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so we tend to, justly complain a lot about finecast but.. some isn't THAT bad and actually looks pretty good even now. For your army are there any finecast units or characters that you look at and say "this isn't tooo bad if he's not replaced in the next few years it's no biggy"

For me it'd have to be Njal in termy armor, despite being finecast it's a pretty decent looking model

Honestly, I'm surprised that any of it is still around, and they didn't switch back to metal when 'Fine'cast didn't live up to expectations.

Having said that, any large, multi-part models would probably be better to have in 'Fine'cast, even with its faults, rather than trying to deal with metal.

The difficulty of Finecast is that they took models designed in metal and just redid them in resin. Resin can stick around as long as it likes if they start designing models in resin instead of the hasty conversion business.

Severina Raine, altho I would've preferred her in plastic to begin with. cuz she's kinda a recent model.

The Necron special characters are not terrible in Finecast. All the ones I got came out alright. I think it may be because they were designed for the resin, compared to a bunch of old moulds that just started to have to use it.

I'm excited as can be that the Flayed ones got replaced. That was an awful kit, and the new ones are just fantastic.

BrianDavion wrote:
so we tend to, justly complain a lot about finecast but.. some isn't THAT bad and actually looks pretty good even now.

Nope, its that bad.

I wouldn't be surprised if many of the pics of 'finecast' models are still pics of the old metals.

Dump it all.

None of it should stay. All of it should go, replaced with plastic.

 Sasori wrote:
I'm excited as can be that the Flayed ones got replaced. That was an awful kit, and the new ones are just fantastic.

As someone who owns about 18 of the original metal ones, I'm glad they're plastic.

Shame that they'll have a great new price to go along with the minis though...

 Sasori wrote:
The Necron special characters are not terrible in Finecast. All the ones I got came out alright. I think it may be because they were designed for the resin, compared to a bunch of old moulds that just started to have to use it.

To be clear, 'Fine'cast doesn't use the same moulds, just the same master models.

Voss wrote:
I wouldn't be surprised if many of the pics of 'finecast' models are still pics of the old metals.

The pics of the old metals weren't metal. GW's studio models were resin long before 'Fine'cast came along. As I understand it, as part of the development process they used to cast up a small batch of each new model in resin, as the resin showed flaws better than metal. The models sent to the 'Eavy Metal crew for painting were generally from this resin batch, as were a lot of the 'upcoming model' previews at Games Days (leading to a lot of 'OMG, [new model] is coming in plastic!' speculation after every Games Day as people got confused by the grey resin models on display...

 insaniak wrote:
... as were a lot of the 'upcoming model' previews at Games Days (leading to a lot of 'OMG, [new model] is coming in plastic!' speculation after every Games Day as people got confused by the grey resin models on display...

Is it still a bannable offence to re-post the pics of the previewed "plastic" Haemonculi from a few years back?

Was that the Juan Diaz training piece that never got released...?

I don't own very many FC pieces (having bought the originals in metal). That said;
I don't mind my current biovore. There's no flaw to it that I can detect - other than price.
And over in AoS the Cockitrice is perfectly fine. A tad fragile, but I doubt that a plastic version would be an improvement detail wise.
The only FC piece I'm not happy with? My AoS goblin boss on giant squig. Ugly model to start with whatever the material, & his sword arm hasn't survived.

I remember the lowest point of failcast for me was having to return 5 boxes of Blood Knights and bashing them together to make a single unit of 10 that would be just salvageable enough for me to work with without bubbles. Unreal.

The more modern ones have been okay, with a few exceptions.

It's pretty terrible however, if there are a lot of fine details or very thin bits like mechandrites etc.

Realistically, GW has the best plastic on the market. Everything at this point should go plastic or go home.

It is that bad, it's the worst material I've ever worked with. It should all go, gw and fw should never have attempted it. The bubbles, the gates, and spru running out of half the extremities, even the name and description is to the point of parody. I can't imagine a single redeeming feature though I recall some excuse about it not being toxic.

 insaniak wrote:
Was that the Juan Diaz training piece that never got released...?

I believe so, yes.

