Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

Okay so the Ancient and some bits for the Captain have arrived!

Space Marine Heroes kits indeed seem to be made by another manufacturer than regular GW plastic kits. The sprue gates are tiny, the plastic itself is more gunpla kit tier than the gray bulk stuff GW typically uses, and there are no visible mold lines anywhere
The tranfer sheet that came with the Ancient was an unexpected delight, all the banner details are in fact separate transfers, so it will be trivial combining the kit's transfers with my vintage transfers.

Captain kit should arrive early next week. Yall know the now iconic Jes Goodwin 1989 metal design? I think I found a pretty good match for the head from Primaris Eradicator respirator heads. Here's two options, one with the exact same haircut and another with a crew cut with stripes on the left side. Right now I'm thinking I wanna go with the exact one but I'll paint both and see which one complements the model better once basic acrylics are in.

I'm going to kitbash the Cap a bit further though! i might convert his knee pads because that's always a point of interest when people paint that mini, some quartered designs or chevrons or something...? I also have already bought a resin storm bolter I want to swap with that awkward scoped pignose atrocity the Ltd ed model comes with. And hey there's a big skull on his crotch on the original? That's going to be tricky.. Anyone know any Indomitus pattern TDA kits/bits with a skull crotch? If I can't find a suitable piece, guess I'll just go with the tabard style crotch of the Captain base model.

Excellent modelling based on a very good vision, and neat painting as well!

 Karak Norn Clansman wrote:
Excellent modelling based on a very good vision, and neat painting as well!

Thank you sir! Have you still been writing more of your bleak lore descriptions about the Imperium of Man? Always enjoy reading those.. Ah, I actually see you have whipped up some new Descendant Degeneration material, need to catch up on the thread, nice one

Cheers

Adepticon is only two days away! I hope I'm not going to be disappointed, but there is some hope that the new Horus Heresy kit with the new beakies will be revealed on Thursday morning. Of course, even if the box gets revealed then, it's still going to be a month or two before it hits the stores but then at least I'd have an estimate on when to expect to be continuing the corvus builds.

Meanwhile, the honour guard bits hoarding is progressing as planned. All that remains is one regular Blood Angels Terminator Assault Squad kit, and perhaps some single bits from the Deathwing combo kit..

Got a short holiday coming up next week, so planning on starting the Honour Guard builds next weekend.

Woke up 6AM local time and there it was - The new Horus Heresy announcement! Along with the trailer, GW showed a single new beaky model, which I swiftly 'shopped to a more matching colourscheme, in order to get a better idea on what to expect. I know I won't be able to match the Eavy Metal painting quality (I'm also more partial to a weathered military modelling look anyways), but this shows some sort of reference.

Thre seem to be subtle tweaks to the Corvus armour in the new kit. The helmet shape has changed, the curvature of the beak part is markedly different, as well as the vents look bigger somehow? All in all, the new sculpt reminds me of a metal Marine I owned back in the day; couple of the details match, like the toes being this segmented piece with lines, and the curvier helmet beak shape. Maybe this model was one of the inspirations behind the new sculpts?

Anyways, I'm hella stoked! There was also a new Plastic Praetor kit announced, and there is some evidence in the new HH trailer video to suggest that the Praetor kit comes with a Corvus head option with a completely new helmet variant design which I think looks gorgeous. Even if the Praetor himself is looking to far removed from RTB-01 sensibilities (far too ornate looking), I know I will want to use a helmet like that on some HQ model.

Early rumours are estimating the new Beakies will drop around June-July. I've got more than enough to work with until then..

As soon as I saw the announcement I thought of this blog! Can’t wait to see more progress, and hopefully they’ll match size wise with the old plastic beakies you have for even more variety.

Ooh, and the SM Heroes Marines are a cool addition too. Did you get a full set? I’m missing the Banner bearer

 gobert wrote:
As soon as I saw the announcement I thought of this blog! Can’t wait to see more progress, and hopefully they’ll match size wise with the old plastic beakies you have for even more variety.

