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So this landed yesterday:



Our next Apoc game is April 8th. Let's see how far I can get by then...

First we check all the bits are here, clip and clean up any flash. With a quick dry fit I see that this thing towers over my other big bugs, and most will easily fit underneath it.


Now it's time for a bath. First I boil a kettle, soak two legs in very warm water, and they easily bend into their correct shape. Then we mix in a popular brand of washing up liquid and break out a spare toothbrush to scrub off the release agent.


Boring fact of the day: grey resin sinks like a stone, while the yellow resin body floats!

At this point I decided to call it a night, and left the parts laid out to dry next to a radiator.

This blog has my interest, if it continues with this level of detail i will be a keen follower.

This blog has my interest, if it continues with this level of detail i will be a keen follower.

My sentiments exactly!

Day 2:

Time to start some assembly. Basically every small part gets attached to the main body. Unfortunately this includes a ton of spikes. Often really tiny spikes, that you can't both hold in your fingers and still see. I strongly recommend a small pair of tweezers for this step. Also be sure to remove all the spikes from the sprue under a box of some kind. There's a quite a few that decided they wanted to jump and hide at the other side of the room when clipped off, and I'll never see them again.

Beyond the spikes, the other parts are pretty easy to attach. You may want to pin the funnels and head, as I can see these becoming a liability, epsecially if you pick up the model by the wrong funnel. Here is the first assembled stage:



Next I drilled a pair of 2" holes in the underside of the torso, using a slightly thicker drill bit than the normal citadel one:



Why two random holes, you say?



Yup, this big beastie won't be standing on those flimsy legs. Unfortunately at this point I'm missing the materials to do anymore, so that's all for today. Stay tuned!

Subscribed!

Is that coat hanger used for support? What tips can you give me for making it? how did you drill / bend it etc etc.

I managed to build a bio titan but im scared of letting it stand atm

The holes were drilled with a normal citadel modelling drill, although I used a slightly thicker drill bit from a proper electric drill set. Right now that's just a coat hangar clipped in half, then trimmed so the height is roughly even on both sides at level with the legs.

Eventually I'll be turning it into a wireframe hidden in a proper base, likely a wrecked building or tank the titan is walking over.

xttz wrote:although I used a slightly thicker drill bit from a proper electric drill set.

Would dremel be able to accomplish the samething? Most people recommend me dremel over electric drill :x

LunaHound wrote:

xttz wrote:although I used a slightly thicker drill bit from a proper electric drill set.

Would dremel be able to accomplish the samething? Most people recommend me dremel over electric drill :x

I didn't use the electric drill, just the drill bit from one. I put it in a citadel modelling drill which is pretty much the same thing as a dremel, so yeah that should work.

These support "legs" are of course functional but imho a little hugly don't you think?

It's actually a little shame for the overall aesthetic of the model.

A slightly more complicated treatment of the "flexible-scythed-feet" of the bio-titan could be a stronger pinning of all the sharp-pointed legs ends. The pins would have to go deep into a big part of the legs however.

Letting the pins come over the scythed blades you'll be able to install 4 little 40mm round bases, one under each feet.

This will grants you a very stronger solidity of the "structure" without harm the "appeal" of this fantastically looking and fastastically pricy, model.

I imagine however that you planned a proper aesthetical way to hide these supports so I will certainyl follow this blog.

Day 3:

A package has arrived!



Just in time in fact. The contents? 25x 12mm magnets for £5 from ebay (plus some 6mm magnets for other nid-related projects).



Fact of the day: Large nid creatures are actually more dangerous to their owners than to anything they will fight on the tabletop. I swear this thing is impossible to pickup without impaling yourself somewhere. This is particularly annoying when trying to file some down flat surfaces on the legs and arms to better attach the magnets onto.

One thing to be careful of at this point is to make sure all magnets face the right way. You won't be able to check this until all glue and putty has fully dried and is holding the magnet in place, so it's best to have a system. I found the easiest way is to keep all the magnets in a single stack, and put a dot on top-most magnet with a marker pen each time you use one. Then glue the magnets so that the dot always faces inward toward the body. This means that any magnets attached to a limb you will be able to see the dot on, and any magnets on the body will have the blank side facing out.

The limbs and tail are pretty quick to do, as the magnets will easily superglue onto a flat surface and hold there firmly after a few minutes:



The body is a little more work, as the indents for the limbs are far from flat. First of all, I scratch a cross-hatch pattern into the area where the magnet will do, giving somewhere for the putty and superglue to bond onto. Then I used a blob of green stuff to fill the gap underneath, pushing the magnet into place and applying superglue to around the edges where it makes contact with the resin. Be very careful attaching a magnet when another is close by- they have a tendancy to jump without warning, undoing your recent work.

Once the glue was dry to the touch, I added green stuff around the edges of magnets on the limbs and body to seal them in. I also used this opportunity to use green stuff to fill in any gaps left by the assembly stage, particularly around the neck and funnels.



