John Prins wrote:
Well, if we wanted sensible armor the female trooper would basically look identical to the male trooper.

 John Prins wrote:
Well, if we wanted sensible armor the female trooper would basically look identical to the male trooper.

 JohnHwangDD wrote:

 John Prins wrote:
Well, if we wanted sensible armor the female trooper would basically look identical to the male trooper.

Almost, but not quite. The armor would be cut somewhat differently to account for differences in anatomy and physiology. This was brought up specifically by a servicewoman who went over the details with Mark of DreamForge.

 JohnHwangDD wrote:
@DS - sorry that I didn't call it out earlier - it wasn't as obvious as in the latest render.

 PsychoticStorm wrote:

 John Prins wrote:
Well, if we wanted sensible armor the female trooper would basically look identical to the male trooper.

And this is why companies choose to create artistic variations on armour.

 Barzam wrote:
Eh, she's a merc, so it's not like she would be wearing some standardized regulation gear anyway. I could totally see future space mercs wanting to customize their armor to appear "sexy." Particularly if that was their gimmick. Impractical, weird apparel is hardly new for sci-fi. As long as she's not wearing combat heels, which she isn't, I'm not really bothered by the costume design.

 Dark Severance wrote:
I will be making power armor with heels because of Bubblegum Crisis, it was an anime that sort of got me into scifi gaming. But for the most part I try to stay sensible with designs, pushing some boundaries.

 Dark Severance wrote:

 PsychoticStorm wrote:

 John Prins wrote:
Well, if we wanted sensible armor the female trooper would basically look identical to the male trooper.

And this is why companies choose to create artistic variations on armour.

I prefer to think... "why not both". I don't necessarily mean one piece of armor being sensible and artistic, but I do mean that there is definitely room for to have both sensible looking miniatures as well as those that are aren't. Just as long as it isn't too much in one direction or another. I mean if everyone is wearing 'standard' gear, then everyone would look the same and that is going to be a pretty boring looking army (in my opinion).

 John Prins wrote:

 Dark Severance wrote:
I will be making power armor with heels because of Bubblegum Crisis, it was an anime that sort of got me into scifi gaming. But for the most part I try to stay sensible with designs, pushing some boundaries.

Power armor with heels actually makes sense...if the heel is where a booster jet is.

 highlord tamburlaine wrote:
You know that's what we all want anyways... that or Boomers.

Spoiler:

 PsychoticStorm wrote:

Well technically Heels in power armour could be used as attachment points like how they were first introduced in ancient times for cavalry, assuming powered armour troops ride externally to their transport vehicle, but this would be a really specialised feature, jetpacks probably not, if a jetpack is not attached to the torso, it will probably harm the user, I guess manoeuvring thrusters could go there though.

Update #21 - No Rest for the Weary

Kickstarter News

It has been hectic and busy but that is normal when it seems like everything converges at once. I'll go more into that further down as it doesn't really concern the project.

As far as the Kickstarter we are still on schedule but I had wanted to be ahead of schedule and deliver early. We ended up adding some extra miniatures into the mix which weren't part of the initial project as more of a surprise for our backers. But those additions didn't add extra delay.

Currently, all our masters are not printed in-house but instead at the same place, we outsource our Kickstarter production with to make things easier. Now the disadvantage is the time to get them in hand, inspect, make adjustments if needed and then back to the factory. On average a 3D master print for a multipiece miniature tends to cost $125-200 after taxes and currency conversions.

Along with the extra miniatures, getting a set of 10+ masters printed ends up costing $1750 which is fine and planned for. With the extra cost though, it puts us very close to the cost of a 3D DLP Printer. It ends up being 1/2-1/3 of the way to a high quality, resolution, 3D DLP printer that is capable of printing the 3D Masters. because today 3D DLP printer prices have gone down while the quality has gone up. We have been looking at printers but more closely at the ones that Awaken Realms and Zealot Miniatures uses.

