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I was looking at some new releases from GW and noticed that there seem to be plastics in things I would have expected to see in Fincast. A good example is the Chaos champion for 40k or some of the Warhammer releases.
I long ago voted with my wallet on Finecast and it seems like a lot of others here have done the same. Am I living in a Fool's Paradise Thinking that GW is reconsidering putting things out in the medium of reinforced whipped cream or what?

I hope so. I'm new to the hobby and have only bought a few finecast products but nearly all of them had bent weapons.

I stayed right away from the stuff when I saw the problems people had with it around here. That's why I'm hoping the GW is beginning to think plastic might be the way to go.

"Fine"cast came in at around the same time as they started playing with single-model plastic sprues.

The suggestion at the time (nothing was officially said) was that "Fine"cast was just intended to be a temporary stop-gap until they could transition everything to plastic.

I wouldn't be at all surprised if we see more and more character models in plastic, with "Fine"cast slowly phasing out.

Like Insaniak said Finecast is sort of GW's transition from metal to plastic.

GW last year reportedly decided that metal prices were too volatile for them and decided to get out of the metal model business. Plus metal has other disadvantages for complex models, too heavy, hard to hold together etc.

BUT they have thousands and thousands of models with molds made for metal. So they developed Finecast as a mid-term subsititute to keep all those models in production while they put out more plastic than ever before.

But not plastic Battle Sisters. Never plastic Battle Sisters.

And it would have been fine if their resin had the quality of say Reaper's Bones line.

But instead they got a substandard method and worse yet raised prices on it.

It's a pretty big black eye for them but unless they decide to go back to metal I don't see it disappearing any time soon.

Well there are Two chracters in the empire Line that used to be fine cast but now are Plastic. Along with in the Fantasy line many single miniatures are plastic, just the Champion is the first 40k mini.
What hope for is something like a sprue for a generic captain, with options for special characters, like you can get a sprue of a terminator captain, but get options for lysander or calgar.

 Kid_Kyoto wrote:
But not plastic Battle Sisters. Never plastic Battle Sisters.

Yeah... next thing you know, people would be expecting plastic Cadians...

How about plastic Cadians who actually look like the metal ones! Huh? Huh?

Anyway... I do love me some plastic characters but I think GW is now so focused on creating a cool looking figure they're forgetting to include options! Nearly all the ones I got have no head, pose or weapon options. Which is really annoying, it was GWs multipose, multioption kits that got me in the first place and brought me back several times.

Now even my Wargames Factory kits have more options than GW.

In an ideal world every army would have a multi part kit for generic characters, and plastic monopose kits for special characters. That would satisfy damn near all of us.

I'm not a fan of monopose generic characters as they are difficult to customize compared to multipart kits like the Empire General kit.

man, i really hope that they make the move to all plastic...
i have had to pass on so many cool minis thanks to Finecast being such a horrible material...
had they gone with Forgeworld resin i would have been happy...
instead, i bought resin LE's from boutique companies who do resin right, and even charge a few squids less than GW...

i love GW minis, always have and always will, but can't get behind shoddy material...
i have a big enough mountain of metal to keep me going for many years anyway...
hell, i'm just getting around to painting some minis i bought 25 years ago...

fingers crossed for plastic everything...
there is a downside though...
all the new plastic characters are monopose...
is everything going to turn into a starter box style mini, or will we see kits like Marine Commander and Chaos Termie Lord???
it would be sad to see all the extra bits dissapear...

cheers
jah

Edit: man, you ninjas are fast!!!

Forgeworld even looks like it's been moving toward more plastics. This could be do to the sheer quantity of certain products that they are whipping out or they have found it to be a better medium, I am unsure.

 Kid_Kyoto wrote:
How about plastic Cadians who actually look like the metal ones! Huh? Huh?

Anyway... I do love me some plastic characters but I think GW is now so focused on creating a cool looking figure they're forgetting to include options! Nearly all the ones I got have no head, pose or weapon options. Which is really annoying, it was GWs multipose, multioption kits that got me in the first place and brought me back several times.

Now even my Wargames Factory kits have more options than GW.

Going way off topic here but in your Sig about the Catachans, you mention there's a line of plastic guardsmen before the Catachans. What were those? I've never heard of any before the Catachan kit.

Are they like the original Metal Cadians? PLEASE tell me they're like the original Metal Cadians. I want those so bad it's not even funny.

 MrMoustaffa wrote:
Going way off topic here but in your Sig about the Catachans, you mention there's a line of plastic guardsmen before the Catachans. What were those? I've never heard of any before the Catachan kit.

That would be the Rogue Trader-era Guard...

 insaniak wrote:

 MrMoustaffa wrote:
Going way off topic here but in your Sig about the Catachans, you mention there's a line of plastic guardsmen before the Catachans. What were those? I've never heard of any before the Catachan kit.

That would be the Rogue Trader-era Guard...

Imperial Army to be specific since the fluff back then did not have an Imperial Guard.

They were referred to as Imperial Guard in everything that I can recall...

Mohoc wrote:

 insaniak wrote:

 MrMoustaffa wrote:
Going way off topic here but in your Sig about the Catachans, you mention there's a line of plastic guardsmen before the Catachans. What were those? I've never heard of any before the Catachan kit.

That would be the Rogue Trader-era Guard...

Imperial Army to be specific since the fluff back then did not have an Imperial Guard.

In fluff they were called the Necromundan Spiders, below is some art.



[pedantic]

In Rogue Trader (the book) they were called the Imperial Army but the name was changed pretty quickly to Imperial Guard, certainly by the time they got their first army list in the Compilation.

I'm traveling otherwise I'd check what they were called in Chapter Approved.



