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Thinking of starting a garage business for fun and I wanted to do a little bit of lazy, crowd-sourced market research. What models would you guys love to see? What gaps currently exist in your 40k (or AoS or non-GW) model range?

Some of the ones I'm looking to make (for myself) are:

New Ork Buggies
New Rat Ogres
New Fantasy Minotaurs

Obviously I'm short on ideas. What else? I'll keep adding it to the list.

You might want to get a lawyer familiar with copyright law to go over this with you. I'm not sure, but you could easily be treading on dangerous legal ground here.

Also Salamanders riding dragons.

Futuristic Female Soldiers in powered armour with mini rocket launchers, flamethrowers and high-heat guns.

Inquisitors

Actually you're on pretty fine legal ground...as nothing you mentioned there is remotely protected - assuming you don't just cut-and-paste GW designs.

There's actually a big fantasy Minotaur kickstarter about to start by Zealot...so skip that. You can't compete. Ork buggies? Easy. Rat Ogres? I don't know how much of a market there is for that stuff.

Heads with these. Not a single 3rd party manufacturer makes them.

Terminator arms with Combiplasma and a hole for the magnet.

And as they've been mentioned in the rulebook and the Codex, Pestigors for 40k.

Alternate 28MM motorcycles for Normal and Enhanced humans.

Maybe something with an Akira Vibe?

First two, probably not. But last one yes. In addition I would like to see:

Space Orc War ATVs
Monstrous Were-rodents
Space troopers on bicycles/motorcycles
parade space troopers

And so forth.

I don't know if these would be super popular. But Tyranid bits seems to be really rare. We end up doing a lot of our own conversions.

Here are some things I know would be interesting.

-Wings/new legs for tyranid Shrikes. The only official kit is oop. People go to all kinds of lengths to try to convert their own. This can either be wings that fit into the arm slots like the FW kit did or a new back of body bit with wings attached. Both great.

-Better bone swords for the Swarmlord. The ones the official kit come with don't look much different from regular bone swords. Some real unique ones would be great. The SL is a pretty popular choce this edition too. I imagine something to make your SL stand out would sell pretty decent.
--As an extension to this. I personally like Bonesword conversions where the sword is a piece of the arm instead of held in a hand. Tyranid weapons are symbiotic organisms that are grafted/grown onto the base creature. So Neat looking boneswords that are a part of the arm in Tyrant and Warrior scale would be real sweet.

-Gaunt/Gant bodies in better poses. Don't include weapon arms or heads so you don't get some GW crack down. Just a pack of 10 bodies in better posses so we can get a lot better variety out of all of our swarms instead of just standing on the left leg or standing on the right leg.

-A biovore. Now, we may be getting that long rumored plastic biovore/pyrovore kit. At which point this is pointless. But Biovores are very popular right now and the kit for them is ugly as feth and made of not plastic crap materials. Everyone converts their own biovores. Would be real nice to have a new option to just buy some.

If you could make passable female models for factions that have very few, such as IG, you would probably have demand from a lot of frustrated people out there.

I would personally like to see alternative character and monster models. Daemon Princes of every type, female Guard commanders, more daemons. Pretty much anything but Space Marine type models or characters, although accessories such as bikes and weapons would probably be welcome.

Eldar. Sorry, "Space Elves".

I think every single model in the craftworld codex needs an update. There may be one or two that are newer, but like 90% of Eldar needs work.

A sculpt for every one of the Aspects, and you'd sell to a lot of eldar players.

A new wraithlord sculpt would be great too. Doesn't need to breach copyright, just make any appropriate sized model that looks cool. Spellcrow managed these jetbikes - http://www.spellcrow.com/space-elves-bikes-unit-p-340.html which seem to work well.

I dunno how many Eldar players are out there, but the problem with doing sculpts for imperial guard or space marines is that there is literally a million different companies out there doing the same thing, and even games like warmachine have a bunch of compatible models for conversions. There are very few (I only know of like 3 or 4 models TOTAL) being made for Eldar that are actually suitable for 40k. (There's some for fantasy elves, but mostly nothing worth mentioning).

I'd definitely avoid all imperial guard, all space marines, and all orks - they have all got a lot of models out there already. Kromlech (along with a couple other companies) already have good Ork buggy alternatives out there.