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 Red Corsair wrote:
I wouldn't worry.
They are doing this utilizing 3D sculpting which very much DOES have a minimum scale requirement due to printer limitations with fine details.

I'd love to know where you are getting your information. 3D printing these days can handle pretty much anything that most wargame companies would throw at it. At least my research into buying a 3D printer suggests that. There are sub-$10,000 printers that can handle a 6 micron resolution, which should be excellent detail, even for figures at 15mm. Also, look at some of the stuff being done by other manufacturers. Andrew Rae with Statuesque Miniatures being an excellent example.

If there is scale creep (and there obviously is), I'd be willing to bet money it was done on purpose.

~Eric

The fellow who made this post is Killian from the BoW Infinity videos http://infinitytheforums.com/forum/index.php?/topic/24911-new-3d-sculpts-vs-old-and-new-traditional-sculpts/#entry524236
Post #19 if the link fails. You can read the rest of the thread if you want. I'm sure you'll find it amusing.

Anyway, We had 33 people at the Dire States Baltimore Brawl Infinity tournament this Saturday. An excellent event, and A good time had by all Now as I understand it, there is going to be one in Houston and one in Orlando. The Dire States ( a take on Dire Foes) seem to be developing into a Grand Tournament circuit for Infinity. The first was in Texas.

I'll post some photos of the tables soon, so watch the community showcase thread for a heads up when that happens.

Man that thread is a trainwreck.

 Red Harvest wrote:

Anyway, We had 33 people at the Dire States Baltimore Brawl Infinity tournament this Saturday. An excellent event, and A good time had by all Now as I understand it, there is going to be one in Houston and one in Orlando. The Dire States ( a take on Dire Foes) seem to be developing into a Grand Tournament circuit for Infinity. The first was in Texas.

I'll post some photos of the tables soon, so watch the community showcase thread for a heads up when that happens.

Sweet! Looking forward to seeing what you guys put together. All the better if some armies are showcased too. Do you guys have a results posting anywhere?

As for a US grand tourney kind of circuit, that would be rad. Go man go!

 Red Harvest wrote:
The fellow who made this post is Killian from the BoW Infinity videos http://infinitytheforums.com/forum/index.php?/topic/24911-new-3d-sculpts-vs-old-and-new-traditional-sculpts/#entry524236
Post #19 if the link fails. You can read the rest of the thread if you want. I'm sure you'll find it amusing.

Ah, I wouldn't put a terrible lot of stock in that. The metal material that he says they are using would require a larger size figure to look decent, but I'm not sure it could ever produce the same kinds of results that resins do. Last time i read anything about metal sintered prints, they were still kinda grainy in addition to having a less fine resolution. If they are using that metal material, then they really need to rethink their process.

That thread is a train wreck...

Thanks for the link.

~Eric

Not sure how that thread is a train wreck, not everyone is agreeing but most people are making their points pretty coherently.

The difference between my Haqq starter Janissary and any of the O:I HI is pretty dramatic, but at least that's an 'old' model.
Having new Wildcats dwarfed by Alguaciles just seems shortsighted.

 Taarnak wrote:

 Red Harvest wrote:
The fellow who made this post is Killian from the BoW Infinity videos http://infinitytheforums.com/forum/index.php?/topic/24911-new-3d-sculpts-vs-old-and-new-traditional-sculpts/#entry524236
Post #19 if the link fails. You can read the rest of the thread if you want. I'm sure you'll find it amusing.

Ah, I wouldn't put a terrible lot of stock in that. The metal material that he says they are using would require a larger size figure to look decent, but I'm not sure it could ever produce the same kinds of results that resins do. Last time i read anything about metal sintered prints, they were still kinda grainy in addition to having a less fine resolution. If they are using that metal material, then they really need to rethink their process.

That thread is a train wreck...

Thanks for the link.

~Eric

Yeah... I've found that it's best to stick to certain, limited sections of the official forum. Personally, I almost never stray from the artistic subforums, like Miniatures and Arcologies.

Back to the topic of scale, it doesn't bother me too much, for now. I'm fine with the new, slightly larger size of the figures, as long as it stays consistent. As exacting as CB is about their miniature lines, I can't imagine that we'll end up with half of the lines approaching 40mm in a few years. Almost all of the recent releases have been spectacular, (barring some personal preferences) so if everything stays consistently scaled from now on, I'm sold.

Well, I say someone made more powerful and larger by say the Dog soldiers transformations or the super soldier programs should look the part with the 28mm for the more common man, and everyday person.