Once all the putty has cured overnight, I should be able to do the first full-assembly of the titan...

So you'll be keeping all the "arms", weapons included, detouchable. Interesting.

And so the reasno for your iron support structure.

Once again I'm interested to see how you will complete this project, even if I'm still worried about the aesthetical in the final.

Do you planned to give a base to the model?

Wow o.o how do you carve out the areas to put magnets in?

Toban wrote:So you'll be keeping all the "arms", weapons included, detouchable. Interesting.

And so the reasno for your iron support structure.

Once again I'm interested to see how you will complete this project, even if I'm still worried about the aesthetical in the final.

Do you planned to give a base to the model?

Yeah I hate the idea of keeping a model this size in one piece - makes it a pain to transport and still rather fragile.

As for the base, I was thinking of using something like these to hide the support structure:
http://www.games-workshop.com/gws/catalog/productDetail.jsp?catId=cat440312a&prodId=prod1095509

Then just mount it on a large oval (Trygon-sized) base with suitable other scenery such as dead units, wrecks and Rippers.

LunaHound wrote:Wow o.o how do you carve out the areas to put magnets in?

I didn't need to carve out anything. The body is shaped to take the rounded edge of the limbs snugly. All I did was put magnets in these cavities then file down the limbs to be flat enough.

Day 4:

Only a short update today, as I finish off assembly for the titan itself.

To avoid the limbs randomly spinning round, getting caught on things and falling off, I added some small pins to hold them in place. These are only glued to the body of course, and mean the limbs can just be lined up with the pin and held in place by the magnet. It's important to make sure the pin is not only in the right place, but at the right angle - otherwise the magnets won't make flat contact.



I also made a temporary base, allowing the titan to finally balance and support itself. Here is the Hierophant towering over my formally largest gribblies. A Trygon fits perfectly underneath it with headroom to spare.



Assembling that makeshift base gave me a much better idea for it. Rather than picking up pricey plastic terrain I have something lying around that will do the job better. Just need some extra supplies first...

Consider me subbed, will follow. Keep it up!

"Hey. Hey. Hey guys."
"What"
"Um don't want to seem an alarmist, but i think we are going to need a bigger gun."
"Oh come on there just bugs for Thrones Sake."
"Well then i don't want to hear we should've listened to you."
"Fine, just watch the parapet"

We're gonna need a bigger Russ...

Day 5 Update!

@^

No work done on the Hierophant today, so instead here's a flashback to a conversion I did a few weeks ago for my 2nd Trygon. I wanted a more dynamic and realistic pose than the "here I am please shoot me" one it comes with. So here's how to make it look scarier (and slightly more likely to get a cover save!).



I cut off the tail around the area where the spikes finish, and tilted the Trygon forward 45 degrees. I then drilled holes and glued in U-shaped pieces of a paperclip to pin it in place.



The rest of the tail that was cut off gets glued up at an angle, in contact with the body. To fill in the gap and make it look more natural, I added an extra armour plate with greenstuff. I also used putty to fill in the hollow area underneath the tail where it normally touches the base.



Say hello to the simple "I'm going to eat you now" pose.

Day something:

Finally I can get around to staring to paint this monstrosity. A quick coat of black primer to begin, followed by a liberal drybrush of adeptus battlegrey to bring out a basic highlight on the black flesh (see my gallery for my usual nid colour scheme). I then went back over with badab black to soften this grey and add some shading. This was all done fairly quickly with a large brush. Later on I'll come back to these areas and spend more time adding better defined highlighting.
While I still have the large brush out, I took the opportunity to apply a red foundation coat over all the armoured areas. This also helps to pick out detail in the photographs below.

Previously I said that I had a better idea for the base. In the last few years of picking up various eBay bargains (and alot of crap) I remembered that I'd bought this this. Inside that box is some terrain in the form of a crashed Space Marine craft. Not only was part of this a perfect size to fit under the bio-titan as a base, but the thick plastic structure is ideal for supporting my wire frame. It took all of 5 minutes to drill two holes and clip the frame at the right height. But there's more...

The spaceship wasn't exactly swarmy enough for my liking. There's no way a Hierophant would be advancing unsupported, but luckily I have just the thing. A dozen rippers left in my bits box, because despite how cool rippers are I never field the damn things due to their useless rules. Throw in an old spore mine and we have a suitably terrifying entourage for Spikey here.





Which all holds up this:



Since I'm no longer using a ruined building to hide the support frame, I need a new approach. As it happens, this new base lends itself perfectly to the solution - cotton wool smoke emanating from the wrecked engines. Obviously I won't add this now as I still need to paint the base. Now if only to decide which chapter to paint this ruined vessel as...

So yeah this was more of a modelling blog than a painting one - I'm not so hot on the painting side.

Anyways... Spikey is finally finished with a whole day to spare before my Apoc game. Just need to add some detail to the base. Oh, and buy some black cotton wool.

AWESOME! Makes me want to put one together myself!