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Can't wait till they get down to making some orcs.

In fact, can't wait till GW drops their licence and KM can start making a proper game line out of the LotR franchise. While GW has some good LotR models in their line, they dropped the ball on quite a few too.

Edit: Well, Galadriel bought. Might need to check on my brush collection while I'm at it.

The LOTR skirmish game system is excellent, one of the best GW has done IMO.

KM seem to make good set piece models, but do they do any good games?

I rather like GW's LOTR game, they just screwed it up by not pushing the game enough and making it absurdly expensive with The Hobbit.

Seriously, the prices of the new Wood Elf stuff is outright insane.

$40AUD for Legolas
$40AUD for Tauriel
$70AUD for 10 Mirkwood Rangers.

Personally I'd buy them, but $150 for only 12 28mm models is friggin crazy.

I'm talking about the models, not the game. I'd love for KM to produce enough models for me to play the LotR skirmish by GW, but without a broad game licence, I doubt we'll see enough troops (or in fact any troops). So far, all we got is three hero models, all tied to the Hobbit licence. I'd love to see some line Uruks, Haradrim, Elves or Goblins.

It doesn't seem like KM make "rank and file" type models that would be appropriate for a LOTR game anyway.

 jonolikespie wrote:

 gianlucafiorentini123 wrote:

BrotherVord wrote:
these things are painted by professionals? COuld have fooled me. I'm a slightly above average painter and I put these minis to shame

In all fairness to the eavy metal team they're told to paint well below what they can do.

Has that ever been confirmed?
I've heard a lot of people saying that, and it makes sense, but so does the theory they simply replaced the eavy metal team with random guys from the studio as a(nother) cost cutting measure.

They were present at GD and the level that some of there own models were painted to was well above what we've been seeing with recent releases.

BrotherVord wrote:
these things are painted by professionals? COuld have fooled me. I'm a slightly above average painter and I put these minis to shame

Pics of your LotR stuff please? The stuff in your gallery looks nice, but it's an entirely different scale. For that matter, the Legolas linked above is blown up in size an absolutely ridiculous amount. Anything is going to suffer badly with that much zoom.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 gianlucafiorentini123 wrote:

 jonolikespie wrote:

 gianlucafiorentini123 wrote:

BrotherVord wrote:
these things are painted by professionals? COuld have fooled me. I'm a slightly above average painter and I put these minis to shame

In all fairness to the eavy metal team they're told to paint well below what they can do.

Has that ever been confirmed?
I've heard a lot of people saying that, and it makes sense, but so does the theory they simply replaced the eavy metal team with random guys from the studio as a(nother) cost cutting measure.

They were present at GD and the level that some of there own models were painted to was well above what we've been seeing with recent releases.

Something to bear in mind is that WD painters are expected to produce very figures at a certain pace - "paint this unit/army/boxed set in Y time". They're not working on individual models where they can really take their time, nor are they painting for the absolute love and joy of it at therir absolute highest standard for 8 hours a day, 5 days per week.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
It doesn't seem like KM make "rank and file" type models that would be appropriate for a LOTR game anyway.

Except they did rank and file models for the Batman game and most line troops in LotR have enough character to act as display models anyway.

 Azazelx wrote:

BrotherVord wrote:
these things are painted by professionals? COuld have fooled me. I'm a slightly above average painter and I put these minis to shame

Pics of your LotR stuff please? The stuff in your gallery looks nice, but it's an entirely different scale. For that matter, the Legolas linked above is blown up in size an absolutely ridiculous amount. Anything is going to suffer badly with that much zoom.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 gianlucafiorentini123 wrote:

 jonolikespie wrote:

 gianlucafiorentini123 wrote:

BrotherVord wrote:
these things are painted by professionals? COuld have fooled me. I'm a slightly above average painter and I put these minis to shame

In all fairness to the eavy metal team they're told to paint well below what they can do.