The idea was to get the 3D Printer, get the masters done in-house and then start production. Things have a way of interfering with the best-laid plans which added some delays to getting the printer, which I'll get to below for those that want to know.

Overall we should still be on track although we're pushing the boundaries of the timeline more than I like. We've been going over the samples of our printers with various companies to make a decision and then things will move rapidly after that. The advantage of bringing the printing in-house is just too good to pass up not to mention it saves us hundreds in the long run, which means we can put it towards more miniatures designs.

We've given ourselves a couple weeks until we have a hard cut off date. If we haven't gotten it by then, then we'll just pay the $1750 and get the masters done with whom we normally have it done with. We will still be getting the printer in-house so that doesn't effect it but I don't want to delay the Kickstarter. We are just hoping to reduce that amount for the cost of the masters since we would only be paying for resin at that point once we bring it in-house.

In Other News

For those that are interested in reviews, the findings, likes, dislikes and images of journey into 3D Printer SLA and DLP we will post a link later once we are done. This will be useful for anyone thinking of getting something like this, comparison with FDM as well a deeper look behind the curtain.

Now for what has been causing us issues outside of business. This isn't related to the Kickstarter but just more of an FYI so you have an idea of what has caused some logistic issues.

A few months ago our family dog, who is only 7, ended up getting glaucoma in one of her eyes, resulting in her losing vision in it. There are two types of dogs, one is a gradual kind similar to that in humans while the other comes on very fast. It was something we were not quite prepared for. To ease the comfort we had to extracted her eye. They did a great job, it just looks like she is winking and she was on her way to recovery. Dog eyes are exact duplicates so the fact that she got it in one, meant that she could get it in the other so we had to make plans to prepare for that to happen.



Then two months ago she had some issues with her lymph nodes so we took her back in. They did a test and sent it off the lab and we found out she had lymphoma, a cancer that starts in cells that are part of the body's immune system. There were quite a few options for treatment, some better than others, but all of them are basically chemo-therapy for cancer. After some serious thought and discussions with the kids and wife, we determined what path to go forward with and have been doing it. We have a treatment every weekend, which is the time away from my normal full-time job to work on Code Zero and the business. That created some logistical challenges which we've been overcoming.

Then wildfires hit the NW, edging very close to where we live. There were a few weeks of dealing with that, along with being in an evacuation zone so we had to prepare. Had they not got them under control, thankfully the wind shifted, otherwise the results may have been very different.

The family is safe, the furry family member is still doing chemotherapy for at least another 2 months but her cancer is already in remission which is great. There have been a few other smaller things but overall spirits are high. A lot of good came from these experiences.

During that time, some of you may have heard that Spartan Games had closed their doors. Due to the poor health of the director, they closed their doors and their assets became available to purchase.

We felt there was a great benefit to going for the Firestorm Armada Line, which included Planetfall. We thought that would be a great benefit moving the IP to the US, streamlining it and improving upon it. There are also benefits to some of the Planetfall assets that we could convert to 28mm scale and incorporate into Code Zero. We ended up putting in an offer of £50,000, hoping that no others would be interested in Uncharted and Dystopia instead. We did not expect Warcradle Studios, basically Wayland Games, to put an offer on the whole range and putting a much higher bid. We wish them the best, it is a shame but we're interested to see what they come up with.

I think that covers everything and should bring everyone up to speed.

 PsychoticStorm wrote:
Wishes for good recovery, its part of the family.

 highlord tamburlaine wrote:
Would've been cool to see Planetfall get acquired stateside.

I could be wrong too, but weren't there models actually made of 28mm figures for the line? I swear I remember seeing larger figures than the actual line at some point.

 Kanluwen wrote:
I don't do Kickstarters or anything like that, but I look forward to seeing a retail release on these. The tactical cloaked models looked awesome and your winking dog has sold me on the whole line.

Best of luck with the chemo to her and best of luck with everything to you!

