very necessary, as the legs look too spindly right now, but hardly anything is actually complete on this model yet.

A bit of a follow-up to what I've just posted; I did a really rough doodle overtop of one of the side/profile pictures to get an idea of what I might do. Unfortunately, I don't have my tablet, so forgive the general roughness of it.

Basically, I have a decision to make. I think the bomb might be sticking out a bit too far from the torso. To remedy this, I can dremel away at the underside of the bomb some to hopefully make it contour to his back better and sit closer to his torso. It's a precarious thing to be dremelling - I only have one, and if I botch it, it's gone, 'less one of you lads has a spare and is feeling generous. I could try to dremel a cylindrical recess into his back and seat the bomb in there, but the underside of it is irregular and probably wouldn't sit too well. I diagrammed this out a bit:



The dark grey/black rectangle is just meant to be a placeholder for where the stubby wings sit. Light brown is where I might be running some straps. The one on the right is what I imagine it would look like if I recessed the rokkit into his body a bit closer. I know it's hard to tell, honestly. Do you guys think it's worth the extra trouble?

not worth slaving for hours just to get it a millimetre or so closer. More important is some nice harness to make the rokkit look properly attached to his torso - done right, that will hide any gap between body and rokkit.

Alright, let's do this purely by aesthetics.




It's just something quick and crude I banged out to get the general positions that are available.

Pose A is with the rokkit trying to contour up against the general direction of the back.

Pose B is the current angle I have, but moved in towards the body

Pose C is exactly how I have it right now

Pose D is leaned forward similar to how the current stormboyz have them.

Right now I am personally leaning a bit more towards B or D, but D might cause some problems by getting in the way of the choppa. What do you guys think, now that I've tried to visualize some of the ideas?

I like version D the best...

Absolutely, positively option A. All the other ones look terrible. Way too high up on the shoulders.

A and D both look pretty good to me. As he's effectively 'falling' from the sky onto his opponent, it makes sense to _not_ be at the same angle as for launching or flying

I think b is the best

"A" looks like the rokkit will simply destroy his legs (again) when he does fly.

B looks good, C looks overbearingly heavy and difficult to move around/carry, and D would be okay.

jamsessionein wrote:Alright, let's do this purely by aesthetics.

http://www.fusedcreations.com/adam/zagrokkitconcept.html


Go to that link, since I can't embed flash movies as far as I know. It's just something quick and crude I banged out to get the general positions that are available.

You should be able to embed flash by using the 'flash' button in the text editor to put flash brackets around the URL address of the flash movie.


I vote for 'D' because it is the most dynamic looking regardless of how functional or "realistic" it may be. And when making models of fictional creatures the most dynamic looking pose is almost always the best.

I think A wouldn't allow him to actually fly, and D would break his back (Ork or not )

C is workable, but I like B the best - if I were to try to model it (and I'm pretty sure you're a better modeller than me) I'd hollow out his back rather than filing off your only rocket

Viperion

Yak; thanks for the lesson, handy feature.