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Has anyone got any experience building legs from scratch for Warhammer 40k models?

I've found myself with the top halves of about fifty Space Marines, and partial bodies for the same number of Warhammer Fantasy Dwarves. I've made some... ok looking legs in green stuff for the former using a sprue skeleton, wrapping it in a thin layer of green, and then squishing small blobs flat against the knees for kneepads, wrapping the feet again to make boots, and adding a loincloth to hide the crappy crotch area.

Wondering if you guys have a better method? This one does not work well with the dwarves, so... well, any suggestions at all on that front are appreciated.

Green stuff and instant mold works great

Instant Mold? Pray tell?

Its a 'plastic clay' there has been much debate about wether or not it is infact rebranded 'oyumaru' a Japanese product, which I have used, its great.
You heat up this product in boiling water for a few minutes and it becomes very soft and squishy, great for making a mold with, When it cools back to room temperature it goes fairly hard, has a little bit of give to it. Green stuff and millput doesnt stick to it, and hot oyumaru/instant mold will not stick to cold, allowing 2 part molds to be made
Greenstuff is aka kneadatite and is far cheaper outside of GW
Would fully reccomend this approach.

I have done some costum marine legs from time to time. My older ones are GS, i made some with pure Milliput and my newest are made in a milliput-GS mix. What i find very heplfull is to use a hard cureing putty that can be filed and sanded like milliput or milliput-GS mix.

Those are the steps i do.
1) Armature from a sturdy wire bent into pose and wrapped with Milliput as a basic surface for sculpting.
2) Add the crotch armor
3) sculpt the upper legs and file/sand them smooth
4) Build the lower leg either as a piece going over the knees of leave room for a knee pad.
5) glue small plasticard pieces onto the wire in the rough shape of the whole feet as the ground of the feet. Just make them a little bit smaller than the actuall feet to leave sculpting room.
6) file/sand the lower legs and correct the lower edge of the armor to get them even and looking good next to normal legs
7) sculpt the actuall feet onto the plasticard.
8) add kneepad if needed and additionla details.

If you are comfortable with sculpting you can press in additional details in steps 2, 3 and 4 like the space marine legs have.

Here are some examples of legs i created using those steps.

Man, that work is incredible! I'm very impressed

Thats a very interesting idea, you can cut hard edges and precise shapes into it once it dries unlike greenstuff. I think I need to look into this.

For now, since we don't have any Instant Mold in NZ, the guys at the local hardware store sold me some latex stuff for making molds with, and I'm picking up some resin to fill the molds with next week. Hoping I can make some legs that way, though I imagine Instant Mold or even the above method of sculpting the legs from milliput would probably give better overall results.

 Dakkamite wrote:
Man, that work is incredible! I'm very impressed

Thats a very interesting idea, you can cut hard edges and precise shapes into it once it dries unlike greenstuff. I think I need to look into this.

For now, since we don't have any Instant Mold in NZ, the guys at the local hardware store sold me some latex stuff for making molds with, and I'm picking up some resin to fill the molds with next week. Hoping I can make some legs that way, though I imagine Instant Mold or even the above method of sculpting the legs from milliput would probably give better overall results.

No, Insta-mold gives quicker results. Not overall better ones compared to silicone mold/resin.

If instant mold is prooving difficult to find, search ebay for 'Oyumaru' Theres a fair few sellers (mostly hong kong) that offer world wide shipping for pretty low rates, also oyumaru is cheaper per stick than instant mold is for something which does the exact same task just as well (am fairly sure its the same thing tbh) it comes in many colours, but clear is one of them, clear seems preferable for molding as one can visually inspect how well the process is going