Has that ever been confirmed?
I've heard a lot of people saying that, and it makes sense, but so does the theory they simply replaced the eavy metal team with random guys from the studio as a(nother) cost cutting measure.

They were present at GD and the level that some of there own models were painted to was well above what we've been seeing with recent releases.

Something to bear in mind is that WD painters are expected to produce very figures at a certain pace - "paint this unit/army/boxed set in Y time". They're not working on individual models where they can really take their time, nor are they painting for the absolute love and joy of it at therir absolute highest standard for 8 hours a day, 5 days per week.

And they had superheavys to paint.They deserve the WD front cover..not like the baneblade kit is several years old along with the guardsmen...

I like the hobbit and LOTR models they look great way better than WFB. I love the more squad based look of the game making it feel a little, stress a little, more like 40k. Finally I've always adored all things Tolkien. My four month old daughter has copies of leaf by niggle and farmer Giles of ham in her room awaiting the day I can read them to her.

But.....I still won't play these games buy the models or read anything GW tries to do in this field. Not completely sure why. I think maybe I just have a string phyciological objection to GW, whom I love in a different way, sullying Tolkiens world. I just want to scream go away its not yours, leave it alone!! Stupid but I bet I'm not the only one.

Actually, as has been said before - the game is quite good - as are many, many of the models released over the last 12 years or so. If you want to talk about "sullying", you may as well blame Peter Jackson, who aside from taking liberties here and there, also made LotR mainstream.

The worst sin I can see GW has made with Middle-Earth is the insane pricing, particularly on The Hobbit.

This list contains the January release list for the Hobbit (confirmed by WD). Blue ones are retail for about one month, red ones are mail order only from the beginning:

GW has no faith in the Hobbit, this is not news.

Those Nid troop boxes as mail order only is very worrying however.

Looks like the Gaunt boxes either received a massive price hike or they're 20 man per box. In which case, I would not put it past GW to keep them exclusive for Direct and leave the cheaper, smaller box for retail.

They are indeed 20 gaunt boxes, they are indeed mail order only to hurt retailers, and Tyranid discussion is indeed off-topic here and discussed in the Tyranid thread.

I have to wonder why GW even retained the Hobbit license, since they clearly don't intend on doing anything with it.

They probably expected it to be bigger when they bought the license and are stuck with it for three years. No use in making nothing at all if you have the license but it's clearly not the cash cow they hoped for.

Are they seriously trying to sell people barrel variations of the Hobbit cast.

 Azazelx wrote:
...For that matter, the Legolas linked above is blown up in size an absolutely ridiculous amount. Anything is going to suffer badly with that much zoom.

Something to bear in mind is that WD painters are expected to produce very figures at a certain pace - "paint this unit/army/boxed set in Y time". They're not working on individual models where they can really take their time, nor are they painting for the absolute love and joy of it at therir absolute highest standard for 8 hours a day, 5 days per week.

I'm a bit baffled by the lengths people will go to to protect GW's honour. The purpose of painting the models is to sell them. And if the staff painters can't make them look decent, why would anyone choose to buy the models? It's incredibly poor marketing for a company that claims to "make the best model soldiers in the world".

Compare this to advertising for other products. When you see a commercial for food, you don't see the food you're actually buying, you see the idealized, studio recreation. I look at these paintjobs, and it's like being shown a mouldy burger.

The only real explanation is that GW has lowered its standards for this product line; sales are driven by the movie and the licensing, not the appearance or quality of the models, so it's not worth the time to do better.

Bronzefists42 wrote:
Are they seriously trying to sell people barrel variations of the Hobbit cast.

I think they're quite novel and interesting. But not worth anything near the price GW put on them.

 Mastiff wrote:

 Azazelx wrote:
...For that matter, the Legolas linked above is blown up in size an absolutely ridiculous amount. Anything is going to suffer badly with that much zoom.