Update #22 - Production Update

I have to apologize for the lack of updates, between the wildfires and our furry baby chemo-treatment for her cancer, it has been a roller coaster. That in itself is not an excuse, just an explanation that a lot has been going on. That, however, does not mean that we have been idle and nothing has been going on. There is a lot of work done behind the scenes but there has not been a lot of time to do a proper update as most free time has been focused towards the finish line.



Late Delivery

I will start with the bad news that delivery will most likely be late. The production is a small run and should be completed fairly quickly but with holidays and delays in shipping because of the holidays, I am going to be upfront and say it will be late. The worse case scenario it will be 3 months late, putting the delivery in March. But I do not believe it will be that late, ideally, we want to ship everything out by January. I have been told that we can meet that timeline, however, I like to add 2 months to every estimate given as I know there can always be complications. We do not foresee any surprises but that is just me being upfront with everything as best as I can.

I understand what it means to invest in something and have it be delayed. For those that do not want to wait a few months, we do have some options. These options are also available to those who want to wait until the main shipping. We are able to provide either single piece high-quality 3d master printed resin miniature or multi-piece 3d printed miniatures. These are the same quality, if not better (since a very small % of detail is lost due to the casting process) resin miniatures. The resin is a more durable and stronger than traditional resin casts as well.

If you are interested in one of those options, please send us a message so we can discuss it and facilitate this process for you.

Camera Upgrade

I have had to rely on outside camera support for good quality pictures as a cell phone camera just doesn't cut for product and image shots. With the holidays, their schedule has been fairly booked which puts a delay on getting images that we need. The decision was made to purchase an in-house camera to use for pictures and video work in the future. That has also been a new learning process as we looked at what the best options for us would have been without putting a strain on our budget. Thankfully we have some great friends who helped out and made the process as painless as possible.



3D Printer In-House

The last update had mentioned were looking into purchasing a DLP 3D printer with the intent to do prototyping as well as printing 3d-masters in-house. This was a big decision as there are multiple options to choose from. We reached out to multiple companies using a test file from one of our miniatures as the "control example". That let us compare it with one of the professional 3d masters which helped us make a better decision.

The quality and speed of the printer was not the only important thing to us. Since we are a business, we needed to be sure that if something happened with the printer we would have access to quick professional support, easy to replacement parts and repair. That meant finding someone with distributor and support within the US. After much deliberation, we made our decision and went ahead with the purchase.



Once we received it, opened the box and set it up everything worked great. The printer exceeded our expectations but there was definitely a learning curve. We quickly learned that we could get a better quality print depending on the placement of the miniature. Each one required multiple tests and since this was a new process, it was slower in the beginning.

This also gave us some other great options we will be able to pursue in the future. It will allow us to print single piece high-quality resin miniatures that are comparable if not better than traditional two-piece resin casting. This will make it easier to create our Starter Packs as well as Board Game prototypes. The cost per miniature for small runs is only marginally more expensive than traditional casting but because it ends up reducing the labor-intensive cost it will help with future products and projects. There will be more information on that in a later update.


Examples of 75mm collectors figure vs regular 32mm miniatures.





Pledge Manager

Originally we were going to use the Pledge Manager designed by Awaken Realms using GameFound. It, unfortunately, is not completely ready for public use. There were a couple other Kickstarters that utilized it and they found some issues that they are trying to work through resulting in the reprogramming of it. As such, they won't be using it for new projects as of yet. We are working on updating our website and should be able to integrate our own pledge manager into it. Work is being completed on that process in the next couple weeks.

How is the Budget?

I know there can be some alarm, red flags, and concern whenever any project starts spending money that was not originally planned for. There are many projects that end up overspending and ultimately fail to deliver or end up in financial issues causing delays with delivery. I want to assure everyone that isn't an issue for us. We have not utilized any of the Kickstarter money at this time. That money was specifically budgeted for the production and shipment of the miniatures so it has been left alone.

Since we ended up bringing 3d prints internally we have saved ourselves a few thousand just in 3d masters, prototyping, tests, and shipping. Also as part of our initial bidding for Spartan Games Firestorm line, which was not successful, we had redesigned our budget. Part of this process was refinancing assets which resulted in freeing up extra funding. We have also taken on prototyping and printing for other outside projects and clients which has allowed us to obtain our current assets.

