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.

I will have to redo all the pictures, because they looked fine on the camera until I moved them to the computer. Then they didn't look as good as I thought they did when I opened in Photoshop. I will have to redo my lighting and try a couple different settings on my camera to get better pictures.

The pictures will work for a preliminary review.





The first thing you will notice straight from the start is that you will probably have to clean the miniatures. There is a powdery substance still on the miniatures themselves which is most likely talc or some sort of mold release powder. This is par for most resin miniatures anything so this isn't something new that was unexpected.

I just use warm water, dish soap and a toothbrush. I usually let them soak for about 15-20 minutes in warm water and dish soap. Then I clean them with a toothbrush with a light brushing. Then soak again for another 10 minutes before rinsing. I will rinse by doing a light brushing with just clean warm water and the toothbrush, then let them sit in water. Then I will take them out and let them dry. An alternate method is just a light brushing with warm water and dish soap using the toothbrush. Then I drop them into a sonic jewelry cleaner ($15-30 on amazon) that has clean water. I let that run and then take them out to dry.

You probably do not have to be that thorough, that is just a habit and routine I use for almost all my resin. You could just do warm water, dish soap and light brushing with a toothbrush then rinse and be fine as well. I deal with a lot of garage kits so a more thorough cleaning carried over to my resin miniatures to allow better primer and painting.






This is not the typical resin, it feels more like a plastic when you handle it. It isn't hard or brittle, seems fairly pliable and soft but not too soft (I can't leave lines with my fingernail scraping it). The weight of it was slightly heavier than Prodos's other resin miniatures. The detail is on par with high quality resin miniatures, the quality of the material is really good. You can tell there is more to the mix than just resin, so it does hold up to their claims of HIPS-resin hybrid material. The large pieces like the body, legs, arms are solid pieces that don't give or feel brittle.

Something that most people who have messed with single piece plastic board game pieces know that thin and long weapons can have a bendy issue. Swords, bows, staffs often are bent or have a curve to them instead of being straight. UniCast has that in common with plastic board game pieces, as you can see from the image below, it came out of the box with a slight bend.



Here you can see just how flexible the material was. If it was a traditional resin, unless you had heated it up first in hot water, this would not have been possible because it would have usually snapped and broke. This is me bending it out of the box, without soaking in hot water first.



When I release the piece, it will mostly go back to the original position. Sometimes with plastic miniatures, you can put them in hot water to bend something back and then hit it with cold water to straighten the piece. The majority of plastic pieces however this isn't possible because of how thin they tend to be with long pieces. Since this is a type of resin I was able to hot water, straighten the piece and then hit it with cold water to get it to stick. It is still pliable so if I keep bending it, I could probably get to bend back again. I did not however do this enough times to see how many times I could do it until it would eventually give and break.



For the most part the casting is fairly clean which is on par with high quality resin miniatures. There is very little flash, if any at all. There seems to be remnants of flash around where complex or difficult undercuts were. It isn't a lot and cuts away smoothly with a blade. You can make out possibly one mold line that really easy to clean smoothly with a blade. Unlike board game plastic miniatures, if you don't clean them carefully you can leave artifacts or cause the plastic to have imperfections. Overall it cleans smoother and cleaner than if I was cleaning mold lines from CMoN miniatures as a comparison.




The quality of the detail is on par if not better than CMoN current plastic single piece miniatures. Unlike traditional board game miniatures plastic the details were not soft, even ones that have high quality detail still have a thin/soft detail issue. CMoN haven't gotten much better at giving much more detail and hiding mold lines unlike previous releases. It will only take a couple miniatures of careful cleaning and then these UniCast miniatures will be ready to be primed and painted.

I'm still waiting from them to fully dry from the cleaning. Once that is done, after I redo the pictures I will start primer and paint tests with them.





If you want additional pictures of different parts, the details of the undercuts or other parts of them... just let me know.

Cool review - thanks!

I'm eager to hear about how easy they clean up. I'm generally OK with PVC minis detail-wise (I'm not a master painter or anything) but I hate how difficult it is to clean the damn thngs of mold lines. (Super rubbery board game minis like SDE uses are likewise obnoxious).

They seem really promising at the very least.

Wow, your Nyx was WAY worse than mine.

My Nyx was practically already cleaned for me. Very sharp overall.

