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Does anyone have any experience with and opinions on the Trollcast material that Troll Forged game is using?

I've been researching materials for my miniature game now that some sculpts are being finalized. I've actually been sitting on a great looking alien miniature for years now trying to find a way to get it mass produced without extra high costs. I want to scale the game such that players would have around 20-30 miniatures on the table, instead of a small skirmish of 5-10.

With metal being pretty expensive now, and hard resin being incredibly time consuming to cast (thus adding labor cost), I was wondering about this Trollcast material, but all the hullaballoo from recent kickstarters about the material they use is making me extra cautious. I wanted to make sure that this material could hold detail.

As it stands, I'm going to have to modify my game to be small skirmish, using individual hard resin miniatures, but the costs for a single miniature goes up accordingly. If I can find a cheaper material that has techniques for speeding up production (like spin casting) then I'd be able to sell my game at a cost that allows new players to jump in more easily.

I own a couple of troll cast figures (the Frothers chaity Judge Minty and Sasha Grey figures - googled pics below:





I haven'y got around to doing anything beyond looking at them yet, but my impressions are that it's a nice hard material, hold sharp detail well and is very well cast with virtually zero mould lines (from memory).

However (and its a big however), these were cast by Ed at Troll Forged who developed the process/ material. When Defiance tried to copy it, their stuff was dreadful (I know that having Defiance involved is likely to have the affect on most things), so I don't know how reproduceable these results are if it's not Ed doing the casting and I don't know if Ed's taking on any new work right now - last time I checked he was neck deep in casting his KS stuff (this was quite a while ago though).

TLR - good material if cast well, not sure if you'll be able to get it cast

Edit: to correct effect to affect - the spelling error I most detest, especially when I make it!

I've got a bunch of minis in it from the first Red Box Games KS and from a couple of Impact miniatures KS

It's a hard(ish) material which responds to clean up very similarly to resin and polystyrene (so scrape with a knife, file or sand)

It's robust and not quite as fragile as traditional resin and makes minis that are suitable for normal gaming. It is also very good at picking up and holding detail

now the less good bits

it's spin cast in traditional style moulds and very fine/spikey detail can be fragile

(I suspect it fails/is weakened as the whole thing is pulled out of the mould which is more rigid that that used for normal vacuum cast resin)



so borrowing this image from the web the spikes on the Red Box Games Helsvakt and the junction between the weapons and the hands were weak points

so keep this in mind before sculpting/commissioning sculpts (talking to Ed is probably the best idea as he's probably got a better idea of why some of the Red Box Games stuff was tricky to cast and how to avoid it)

On getting stuff done Ed is very behind on his own KS a(but he needs to sculpt that too) and the Red Box Games KS was a significant problem,

but he delivered 2 Impact Miniatures KS projects on time (and is working on others with out problem) and has also been supplying them with other minis in Trollcast for their general webstore so he can deliver on time

(again Tom/Chris at Impact Miniatures are very approachable so worth contacting them for their impressions of working with the material and Ed)

Yeah, I think I can do a better job than Defiance at this point.

But yes, I can see that how you work with it being an issue.

A local friend is a wizard with hard resin casting and has all the equipment and experience needed. So, going with hard vacuum cast resin, and adjusting the rules for smaller sized battles is my best bet.

Likewise, I can see myself easily doing a single purpose kickstarter to buy a spincaster, and supplies to do metal casting or decent quality restic. Again, it'd be for a smaller scale game.

At this point, I have done the requisite amount of google searching. I needed more direct opinions and anecdotes before making any decisions. Thanks for letting me know. Hopefully others will chime in with more.

My personal experience has been a severely mixed bag. Some models are great, some are trash. I have gotten good referrals about Ed, and not-so-good.

The material is rigid and holds detail well, but sometimes has trouble filling up the mold cavity and is sometimes brittle. It is okay for thicker pieces, but thin pieces may snap and shatter. It sounds weird to say that the material sometimes behaves one way, but that is my experience with more than 300 models. And the variation isn't always by model. It depends on who was spinning the mold that day. Like Orlando, most of my experience comes from the first RBG kickstarter. He may have gotten better casts than I did. I do think that variations in production were the result of new employees working the molds. So that problem may be alleviated. Like any casting, rushing production causes problems.