Also the total proportions are better than we see with GW which makes a 28mm man with 1/35 scale head and hands for their clown like over sized chunky weapons. sorry, but a las rifle is almost as big as a 1/35th scale squad heavy MG!

That new biker is a mountain of a man compared to regular Ghulam troopers.

Most miniature producers use jewelry grade wax or resin printers, not metal.

Digital sculpting, and printing, is something that will make it much easier to keep large lines of miniatures in scale with each other. And if any sculpts come in off scale, they can be much more easily modified as needed.

Scale creep or whatever it is aside, my real concern is why Corvus choose silent treatment over officially addressing community concerns. If they popped their heads out about now and said, 'Hey folk, we hear what you are saying about scale and we would like to clarify that this is an intentional move to a slightly larger and occasionally less realistic scale but we have a plan and all the models will match up eventually.' Then I believe almost everyone would say 'fair play' and move on knowing that it's under control. Equally if they said, 'Bare with us, we've seen what you're talking about and are discussing how to address this.' Then at least people wouldn't be sitting in limbo over what's happening.

I hate it when companies turtle up on the fans. Alienating.

With the introduction of Silhouette markers for every type of game mini in Infinity, what does the scale matter other than for personal taste?

All mechanics disputes for LOS and firing will be done with the new silhouette templates, not any part of the actual model.

Maybe they are making the miniatures slightly larger for better pop on the table, or make them easier to paint for the detail level?

It's definitely a matter of personal taste. One of the biggest appeals of the game are the top-notch models. We're all talking about aesthetics here,

Except for some people talking about base contact with terrain. Those people are silly and must have curmudgeonly opponents that refuse to take declaration of intent.

ski2060 wrote:
With the introduction of Silhouette markers for every type of game mini in Infinity, what does the scale matter other than for personal taste?

All mechanics disputes for LOS and firing will be done with the new silhouette templates, not any part of the actual model.

Maybe they are making the miniatures slightly larger for better pop on the table, or make them easier to paint for the detail level?

Beat me to it: as near as I understand things, scale creep is only relevant to aesthetics at this point, yes? Personally I have always preferred the "magic cylinder" approach to LOS (at least, I think that is what they used to call it back when I started 40k), which is common to PP games as well.

That said, I do understand the importance of having factions hold together: perhaps that is what underlies things now, that they are bringing all sculpting in-house? Above it was alluded to that the earlier sculpts used a lot of freelancers?

 Vertrucio wrote:

Digital sculpting, and printing, is something that will make it much easier to keep large lines of miniatures in scale with each other. And if any sculpts come in off scale, they can be much more easily modified as needed.

Agree with this. I would view all of this as a kind of 'scale refinement' i.e. it's something that happens a lot with miniature lines when companies start out, an obvious one includes the GW ranges. I don't think you are going to see a continued growth of miniatures, but rather instead a marked difference between the early generation stuff and what has come out in the last year or so (and will continue to come out).

But I think it's going to be something noticeable when lining up size comparison shots (and if the units ever melee with each other - haha! ), I don't think we are going to have had manga-gundam proportioned 40mm tall miniatures with 70mm guns in 5 years time..

For what it's worth, CB talked about the change in scale at the Interplanetary earlier this year, saying that it's an intentional increase in size and an increase in distinction between the parts of a model, so for example kneepads are getting a deeper crease where they join the fabric of the trousers etc.

The printed masters are indeed resin, and size isn't an issue, the same technique is used for 15mm and even 6mm models.

Gun size is a different thing again, apparently for the CAD models they resize them for aesthetic reasons. Not a fan of the idea, but it's definitely a conscious decision on their part.

EDIT - I forgot to say that in the seminar at the Interplanetary CB also said that they now have a specific set of 3D dollies that all the new sculpts are compared to for scale purposes, to keep the sizes more consistent going forwards.

Thank you IJW. Much of that I hadn't heard and a little I had but had forgotten. All in, I should retract 80% of my feelings in my last post about their lack of communication. I wish there was a place where this sort of information was gathered and easily searchable.

No disagreements from me on that! Hmm, maybe I should suggest they start a blog.

 IJW wrote:
For what it's worth, CB talked about the change in scale at the Interplanetary earlier this year, saying that it's an intentional increase in size and an increase in distinction between the parts of a model, so for example kneepads are getting a deeper crease where they join the fabric of the trousers etc.