I agree with pretty much most people that metal was by far generally a better material to work with, the bubbles and miscasting being a big issue. The few cases where I was fine with finecast had to do with unwieldy metal models that would require extensive pinning to hold together for the glue to set. This meant the old SAG model before the plastic one, I owned both the metal and the finecast one, and let me tell you, it was so much easier putting the latter together, and it wasn't much lower in terms of quality.

I've also been pleasantly surprised at how it seems to be pretty well done for a lot of other Ork HQ models, my Snikrot and Zagstruk have come out great, and I don't envy people having to deal with the top heavy Zagstruk as a metal model.

None.
If it's finecast I don't buy it but search for an older metal Version on ebay instead. If there's no metal version the Mini could as well not exist. So get the replacements done. It's the worst material in the whole industry and every finecast should be sold for a third of its price to make me even consider it.

I've never bought a failcast kit that wasn't terrible. Of course, I stopped buying them pretty quickly, so it's a fairly small sample size.

The Sslyth is actually pretty decent in finecast.

BrianDavion wrote:
so we tend to, justly complain a lot about finecast but.. some isn't THAT bad and actually looks pretty good even now. For your army are there any finecast units or characters that you look at and say "this isn't tooo bad if he's not replaced in the next few years it's no biggy"

Nope.
Finecast Thrakka has been replaced five times by GW until I got one that has only slight damage which could pass as battle damage and I was sick of waiting.
I checked a total of 14 finecast KFF meks across three stores not a single one was damaged little enough to be salvageable through green stuff. The KFF backpack and finecast really didn't get along well, usually you could already tell it was in pieces or impossibly bent without opening the blister. The few which had backpacks with only slight damages were missing their face or the arm with the cables was destroyed by bubbles.
Out of the two weird boys I own one is bent so badly that it can't be assembled properly and GW refuses to replace it because I apparently damaged it while trying to make it work anyways. The other one has a banana instead of a staff. I replaced both of them with a metal version and a AoC weird nob
One kit of finecast tank bustas was damaged so badly that some rokkits weren't even attached to their models anymore and half the face of a squig was missing.
I also bought a Belial as a present for someone's birthday. The sword was completely bent out of shape and GW refused to return it as well, pointing to a FW guide on how to handle resin. The owner somehow fixed it, but to this date, the model's sword starts bending back into it's original, twisted state whenever it is exposed to direct sunlight or warmth, destroying the paintjob on it each time.

I have finally managed to get metal versions of all ork models are selling in finecast, so I won't have to bother with this poor excuse for a miniature material ever again.

Dreadnought pieces are pretty fine, though I have had some issues with getting things like auto cannons and the such with bubbles, and cracks, or even heavily damaged mold lines.

I'd rather GW just go through their whole catalogue and update nearly everything that is finecast. Because I remember being stuck with it when it was at it's worst. Especially with how weirdly shaped much to the available Tau models were at the time.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Jidmah wrote:

BrianDavion wrote:
so we tend to, justly complain a lot about finecast but.. some isn't THAT bad and actually looks pretty good even now. For your army are there any finecast units or characters that you look at and say "this isn't tooo bad if he's not replaced in the next few years it's no biggy"

Nope.
Finecast Thrakka has been replaced five times by GW until I got one that has only slight damage which could pass as battle damage and I was sick of waiting.
I checked a total of 14 finecast KFF meks across three stores not a single one was damaged little enough to be salvageable through green stuff. The KFF backpack and finecast really didn't get along well, usually you could already tell it was in pieces or impossibly bent without opening the blister. The few which had backpacks with only slight damages were missing their face or the arm with the cables was destroyed by bubbles.
Out of the two weird boys I own one is bent so badly that it can't be assembled properly and GW refuses to replace it because I apparently damaged it while trying to make it work anyways. The other one has a banana instead of a staff. I replaced both of them with a metal version and a AoC weird nob
One kit of finecast tank bustas was damaged so badly that some rokkits weren't even attached to their models anymore and half the face of a squig was missing.
I also bought a Belial as a present for someone's birthday. The sword was completely bent out of shape and GW refused to return it as well, pointing to a FW guide on how to handle resin. The owner somehow fixed it, but to this date, the model's sword starts bending back into it's original, twisted state whenever it is exposed to direct sunlight or warmth, destroying the paintjob on it each time.