In Other News

The families furry baby, Mikaido has successfully finished her 4 months of cancer chemo-treatment. She has officially been diagnosed as in remission. It is now a waiting game to see if it comes back or if she continues to live worry free to her ripe old age.



We have high hopes for many more years of great memories with her. On the plus side, human treatment for cancer is the same treatment that they use for dogs and cats and there have been some great breakthroughs in treatment this year. The FDA has approved CAR T-cell treatment for B-cell lymphoma. It uses the patients own genetically modified cells to attack the type of leukemia opening a new frontier in treatment and medical innovation.

That is all for now. There is a lot more to cover and we intended to post them up last weekend until we were hit with the nasty flu. We are still not at 100% but I understand the importance of needing to get proper communication out even if it is short. We plan to get some more assembled miniatures pictures, along with images of them primed since the orange is reflective so hard to see some of the details.

Update #23 - Sitrep

I apologize for the radio silence but we are mostly in a holding pattern waiting for casting to finish so there has not been a lot share. That doesn't mean we haven't been doing anything, there are a lot of great things we have been doing behind the scenes but before we get to that... let's talk about the delays.

The Elephant in the Room

We are late in delivering and although we aren't even close to being as late as the majority of other Kickstarters, it does not change the fact that we are late. Part of that was our fault and the other half is outside of our control. I'm not blaming them as we know there are always delays in manufacturing but I will update on how we got here.

Through the Kickstarter we unlocked 17 miniatures; 10 Anazi Dynasty Blincs, 4 Federated Commonwealth Corers, 1 Ex-Inquisitor, and 2 Corsair Mercs. 10 of them we have already previously done a test casting run with so we already had masters and production samples. The rest we had not done masters for yet.

That first delay basically lost us our spot in the production queue. It was a hard decision but one that needed to be made to allow things to be easier and faster future releases. We did research which took longer than expected to get samples back from the various prospects but ultimately made a decision to get a 3D Printer to print masters. As such once we got everything together and shipped out to our caster, it has just been a waiting period.

Why didn't we just cast in-house?

It is a good question since we have the ability and capability to do so. We made the decision long ago that Kickstarter Campaigns were to be fulfilled through outside sources and not in-house. Future releases would be handled in-house but fulfillment was handled by someone else. The main reason is because we still work full full-time jobs on top of us building this business. I have seen many other Kickstarters go astray as they try to balance work while working on their Kickstarter. We didn't want that to happen. That meant that there could be delays which there usually always are and they would be outside of our control.

At this time casting is still proceeding. I am waiting to hear a better timeline on when it will be completed and shipped. Once I hear that, I will be able to share it but until then things are still proceeding.

Wave 1 and Wave 2

I understand that no one likes to wait and delays are sometimes unavoidable and annoying. For this reason, we have decided to do two waves. Wave 1 will be for those that do not want to wait for resin casts. We can fulfill pledges with 3d master quality prints. You will not be able to tell the difference between these and resin casts and will have a better detailed and better resin miniature. You don't have to take our word for it though, this weekend we should finish photos and will be adding them to the Pledge Manager. Wave 2 will be for those who want the resin casts.

Pledge Manager

Originally the Pledge Manager was going to be through GameFound which is the system that Awaken Realms created. They were offering to Kickstarters to utilize for free. This meant we didn't have to pay a $250-450 setup charge like other Kickstarter backerkits which we didn't initially plan for. Unfortunately when they utilized it with a couple Kickstarters there were some issues. At the time it isn't ready for release.

Some of what we have been doing has been modifying our own e-commerce package with our online store. We have been working on it and testing it to see if it will work as a Pledge Manager. It took some work but we are about done and it will function as our Pledge Manager. When the work is complete the link will be sent out. The pledge manager will stay open until we start shipping Wave 2.