The printed masters are indeed resin, and size isn't an issue, the same technique is used for 15mm and even 6mm models.

Gun size is a different thing again, apparently for the CAD models they resize them for aesthetic reasons. Not a fan of the idea, but it's definitely a conscious decision on their part.

EDIT - I forgot to say that in the seminar at the Interplanetary CB also said that they now have a specific set of 3D dollies that all the new sculpts are compared to for scale purposes, to keep the sizes more consistent going forwards.

All of that makes sense except purposefully resizing the weapons. That seems like a silly choice for such an aesthetically conscious company. It's very much contradictory to everything else they are doing to maintain consistency.

~Eric

 Taarnak wrote:


All of that makes sense except purposefully resizing the weapons. That seems like a silly choice for such an aesthetically conscious company. It's very much contradictory to everything else they are doing to maintain consistency.

~Eric

Not really, they are consciously changing their aesthetics from their original manga style to a more "occidental" type of look. Making the weapons bigger is consistent with this new aesthetic (and so is making the miniature themselves bigger).

It is going to lead to some upset among people with a lot of 'older' minis - i.e., the people who helped get CB and INFINITY to where they are today.

Hopefully it isn't always as egregious as some of the examples we've seen so far.

Well, I can't disagree with you there, but given the reception that this new style of minis seems to be having, I think that CB made the right choice.

PhantomViper wrote:

Not really, they are consciously changing their aesthetics from their original manga style to a more "occidental" type of look. Making the weapons bigger is consistent with this new aesthetic (and so is making the miniature themselves bigger).

But changing to a more westernized style shouldn't involve having two differently sized instances of the same weapon in the miniatures line. And that is really what I was referring to. However, I admit to only peripherally following that issue and they may already be correcting that as well.

~Eric

 Taarnak wrote:
All of that makes sense except purposefully resizing the weapons.

Like I said, I don't like the idea myself, I'm just pointing out that it's intentional and not (as some have suggested on other forums) incompetence/accident on the part of the sculptors.

@IJW, Don't you think that that 'news blog' is sparse at best? It doesn't serve the purpose I feel we are lacking.

Also do we have an idea of when they started this scale up? I was very confused to find that the Vanguard from the Morat Starter being substantially smaller than the Vanguard from the box set.

And surprisingly I'm not overly impressed with either set but that's for another thread, I think I'll review them on my blog if there is interest.

What news blog?

Oh I thought you were referring to the news blog on the Official website. Sorry I misunderstood.

 Taarnak wrote:

All of that makes sense except purposefully resizing the weapons. That seems like a silly choice for such an aesthetically conscious company. It's very much contradictory to everything else they are doing to maintain consistency.

~Eric

Actually this happened because CB is such aesthetically conscious company, the resized weapons look harmoniously better on each sculpt individually, examples of the old unified sized weapons are the stock of comments about huge weapons on female models.

CB has tried every aspect of realism and artistic combination there is, I believe this is the ideal mix and from what I heard they intent to stick to this approach which will bring a more unified look on the range and be more user friendly.

I still think people are completely ignoring how most infinity models were large with large weapons and then they got noticeably smaller. Suddenly, with digital printing things get very slightly larger and there are complaints?

Compare:

New Djanbazan amongst old ones. Yes, this is female and she's obviously going to be smaller. However, regardless of height and gender, people tend to have similarly sized heads. There is a whole scale of difference here.


The Nomads went through an even more insane scale change of their weapons and models. Check out the Reverand Moiras.


And in the end, we come to today where people complain about the difference between these two guys' weapons:

Scale changes have existed in this line ever since they began resculpting figures. Compare the old Zhanshis to the current ones. Or the old Kazaks to the current ones. The old ones are actually a lot bigger and chunkier than the current ones. This is nothing new.

The original Djanzabans were mutant-huge, and the Haqq HMGs looked like weird comic book pipes. So far, positive change. Same with the giant rifles, and their laptop-sized ammo magazines (which are extra blatant on the older Ariadna models).

The original Rev. Moiras should never be used as an argument against better scaling. The HMG looked terrible, and resembled a woman caber tossing a gun-shaped boulder.

Plus, I wasn't super thrilled at the realistic scale that came out for the Riot Grrl's combi rifles, or the Vortex's tiny gun. They're cutting something in between to make individual models look good, which I'm fine with.

Plus, for every 'HUGE' old model (Djanzaban, BeefyFusiliers, etc) you got a tiny old model (Interventors come especially to mind).