Ooh, and the SM Heroes Marines are a cool addition too. Did you get a full set? I’m missing the Banner bearer

All the heads and shoulderpads will at least be compatible, so I'm not too worried about it. I'd think the kneeling marines will probably look OK even in the old scale, as well as vehicle crews which are sitting etc, and those would have been the hardest to replace anyways at this stage. At most, it's looking like I might have to "truescale" my assault Marines due to the HH 2.0 kit having supposedly much more static poses, but thankfully that's only 5 models at the moment!

I'm also excited about the new helmet designs. Those new top vented beaky helmets look superb, I will want to have at least a few of them for sure. The plastic backpacks and bolters coming with the new kit will also give a bit more variety, I can mix and match these with my existing resin ones in the squads.

I did manage to get the complete SMH2 set. The last one I got was Feurran, he is currently getting expedited from the USA. I also bought all the remaining pieces I need - A BA Terminator Assault Squad kit and some bitz from the Deathwing kit, mainly the Terminator Apotechary bitz and a few backplates with the curved exhaust ports.

Decided I will add a 9th member to the Honour Guard, but I cannot field a TDA Apotechary in current 40K so it's just going to be for display. Going to make him some sort of Sanguinary Priest, probably using some appropriate torso and shoulderpad from the BA Assault termie kit. I don't intend to use the BA Assault termie torsos for anyone else as they are too blinged out, but the blinged out look might be sort of appropriate for a Sang Priest, he's going to be hanging out with the Chaplain Tarentus model anyway, and that one is blingy also.

The rumoured Spartan coming with the HH 2.0 box will be my dedicated transoort for the Honour Guard. I'll probably sell off the Catapractii termies but am keeping the Contemptor.

Holiday! Finally got a chance to sit down and get started with the Honour Guard builds.

Here's where I got to today. Everything is still in the sketching phase, so things are probably going to change before I lock down the builds but I'm happy with how things are shaping up. The end result is looking more like Classic 1st Edition Space Hulk / Deathwing expansion than the current "Space Vampires have ALL THE BLING!!11" BA termies, but still having interesting poses and unique Indomitus suits, exactly what I was looking for. Keeping it 1991

All the pignose Storm Bolters will be swapped out to properly modeled two barreled ones. I bought 5 SoB Storm Bolters from a bitz shop, will just take some cutting and pasting to get the pignoses swapped out. All the rightside shoulderpads will also be swapped out to the FW resin ones, right now I just wanted to rough sketch the whole squad with the Ancient to have a better idea of the poses and such.

Apotechary bitz are still on their way, so that one will be the last one to get a sketch build I think. I made a spare torso for him from the BA Assault Squad Sergeant torso, but then realized that these SM Heroes Terminators are actually a bit taller than the older multipart plastic kit sculpts! Which means that I can't really hope to mix and match the torsos too much..

Next up, Captain and the Chaplain.

Glad to hear you’ll not have to rework much to fit the new beakies in to the army.

Great work on the SMH2 Terminators, all of the tweaks came out great and added a bit more Blood Angels bling without being to gaudy

 gobert wrote:
Glad to hear you’ll not have to rework much to fit the new beakies in to the army.

Great work on the SMH2 Terminators, all of the tweaks came out great and added a bit more Blood Angels bling without being to gaudy

Thanks! I'm still going to add those little armpit shields from BA Assault termies kit, and perhaps a few purity seals if needed, but certainly don't want to go overboard with the decorative elements. Also thinking of getting some of those Deathwing kit right arms, they have separate pieces for the hands & weapons, which would give a bit more flexibility to the right arm poses. ATM I'm not compeletely satisfied with the right arm poses, they are still a little too samey - being able to add slight angles to the hands/wrists would go a long way towards adding some variety.

After the squad was done, I had to rush and make quick sketches for the Chaplain and the Captain as well. Interestingly, the 2020 Tarentus model is also a pushfit and has identical plastic sprue gate size & quality to it as the Space Marine Heroes kits. the Captain however was from 2016, has that seemingly smaller scale (? or does it just seem like it because I haven't compeletely seated the legs yet?) and is a regular GW multipart kit.