Something to bear in mind is that WD painters are expected to produce very figures at a certain pace - "paint this unit/army/boxed set in Y time". They're not working on individual models where they can really take their time, nor are they painting for the absolute love and joy of it at therir absolute highest standard for 8 hours a day, 5 days per week.

I'm a bit baffled by the lengths people will go to to protect GW's honour. The purpose of painting the models is to sell them. And if the staff painters can't make them look decent, why would anyone choose to buy the models? It's incredibly poor marketing for a company that claims to "make the best model soldiers in the world".

Compare this to advertising for other products. When you see a commercial for food, you don't see the food you're actually buying, you see the idealized, studio recreation. I look at these paintjobs, and it's like being shown a mouldy burger.

The only real explanation is that GW has lowered its standards for this product line; sales are driven by the movie and the licensing, not the appearance or quality of the models, so it's not worth the time to do better.

It's not a question of "protecting GW's honour", it's a question of dealing with the constant naysaying.

I have Legolas and Tauriel both, given to me as Christmas presents along with some Mirkwood Rangers and Palace Guard. The sculpts are actually quite good. Whoever painted the models should be reprimanded because the sculpts are not the issue.

 Kanluwen wrote:
Whoever painted the models should be reprimanded because the sculpts are not the issue.

Maybe bad working atmosphere, tight time schedule and bad payment are not enough to motivate the painters

I have zero interest in anything Hobbit or LOTR related but I clicked into the first post to check out the models. The models are OK but what is up with some of the paintjobs? I mean, they're not terrible, but they're definitely not what I expect of GWS either.



How is the same painter (presumably) able to do such a knockout job on the robe and such a poor one on the face?

Speaking of bad faces;



There was a while back where it was speculated that GWS was knocking back the 'Eavy Metal team's paintjobs on the product shots to make things "more accessible" to the average painter. At the time I thought that was rubbish but now I'm not so sure.

 Howard A Treesong wrote:
They probably expected it to be bigger when they bought the license and are stuck with it for three years. No use in making nothing at all if you have the license but it's clearly not the cash cow they hoped for.

With licenses, there are usually up front costs that need to be covered as well as minimum royalty payments that must be paid no matter how well the products sell (or don't sell). For the Hobbit license, I would imagine that the minimum royalty payments are quite substantial, given the success of the GW LOTR license. If GW does not want to lose money on the license, they need to promote the line heavily so that they can sell lots of Hobbit stuff. I suppose its possible that they have written it off as a loss already and are just doing the minimum required stuff detailed in the license contract, hence quite a few substandard sculpts and the weak paint jobs on this latest batch.

The cost of the license is probably driving the amazingly high prices, although prices for new stuff in 40K and Fantasy are getting pretty amazing too.

T

Oops, I should have read the rest of the thread first, looks like everyone already noticed how underwhelming the paint jobs are.

That one Ranger with the hood and mask that looks sort of like a green ninja is pretty badass, though. Bottom right. I also like the crouching guy on the top right. Decent models, poor paintjobs.

 Kanluwen wrote:

It's not a question of "protecting GW's honour", it's a question of dealing with the constant naysaying.

I have Legolas and Tauriel both, given to me as Christmas presents along with some Mirkwood Rangers and Palace Guard. The sculpts are actually quite good. Whoever painted the models should be reprimanded because the sculpts are not the issue.

The best toy soldiers in the world everybody!!

*slow clap*

Now compare to the (admittedly slightly larger scale) Knight Models minis and paint jobs.

Yeah...

 Mastiff wrote:

 Azazelx wrote:
...For that matter, the Legolas linked above is blown up in size an absolutely ridiculous amount. Anything is going to suffer badly with that much zoom.

Something to bear in mind is that WD painters are expected to produce very figures at a certain pace - "paint this unit/army/boxed set in Y time". They're not working on individual models where they can really take their time, nor are they painting for the absolute love and joy of it at therir absolute highest standard for 8 hours a day, 5 days per week.