Ed is a fantastically busy guy so far as I can tell, and so production times may be long. But, he is busy because clients have been satisfied. One thing to keep in mind is that your molds will also have to be made by Ed, as far as I understand (and are more expensive than metal molds), and for the most part won't be usable by another manufacturer. So once you are in, those costs are sunk into the material and with Ed. If you don't like it you can't get your molds back and try a different service.

At the end of the day, contract casting is going to spike your costs in the long run regardless of what material you use (HIPS will alternatively kill you in up front costs). If you can cast in house, you'll save money regardless of what the material prices are, and you can get set up for spin casting somewhere between $3-$6K, maybe less if you are creative. You can also get away with 'sweat equity', i.e. you don't have to pay yourself to spin the molds, so you save your costs there.

I can only speak from experience from RBG's first KS, which was all cast in TrollCast material, and I got about 100 or so miniatures form it.

The material itself is good, in my opinion, and I have some very nice casts. With the right type of miniatures, I believe that it will be an excellent material for casting.

I've tried to contact Ed at several occassions to ask him about casting miniatures for me in the future, but I never heard back from any of those requests so now I've given up.

TrollCast - Good experiences.
Trollforge - Bad experiences.

grefven wrote:

TrollCast - Good experiences.
Trollforge - Bad experiences.

That's an interesting way to sum it up. As my post suggests, the guy spinning the mold was likely as much or more at fault as the material in the not-so-great casts I have. But one thing to remember is that those casts were supposedly QC'd by Trollforge, and were definitely QC'd by Tre. I know there was some friction to do with alleged miscasts or casts that didn't pass Tre's QC standards. What were those casts like, and how many were there? I don't know.

That said, I've heard good things about Ed and Trollcast too, from people I respect in this industry. At the end of the day, I'm only an end customer when it comes to Trollcast. Other than that is what I have heard in conversations with a few people. So bear that in mind.

When RBG was contracting with Trollforge, Trollcast was a relatively new material and a relatively new production process. Plenty of other products have been manufactured in Trollcast since then. Though I don't have a list offhand. Does anyone know all of the Trollcast products on the market? Getting a list of those might help point the OP in a good direction for getting feedback on the company/material.

Thanks again for all this info, it's helping me immensely.

At this point, with so many unknowns, cost, and QC issues, I'll just use my friend's resin casting studio.

I'll just have to make the game and sculpts worth the higher price, meanwhile building up reputation and cash reserves to jump to another material later down the line.

Sasha Grey has her own war miniature? Wow, being in porn really pays off nowadays...

 Vertrucio wrote:
Thanks again for all this info, it's helping me immensely.

At this point, with so many unknowns, cost, and QC issues, I'll just use my friend's resin casting studio.

I'll just have to make the game and sculpts worth the higher price, meanwhile building up reputation and cash reserves to jump to another material later down the line.

Just to echo - the material seems fine enough, though I haven't really seen it to be as revolutionary as it was originally pushed as being. The detail is perhaps a little better than metal on clean casts - but you have many of the issues of resin casting that prevent clean casts from happening all the time. It isn't much stronger than certain mixes of resin - one thing people miss out on is that polyurethane resins can be formulated from brittle as glass to tough as rubber...so it isn't too hard to get a resin cast that is as strong or stronger.

With regards to the unknowns, that is my biggest issue with "Trollcast". Not so much the unknowns in the end results, rather the material itself. Plastics are a complicated thing, and many plastics have issues with them. Since they have not (as far as I have seen) released the actual formulation of the material, you have no way of knowing what is in it...whether it will degrade in a years time and fall apart... I have seen some plastic formulas turn into powder if left exposed to air in a fairly short period of time (in terms of my miniature/model collection). Even if they are just using some of those plastics as fillers - it would be troubling to get into your unpainted miniature backlog in 3 years time only to find that the figures have begun to decay.

Although it isn't a huge concern for me - it is a concern for many people...many plastics contain things like phthalates and other chemicals that they feel are unsafe. Some regional regulators have begun to ban many of these substances, or require them to be identified (in the US, California in particular is a potential mind field for anyone using Trollcast). Consumers who have those concerns have no way of knowing what is in it. Anyone who is selling them is on the hook for the materials should it be found that they contain one of the substances that has to be marked. When those toys from China were identified as containing lead - they didn't go after the factories, they went after the retailers and distributers of the products.

If he feels he has something revolutionary, he should file a patent and let it work out that way. I suspect it isn't anything quite so special though, but not knowing is very troublesome to me.