The custom Captain head will require some more delicate cutting and fitting for a perfect fit, but with patience and a lil luck it should turn out great! He'll also be getting my most ornated FW BA shoulderpad and a resin Storm bolter before he's fully built.

That is a sweet looking couple of minis. Good luck wrapping up the rest of the build on the Captain.

 youwashock wrote:
That is a sweet looking couple of minis. Good luck wrapping up the rest of the build on the Captain.

Cheers man

Apotechary bitz arrived, so made a first draft of the Sanguinary Priest. His pose is super static ATM, might get a remake.. Not sure about the combiweapon either, it feels too big for him somehow?

Also kept on modifying the Captain and got the head to fit this time around
Added some BA flair while I was at it (shield icon might still get a swap later). But now I think I need some of those Deathwing right arms, at least one for the Captain would make life soo much easier with regards to the resin weapon swap.

How am I only finding this now????

Loving what I'm seeing - here's my take on the same idea, started during lockdown
: https://skinflintgames.wordpress.com/2020/07/17/crossing-the-rubicon-nostalgius-a-1991-blood-angels-tribute-pt-1/

 Skinflint Games wrote:
How am I only finding this now????

Loving what I'm seeing - here's my take on the same idea, started during lockdown
: https://skinflintgames.wordpress.com/2020/07/17/crossing-the-rubicon-nostalgius-a-1991-blood-angels-tribute-pt-1/

Hey,
Cool! Your blog is doing a fine job of preserving the flavour of the era, kudos! Mine is only inspired by it though, I will be taking artistic liberties in the actual implementation. I wanted to take a piece of my hobby history and sort of "remake" it with modern minis. Nostalghia, its a helluva drug hehehe!

I wasn't happy with the Flamer Marine, so thought I'd try converting the Cyclone Missile Launcher Hero into an alternative torso for it. The CML termie has this nice alternative cabling on the armour, and the pose is quite appropriate for any heavy weapon, as the pose is sorta like bracing for recoil. Only problem was that the Cyclone Launcher is modeled on the back half of the model kit! Some conversion work needed to be done..

I though this would be a great opportunity to introduce more armour variety by replacing the back plate with a Deathwing one. I love the arched vents of those bitz! So, with some patient razor sawing, I cut the back half of the kit from the back plate joint, carved out the redundant fillings from the DW back plate interior, and the combined result fits pretty snug, just as I hoped The end result will be perfect with a little gap filling after final assembly.

As an unexpected bonus, the helmeted head of the CML hero is also a unique sculpt, with some kind of enhanced filtration systems on the helmet. (Note to self: remember to drill open the flamer nozzle holes! With the piece hollow like it is, there's no excuse not to do it EDIT: Noticed the CML torso lacks the TDA camera mount, remember to add one from a spare chestpiece bit)

I think the Flamer Marine torso swap worked better than I expected, what do yall think?

Some great bashing of these Terminators! Who knew there was such variety in Terminator bits!

 Gwyn chan 'r Gwyll wrote:
Some great bashing of these Terminators! Who knew there was such variety in Terminator bits!

Thanks! I have to give credit to my fellow Dakkanauts for that, up until about a month ago I never realized how sweet the Space Marine Heroes kits were. I remember seeing them at my FLGS at the time when they originally came out, and totally dismissed them as worthy kitbashing material just because there seemed to be no way to buy the whole set without having to chance getting a bunch of redundant duplicates. I never knew they were sold as complete sets at the time, and also thought they'd all be helmetless

I ordered those Deathwing bolter arms, once they ship I can get back to finishing the Honour Guard builds. Still need to figure out how I intend to do the flamer / assault cannon Marine though.. Magnetizing the right arm just below the shoulder pad might be my best option..

 tauist wrote:

All the pignose Storm Bolters will be swapped out to properly modeled two barreled ones. I bought 5 SoB Storm Bolters from a bitz shop, will just take some cutting and pasting to get the pignoses swapped out. All the rightside shoulderpads will also be swapped out to the FW resin ones, right now I just wanted to rough sketch the whole squad with the Ancient to have a better idea of the poses and such.