We are still waiting on a few new pieces of artwork to be completed. In the meantime here is an image dump of some photos as well as artwork we have been working on. Sunday we hope to do another image dump, this time of all the miniatures, to add to the Pledge Manager so we can open that up next week.

Image Dump

Spoiler:

The Future

I am excited about the future because throughout this process we have been spending time doing comprehensive tests of Tradition Resin Casts Vs 3D Master Prints in terms of durability, paintability, costs, and what it can mean for future production and manufacturing.

Resin casting gets us great quality miniatures but the downside is the labor cost in the casting process. Like all casting processes you can lose a small %, usually 1-10% of details due to the casting process, which is one of the reasons sculpts are exaggerated and details aren't soft. A mould can last for 30-40 pulls before having to be redone. You can mix resin, pour, put it in a pressure pot then demould with the process taking roughly 20 minutes. That means having someone spend that attended time doing that, producing 5-10 miniatures every 20 minutes. You can add more moulds but the resin as a working span so there is a limit how many moulds one person can pour resin. You can increase the output by adding more labor which gets increasingly more expensive. If you have someone just doing casting, when you aren't doing production, you now have wasted labor.

That brings us to 3D Printing manufacturing also known as Additive Manufacturing. For the most part unless you are using a $100-200K 3D Printer, most average resin printers can't keep up reliably. Each printer SLA or DLP have their own strengths and weaknesses. The costs have come down, printers have improved greatly in the past 5 years.

SLA uses a laser that is round 70-140microns circle. That means that the surface texture is smooth but because it is a laser, it does have trouble with some details depending on how your model is orientated. It is slower than DLP and prints similar to a FDM printer in how it prints tracing the design and infills. A 32mm miniature with SLA could take 3-5 hours to print and if you did multiple ones, they'd each take that much time for each additional miniature. You don't get a benefit from doing a full plate of printing. If I was to do 5 miniatures, then it would take 15-25 hours, 3-5 hours per miniature. You can create a printer farm but for manufacturing, it would be better to have a caster.

DLP printers however print a full layer at a time, instead of tracing your design. They operate much faster and can get a better resolution at a voxel level. That comes at a price, mainly a much smaller print volume. However the same 32mm only takes 1-2 hours to print and if I do extras, it doesn't add any extra time per miniature because it does a full layer at once. The same 5 miniatures would only take 1-2 hours vs 15 hours of the SLA.

We already utilize 3D Printers today in miniatures manufacturing. Almost the majority of digital miniatures print 3D Masters to either cast from or create 3-Ups for injection moulding. Antenociti's Workshop uses a Formlabs Form 2 SLA to print masters and Awaken Realms uses a Solus DLP printer to print masters. Normally we would print a 3D master, create a silicone mould of that master and cast from that mould.

We decided to take it one step further and skip casting entirely. For commercial printers and even some hobby DLP/SLA printers reliability, consistency and ability have greatly increased. Once you have created your main print file, I only have to press print and walk away. We can offer 3d master quality printers, at a slightly higher material cost per miniature but at a much lower labor cost. 3D Printing allows us to make better use of our time, freeing up time to design, test and do other things other than just casting.

Like all resins, not all 3d printer resins are the same. For example, Formlabs resin tends to be brittle. It is a great resin but has a small learning curve to work with it and one I didn't feel customers should have to deal with. We have been doing quite a bit of testing with multiple resins and believe we've found a good medium with EnvisionTec as well as Solus resins. It closely matches traditional resin in miniatures, if not stronger and more durable.

Not only do we get the benefit of greatly reducing labor costs, one of the larger costs of casting. It also means we don't have to wait for a casting run to be completed. Normally we have to wait until all 50-200 casts are complete before we get the shipment. But with this method we can literally print on demand, once sculpting is complete we can just go straight to manufacture and then shipping. It becomes a win/win situation for both us as a company and for the consumers. We also believe this is where future is going towards for miniature manufacturing. We have already started to see a couple companies start to make this shift.