I'm a bit baffled by the lengths people will go to to protect GW's honour. The purpose of painting the models is to sell them. And if the staff painters can't make them look decent, why would anyone choose to buy the models? It's incredibly poor marketing for a company that claims to "make the best model soldiers in the world".

Compare this to advertising for other products. When you see a commercial for food, you don't see the food you're actually buying, you see the idealized, studio recreation. I look at these paintjobs, and it's like being shown a mouldy burger.

The only real explanation is that GW has lowered its standards for this product line; sales are driven by the movie and the licensing, not the appearance or quality of the models, so it's not worth the time to do better.

Protect GW's honour? Err, no. I have a hate-love-hate-hate-hate relationship with GW, you can view my post history and see I attack GW more than I defend them.

I'm just calling it how I see it. When you take something that is 4mm across and painted to look good when 4mm across and then zoom in so it appears on your screen as 40mm across (like the zoomed in face pictures), of course it's going to look terrible.

Bad marketing? Absolutely. But really the sculpts and even the painting aren't nearly as bad as people are making out IMO. They may not be painted to competition standard, but they are an order of magnitude better than what I can paint and I'm guessing what most people on this forum can paint.

Lets take some of those images and rescale them to the actual model size (using my own monitor and a few LOTR models as references, I'm on a 23" 1920x1080 monitor, so I think that's a pretty common DPI, and I have an old Fellowship of the Ring set and some Rohan that I'm using to roughly scale the images).

Resizing some of those earlier pictures to a realistic scale, this is what they look like...









Still think you can paint better than that? Maybe you can, I'd suggest many people can't, I sure as hell can't.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
To add to that, I don't know why GW insist on zooming in to unrealistic levels on their LOTR/Hobbit models, because it makes them look terrible when really they aren't bad at all. They clearly use feathering to do blending, when you zoom in looks ugly, but reality is the feathering is so fine you can only see it with a magnifying glass.

Bronzefists42 wrote:
Are they seriously trying to sell people barrel variations of the Hobbit cast.

Yeah and on the LOTR forums I go on plenty of people want them.I'm sooo serious.Also:Why are people complaining about the faces?Its not like its 4mm wide or anything..Its probably because people are so used to 40k/fantasy heroic scale.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
Still think you can paint better than that? Maybe you can, I'd suggest many people can't, I sure as hell can't.

"I can't paint better than that" isn't really the greatest defense, is it? I mean, of course I can't paint better, I'm a mediocre painter and not part of one of the greatest miniature painting teams in the world as 'Eavy Metal are (were? are allegedly?).

The goal should be the best paint job they can do to show off how great the models look. I don't know much about the long haired blonde guy (or maybe girl, is there really a distinction among elves?) but I bet he or she didn't spend the whole movie looking like they were concerned they may have crapped their pants.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
To add to that, I don't know why GW insist on zooming in to unrealistic levels on their LOTR/Hobbit models, because it makes them look terrible when really they aren't bad at all.

This is a much better argument, and one I can agree with.

 Ouze wrote:
"I can't paint better than that" isn't really the greatest defense, is it? I mean, of course I can't paint better, I'm a mediocre painter and not part of one of the greatest miniature painting teams in the world as 'Eavy Metal are.

The goal should be the best paint job they can do to show off how great the models look. I don't know much about the long haired blonde guy (or maybe girl, is there really a distinction among elves?) but I bet he or she didn't spend the whole movie looking like they were concerned they may have crapped their pants.

Actually, funnily enough, when I watched The Hobbit the other day, I actually thought "hmm, GW actually captured him quite well".

But again, it's not just "I can't paint better", that comment was meant for the people who are stating they could paint better when actually I don't think they could.

I actually think they're painted quite well, they just aren't photographed well. There's a world of difference between the Fantasy/40k hero scale where you probably can paint detail fine enough to zoom in and LOTR scale where really, what looks good on an ACTUAL model doesn't look good zoomed in 10 times the size.