Pignose Storm Bolters! Ahhh can't unsee them now. I just went through and looked at all my terminators and realized how ugly the Space Hulk storm bolter models are! Ha and the very old Space Marine Terminator Captain in pewter actually has individual barrels on his storm bolter. Even the new Captain Karlaen has pignose! Good to see your attention to detail though. Did you end up getting all 10 of the SMH2 boxes? I spent quite a bit of time hunting for them when I was in Japan and took me quite a while to get the ancient banner bearer with the paint set.

 Eggroll wrote:

 tauist wrote:

All the pignose Storm Bolters will be swapped out to properly modeled two barreled ones. I bought 5 SoB Storm Bolters from a bitz shop, will just take some cutting and pasting to get the pignoses swapped out. All the rightside shoulderpads will also be swapped out to the FW resin ones, right now I just wanted to rough sketch the whole squad with the Ancient to have a better idea of the poses and such.

Pignose Storm Bolters! Ahhh can't unsee them now. I just went through and looked at all my terminators and realized how ugly the Space Hulk storm bolter models are! Ha and the very old Space Marine Terminator Captain in pewter actually has individual barrels on his storm bolter. Even the new Captain Karlaen has pignose! Good to see your attention to detail though. Did you end up getting all 10 of the SMH2 boxes? I spent quite a bit of time hunting for them when I was in Japan and took me quite a while to get the ancient banner bearer with the paint set.

Hey, apologies for the late reply! I did finally manage to buy all ten, Feurran was the last one to arrive.

And speaking of the pignose Storm Bolters, I think they can be modeled to look decent, but not with my crappy depth perception and subpar drilling skills. In fact, I find the whole topic of barrel drilling very stressful, I always mess mine up one way or the other! Either I get the barrel hole slightly off center, or end up with a crusted barrel hole, with an ugly edge extrusion at the front, or with a barrel hole that doesn't look even remotely smooth from the outside looking in.. you see this junk inside the barrel which refuses to clean itself even with the help of some filing or slight melting with some thin plastic cement

I have seen the light!

I've long been curious about applying more advanced scale modelling techniques to my miniatures. So a few weeks ago I bought a book by Lincoln Wright called "Sci-Fi FAQ", which is all about making high end Science Fiction models. It's a 400+ page affair, shows a lot of advanced techniques, and reading it is giving me a bunch of ideas and inspiration on how to take my modelling further.

Next week, I'll be heading to a local military scale modelling specialist store to pick up some new gear I want to start experimenting with right away. I built a Munitorum Container last night which will serve as a test bed for some of the stuff I want to start using on my 'Angels. The timing of this is great, as the new Horus Heresy box set is supposedly entering preorder in the next week or two! I'm already eyeing up the new Contemptor Dreadnought kit as a perfect start for applying the full knowledge of the book. Lincoln is a diehard Maschinen Krieger nut and I'm confident that his many Ma.K tricks can be applied to the Contemptor (they're both heavily armoured battlesuits after all). The bare, somewhat large surfaces of the Contemptor will be perfect for surface texturizing, colour modulation and chipping etc

Coming back to the beakies, WHC have kindly supplied me with a new reference pict (just dont look at the gun barrel LOL). I am going to go less edge highlighty and more weathered on my beakies, with black helmet lenses (as shown in the og Space Marine Paint Set guide) and metallic coloured "toes", but its nice to have some reference using the exact same model(s) as I'm going to be using. Not too thrilled about the left shoulderpad being a 2-piece build, but it is what it is. Will put my sanding sponges and putty skills to the test

Started working on the Storm Bolter swaps today. After two hours of careful cutting & pasting, I got the first one done. Messed up cutting the weapon off from the knuckle side a bit, leaving a scrape along the bolter bottom edge, but with a bit of putty it should be OK.

Still going to add a small shield to the left armpit, and am thinking about maybe swapping out the Sergeant's "flagpole" to a BA themed one (maybe the symbol with three blood drops, hmm?), but he's pretty much done otherwise.. Assuming I don't flock up the barrel drillings later!