I have finally managed to get metal versions of all ork models are selling in finecast, so I won't have to bother with this poor excuse for a miniature material ever again.

Had to take six different attempts at getting a usable Draigo for my GK army.
Two of them showed up with no arms, one had a bubble that reached all the way through the model and a shield that was basically useless. The others were either horribly twisted, or broken and way too brittle to work with.

I feel your pain.

The thing is when it works Finecast is good. It holds detail very nicely, the properties of its texture even make detail stand out rather nicely even better than resin or metal (of course paint also has the same effect).


The problem is its totally unreliable and can have errors that run through huge batches of models without end. No one likes having to ask for replacements and getting failed replacement after replacement starts to feel really bad. Plus the failures are often bubbles and losses of detail or parts in big chunks. It's not like a small single air bubble in most resins where a small dab of filler fixes it.

Finecast was a mistake and I'm also surprised GW has kept it around as long gas they have and hasn't gone back to metal for those models that had metal castings (Skaven still have a good chunk of metal). That said its clear that GW is moving on from it, its just taking time.


One bonus is perhaps it pushed GW to really work on their plastics to the point where they are today really pushing out some top rate models. Though I think Hawk Wargames has perhaps got the edge on super fine details with plastics (though not an edge in terms of sculpt design for the mould - FAR too many cases of lots of ridges and dots all along the mould line join).



There are some sculpts I really like being done in finecast, but I don't want them to remain. I don't want to lose the models, like the cockatrice for AoS, but at the same time I really don't want GW to keep finecast around. It's just not reliable enough.

eaither GW's improved it lately or I got lucky recently, I had THREE finecast models delivered to me (Njal in termy armor, wolf lord on thunder wolf and Arjac) the worst I can say about the quality of the models is a slllight bend on the wolf lords axe heft

As I was putting together my finecast thunderfire cannon, I thought “This would be even worse in metal” Not that it was good. Plastic would be better, obviously.

Marines are not horrible. My Sgt. Talion was fine(cast). Generally blocky and solid. Eldar on the other hand, with fine detail and spindly bits, need to purge all the finecast from their range ASAP.

I keep hoping they'll give us a thunderifre cannon in plastic, GW could pair it with a primaris techmarine gunner and slap a 90 dollar price tag on it. expensive but people'd proably buy em

BrianDavion wrote:
I keep hoping they'll give us a thunderifre cannon in plastic, GW could pair it with a primaris techmarine gunner and slap a 90 dollar price tag on it. expensive but people'd proably buy em

I would. I know they teased the new primaris techmarine a while ago, so I doubt we’ll see a new TFC. I suspect those new static guns are the replacement. Unfortunately.

I've been quite lucky with finecast models.

Got 3 zoans, 3 lictors and 3 venomthropes plus 18 spore mines.

None of them had issues.

Zoans and venoms have been already remade in plastic though, so if I had to vote for a model to keep in finecast for a little while, I would say the Lictor.

 Nevelon wrote:

BrianDavion wrote:
I keep hoping they'll give us a thunderifre cannon in plastic, GW could pair it with a primaris techmarine gunner and slap a 90 dollar price tag on it. expensive but people'd proably buy em

I would. I know they teased the new primaris techmarine a while ago, so I doubt we’ll see a new TFC. I suspect those new static guns are the replacement. Unfortunately.

I'd considered cobbling together a primaris tech marine and rigging up a counts as TFC for my stormcrows.

I bought a deathleaper last year because I’d been told finecast was...fine... now.

It wasn’t awful but it wasn’t good. I had to use hot water to bend a leg back, trim off a silly amount of garbage, and fill in a bunch of gaps. I won’t buy another finecast.

Racerguy180 wrote:
Severina Raine, altho I would've preferred her in plastic to begin with. cuz she's kinda a recent model.

SR is the only finecast model i've ever bought or built and i thought it was well below standard, the detailing on the face was completely gone on my model, and the sword snapped whilst i was building it.

All of finecast should die in a fire, along with whoever proposed it in the first place.

I have not had a pleasant experience with ANY finecast, and in fact have had or have friend's finecast miniatures melt or become brittle with a modicum of exposure to sunlight - window sunlight at that.