[/pedantic]

Returning to the topic at hand, I would love LUV to see them back in plastic. Maybe some 3rd party can be convinced to do a sprue of 'bomber jacket space soldiers'?


Automatically Appended Next Post:
I think these were metal models but they give a good idea what they looked like

 Squidmanlolz wrote:
Forgeworld even looks like it's been moving toward more plastics. This could be do to the sheer quantity of certain products that they are whipping out or they have found it to be a better medium, I am unsure.

They still do only resin, with the exception of cockpits, as far as I know. And plastic components are from GW kits used as a base for the model. FW themselves don't actually do the plastic components.

Regarding the plastic characters - they really are great. Although, as some have pointed out, lack much in the way of posing options, but they really pushed how much detail they can get into them. The Necromancer is superb, and really couldn't have been done as a metal with its cloak without having to be excessively pinned.

 insaniak wrote:

 MrMoustaffa wrote:
Going way off topic here but in your Sig about the Catachans, you mention there's a line of plastic guardsmen before the Catachans. What were those? I've never heard of any before the Catachan kit.

That would be the Rogue Trader-era Guard...

I have a few of those I'm thinking of turning into ratling snipers for my Cadians!

I'd've happily taken plastic Cadians that looked just like the metal ones. The metal Cadians were my first ever Guard minis. They started the madness!!!

 insaniak wrote:
I wouldn't be at all surprised if we see more and more character models in plastic, with "Fine"cast slowly phasing out.

The sooner the better. The single-frame plastic character models are amazing. I've got a number of them, and I don't even play Fantasy.

It seems to me they are doing more finecast. Tons of WHFB units and characters that were in plastic have now been released in finecast.

We wrote:
Tons of WHFB units and characters that were in plastic have now been released in finecast.

Like what?

We wrote:
It seems to me they are doing more finecast. Tons of WHFB units and characters that were in plastic have now been released in finecast.

I can't think of a single plastic kit that they're replaced as a finecast kit - it's actually not economically viable to do so for GW. Pulling an expensive plastic mold to move to more expensive resin production (compared to super cheap plastic injection production) is just stupid. That's why we see super old stuff like Zombies still running their original mold.

There are more finecast characters and units in production, however, though this is due to them adding more units to the finecast range than they're converting to plastic.

 insaniak wrote:

 MrMoustaffa wrote:
Going way off topic here but in your Sig about the Catachans, you mention there's a line of plastic guardsmen before the Catachans. What were those? I've never heard of any before the Catachan kit.

That would be the Rogue Trader-era Guard...

Is one of those guys wielding a fish?

I really wanted to give fine cast the benefit of the doubt. But having assembled 2 plague marine kits and Festus, I'll say this material is awful, and a nightmare to assemble, with extreme amounts of mold lines and process defects. And it's expensive.

Also done two new plastic kits from 2012, plague bearers and nurglings, and they were easy to assemble, with minimal mold lines and process defects, abundant extra bits and just in general, easier to work with.

One thing I will say in the favor of finecast, is that the material is genuinely detailed, and quite sharp looking when fully painted.

That aside, I absolutely want to see GW get rid of this crap and switch to plastic. Their plastic kits are quite nice.

My Warp Smith was pretty much perfect. It certainly wasn't the cancer-curing world-peace-causing hot-women-attracting solver of all mankind's problems that GW advertised it as, but it's a perfectly fine cast (if you'll excuse the pun).

I wouldn't say GW is phasing it out. Consider the fact that some of the brand-new, never been plastic or metal models for the Hobbit are in Finecast. I just wonder how they are picking and choosing who gets the finecast treatment.

Frankly, I'd love to see them whip out some of the old molds and crack out some of the vintage models. There are also some old metal models that disappeared that need to be back in print, like the individual havocs.

hotsauceman1 wrote:Is one of those guys wielding a fish?

Plasma Gun

SoloFalcon1138 wrote:I wouldn't say GW is phasing it out. Consider the fact that some of the brand-new, never been plastic or metal models for the Hobbit are in Finecast. I just wonder how they are picking and choosing who gets the finecast treatment.

Well, yeah, they still have the same budgetary constraints that they always had. Each new release can afford a finite number of plastic sprues before they have to do the rest in finecast.

But as the cost of making moulds for plastics comes down, and ranges are re-visited without replacing every existing mould, each re-release of a range should see more of it in plastic, as has been happening with Space Marines for nearly 2 decades now.

I'm still not convinced that GW suffers some huge cost to produce injection molds. They do it all in house. Sure the up front costs are high for machinery but that has to have paid itself off by now, or would rather quickly just from the amount of money plastic kits save over other mediums.

Look at http://proxiemodels.blogspot.com/

He does 100% of the work on his injection molds and designs and somehow manages to get by, and that is 1 guy in a garage as a hobby. Surely a staff of X could achieve the same feat within reasonable costs.

Finecast is a sloppy product that should have never happened as it stands. If GW didn't want to buy metal, they could have just said up front that metals will now cost X more or that they are all discontinued until a proper new medium is in place. Instead they rushed out an untested product and suffered a massive hit to their reputation.

Call me crazy, but every company I've worked for would rather make less profit per item sold than having no items sold.

Add to that the fact that a company like Reaper can get away with the Bones program yet GW can't figure that mess out.

Replacing Finecast with plastic models? Why. . that could drag me back into the Hobby!

I'll believe it when I see it.

I think the way to go is that of the limited edition model in the Dark Vengeance set. A really nice, detailed monopose character on a single small sprue.

If that was the direction that they take models like that, I'd be more than happy. I'd like a plastic Tau Ethereal model at some point. Preferably at the same time they become useful. I hope they do become useful because they're fun to paint.