Good attention to detail! Really like the separate gun barrels on the storm bolter and look forward to seeing them painted up. Now time to go through my collections and see what I can do about my "pig noses".

All right, Horus Heresy 2.0 box has landed and it's time to resume the builds.

Before we continue, some observations and a tool tip. This was the first time I used a sanding stick for fine cleanup of a model and I'm telling yall its the bees knees! Everyone needs to try this AK Tri-Stick, using it feels almost like cheating! My cleanups look flawless now Ok, onward to the observations..p

The new 2021 (Sprues date this kit internally as a 2021 design, even though the actual kit release is this year) MKVI Corvus is a great reimagination of the classic Beakie.

The proportions have been slightly tweaked. Not only are the thighs significantly elongated, the chestpiece also seems a touch wider? (need to make a test conversion...) Fortunately, all the older heads, arms, shoulderpads and weapons can be bashed with the new kit, which is good. EDIT: upon later tinkering, the chestpiece width issue turned out to be psychological. The chestpiece is still the exact same width as before, but now the way in which the torso is cut on the sprue makes refitiing chestpieces fiddlier than what would be ideal..

You can see the new pauldrons are an exact match sizewise to the old FW resin pauldrons. And yes, the new plastic pauldrons are built from two halves, resulting in a slit aross the shoulderpad even when you glue it as tight according to the sculpt as possible. You will either need to leave them be, or putty those gaps up. Thankfully, they can be substituted with the resin pauldrons!

The new Backpack design is bulkier in the middle, and the design is a bit more minimalistic. What sucks is that GW ditched the age-old backpack connector socket type, making all the old backpacks incompatible with the new torsos without modding / conversion work.

Finally here's two picts showing that you can use the new MKVI arms & weapons with the old kits. So at least conversions where one transplants vintage chestpieces into the new legs seems doable, with the exceotion that backplates probably need to be in the new style in order to accomodate the newly shaped backpack "connection point", which is no longer the round hole like it has traditionally been up to this point.

The subtle tweaks on the 2021 sculpt do make the old sculpts look derpy, just as I feared, so I will need to use the new torsos as much as possible going forward. Probably will need to learn to do thigh modding conversions as well, probably no way around it.

I'll tinker with the new bits for a bit and see if I can come up with an upmodeled Squad Lorenzo next. All in all, as a Beakie fan, we've never had it so good! Stoked!

Thanks for the comparisons tauist, really useful to see the side by sides. The join on the shoulder pad seems max, just to get more rounded studs! The torso does look a bit different, almost like there’s more of a gap between the chest plate and the belt, but if the old ones fit, then it must be psychological! The poses definitely seem to be less squatting, even the thigh connector pipes aren’t as horizontal as the old beakie. I wonder if they’ll rescale the other marks to match?

 gobert wrote:
Thanks for the comparisons tauist, really useful to see the side by sides. The join on the shoulder pad seems max, just to get more rounded studs! The torso does look a bit different, almost like there’s more of a gap between the chest plate and the belt, but if the old ones fit, then it must be psychological! The poses definitely seem to be less squatting, even the thigh connector pipes aren’t as horizontal as the old beakie. I wonder if they’ll rescale the other marks to match?

I'm confident we will see rescaling of other armour marks eventually. The new anatomical proportions are such a significant improvement. However, I'd wager we will first see the unreleased marks first, such as MKII & MKV before we are goong to see rescales to MKIII, MKIV & MKVII.

I am really enjoying assembling the new MKVI, the kit is challenging to build but clearly a lot of love went into it. The pieces are easy to clean of moldlines, and the little pegs are a cool way to make sure you can assemble a pose 100% as intended, but it is also easy enough to ignore/cut the pegs and go more freeform with the pose, at least in the case of armature. Only one model out of five is giving me a hard time during assembly, the pose V. It's the only one where you have to glue in both legs to the torso. I tried finishing that one as the last model yesterday, but one leg kept falling off (I use very little glue with the legs in order to avoid glue spillage from the joints).

