I'm curious of peoples opinions on this.
GW of late seems to be moving away from the old standard U-hand in favor of sculpting a pretty-looking hand holding the weapon molded onto the stock, and the free arm bit being just a shoulder to a wrist.
I tend not to like this as a modeler, because while the basic product tends to be nicer (the ugly join is often hidden behind the gun itself) the advanced stuff you can do with the gun bit becomes much more limited.
With U-hand design, I can leave off that hand and easily have the model throwing a grenade, holding a melee weapon or reloading by customizing the other free arm. Or, I could separate the weapon bit from the sculpted hand and then all I have to do to model the weapon hanging from a belt or on a model's back is to sculpt a stock on with greenstuff.
With the wrist join design, I have to painstakingly shave off the sculpted-on hand, which generally looks like crap in the end unless I'm very lucky or careful.
On the flip side, a model with a U-hand which you model just holding the weapon normally would generally look terrible, and required lots of extra effort to make him look like he was holding the gun naturally.
Thoughts? Opinions? Has anyone noticed?
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