My Lamia however needs some serious cleaning on her staff and wings. Those were really thin pieces so it's not surprising.

I had forgotten Calypso was a character figure. I thought she was a regular Inquisitor model, and bought a box of Inquisitor models.

The Inquisitors are actual resin figures. Very simple construction, but resin regardless.

I've noticed the Unicast stuff seems to be in darker packages than the other Space Crusade releases as well.

Thanks for the review, the cleaning may be an issue if it is needed widespread for boardgames.

The bending quality is actually a nice trait again for boardgames.

This whole process is very interesting. I'll have to keep it in mind for future projects (if I ever get around to a boxed game or similar). I reasonably happy with metal for most of what I do, but the advantages of a low-cost resin-plastic hybrid (with that levels of detail ) has some very promising applications.

Wow.. saw that first pic and thought it was a bad miscast, glad it was just mold release and cleaned up well. I think they look great overall.

Looks like your copy had the same issue with those little "handles" on the backpack not making it intact. Looks like they hit a limitation of the process, and probably should have redesigned that piece.

Albino Squirrel wrote:
Looks like your copy had the same issue with those little "handles" on the backpack not making it intact. Looks like they hit a limitation of the process, and probably should have redesigned that piece.

I'll have to look more closely when I get home. I never noticed they were supposed to be handles. Once I finish going through my other models to make sure that is the only issue, I'll contact them about a replacement. Thank you for pointing it out, I probably wouldn't have noticed it until I started painting or thought that piece was flash and they were supposed to be rivets of some sort.

Another interesting review from Jake Thornton

Fantastic sculpts, that slight mold slippage is very minimal IMO.

 Dark Severance wrote:

Albino Squirrel wrote:
Looks like your copy had the same issue with those little "handles" on the backpack not making it intact. Looks like they hit a limitation of the process, and probably should have redesigned that piece.

I'll have to look more closely when I get home. I never noticed they were supposed to be handles. Once I finish going through my other models to make sure that is the only issue, I'll contact them about a replacement. Thank you for pointing it out, I probably wouldn't have noticed it until I started painting or thought that piece was flash and they were supposed to be rivets of some sort.

I have the same model and I do think they're rivets. Does anyone have a 360 degree view of the studio painted one so we can compare?

Sining wrote:
I have the same model and I do think they're rivets. Does anyone have a 360 degree view of the studio painted one so we can compare?

Well, looking at Prodos's 3D render, those appear to be handles, though the design may have changed

Hmm, weird cause mine has the same issue. As does Jakes from the pics I've seen on his blog. And Dark Severances.

Sining wrote:
Hmm, weird cause mine has the same issue. As does Jakes from the pics I've seen on his blog. And Dark Severances.

I could see those easily getting removed from the final product. The renders they have in their sketchfab profile aren't the final versions of the sculpt - note the missing text-belt-thing on the render.

The handle aren't really an important aspect of the model, and yes could have ended up as something that didn't cast well consistently. Not really something that really is a major defect in the process.

 RivenSkull wrote:

Sining wrote:
Hmm, weird cause mine has the same issue. As does Jakes from the pics I've seen on his blog. And Dark Severances.

I could see those easily getting removed from the final product. The renders they have in their sketchfab profile aren't the final versions of the sculpt - note the missing text-belt-thing on the render.

The handle aren't really an important aspect of the model, and yes could have ended up as something that didn't cast well consistently. Not really something that really is a major defect in the process.

It is an indicator of a defect in the process, not necessarily the molding/casting but the whole process. Once they realized 'Hey, these handles are not gonna work' then the render/file used to create the mold should have been adjusted to leave it out rather than miscast each time. 'Hey, when miscast sometimes they come out looking like rivets" doesn't work when there are no similar rivets on the figure (there are some recessed but none I see stuck on top of surfaces). Someone from Prodos should have caught that and adjusted rather than allow miscasts to be sent to customers. So it looks like a defect in the overarching process to me.

I would say it showcases the limits of the technology if any, these models are the first production models and many things will become apparent on what design limits there are and what can be done with alterations.

For example the handles seem to need a bit of thickening to withstand demoulding..

some nice video of the detail on the gangfight games minis done with unicast here

At about the 1 hour 5 minute mark, for those not wishing to sit through too much of that before finding it!