Anyways, here's where I got to yesterday. Still need to add nades, pistols and few bayonets, but almost half of the squad done. When seeing a group of the new models, you really start to appreciate just how much better the new proportions are. I even went as far as to ebay a SMH1 series kneeling marine, just so that i can get Castivar's model to match up the size of the new models better! (Yeah, he's still going to end up kneeling)

Next morning, and I finally tackled pose V - well, sort of. While I did manage to glue both legs in finally, I flocked up gluing the left leg a bit, resulting in a slightly modified leg stance. Turns out, the leg assemblies are actually pretty ruthless in the sense that if you mess them up once, any partial glue residue in the socket from a failed attempt will mess up the tiny pegs, and make it almost impssible to get the leg back to it's intended position/angle.

So here's the primary Combat Squad of Sqd Lorenzo. Still need to add accessories, and was thinking of adding a scope to Sgt Lorenzo's Bolter, now that he lost his combiweapon, I think I still want something extra for his weapon..

Nice squad tauist. I have been keen to see how the new HH box is put together so I'll be following with interest!

 Olthannon wrote:
Nice squad tauist. I have been keen to see how the new HH box is put together so I'll be following with interest!

Thank you sir! Speaking of the rest of the AoD box, I'm afraid it will take some time before I get to build the Contemptor and the Spartan though. I'm in the middle of transforming from the traditional "GW mini painting school" into "Advanced Sci-Fi Model school", so am trying to learn new modelling and weathering skills, which I want to be applying to the AoD vehicles. Next big one I need to practice with some test models is surface texturizing, I want to try to apply a slight armoured texture to the hulls of vehicles, and need to test a few options with some "disposable" modelkits first. In theory it should be a simple affair, stippling some undiluted Mr Surfacer 500 or 1000 to the armour panels, but I've yet to test this with any GW miniatures, so don't know if the result will look realistic in-scale or not.

Anyways, I reckon most of the western world has assembled & painted their AoD boxes before I'm anywhere close to finishing mine LOL. I like to take my time with this army.

I had been hunting for a Heavy Weapons upgrade kit for the MKVI locally for a few days, and finally found a LGS which had stock. I should be getting the SMH1 kneeling Heavy Weapon model in a week or two, so can finish assembling the rest of Squad Lorenzo soon.

My new tungsten drill bit set also arrived from China. Looking forward to seeing if it helps with obtaining clean, distortion free gun barrel holes for my minis. The price was surprisingly reasonable compared to how much something like Tamiya drill bits cost. And these were recommended by at least one modeller on youtube, supposedly high quality tools. Can be readily found on ebay.

EDIT: Opening up the Heavy Weapons upgrade kit reveals another undocumented surprise! Seems like there are a bunch of extra arms on the sprues, and there's two of them! This was unexpected but a great bonus for anyone who is looking to kitbash some MKVI but also wants to use the "official" arms for their kitbashes. Someone high up in the GW foodchain must really love Horus Heresy!

The SMH1 series kneeling ML marine arrived, but regrettably buying it was a waste of money! Although the standing marines in the SMH series are all upscaled to CSM (and therefore Beakie 2021) proportions, seems like the kneeling model is the exact same size as the oldmarines from, say, Devastators kit. F41L. So I ended up using only the base from the SMH1, to give the crouching model a big more height so he wont look all miniscule next to his brothers..

I also made another observation regarding the new MKVI kit. The new helmeted heads are smaller than the old sculpts! This will make helmet swaps slightly problematic going forward, I'll need to check I wont go overboard with larger helmet spam.

Managed to build two more, Castivar and Furian. I'm not 100% sure either one is final yet. The 2021 Missile Launcher is gorgeous, but not sure I like the crouched pose anymore. Furian looks OK except for the torso pose, the "pose 1" from the MKVI kit feels too static for him, need to try a more dynamic torso with maybe some twist to it.. I broke off a glued leg assembling Furian AGAIN! Dunno if the heat is affecting the glue or if these MKVI leg joints are just a PITA to assemble properly. Anyways, its getting late, more tomorrow..