What's the latest on BB's future?

Lucien Swift · Post by **Lucien Swift** » Fri Oct 04, 2002 1:39 pm

personally, i doubt that the "plastic ogre" has anything to do with a potential plastic release in the future... quite simply, plastic minis cost a fortune to produce... actually extruding the plastics is remarkably cheap, but the metal pattern mold can run as much as a really nice automobile... the odds of them doing those patterns for a bloodbowl release, given bloodbowl's limited sales base (we may be dedicated, but we're few), i just find it hard to believe they'd take that plunge...

more likely, what you're seeing is a resin cast. gw sculptors have been using resin castings of interim-step parts for a couple years now... basically, what happens is that in the past when you wanted to make several variation miniatures off a common incomplete figure (as is pretty much the norm in the industry), you'd make a partial sculpt, cast it in metal, and then finish the partials, creating several minis for comparitively less work because you wouldn't have to do the legs again or whatever... the down side of this approach is compression. every time you make a metal model, and with each generation, it gets squashed a little flatter... using metal partials, you're dealing with third-generation production minis, and at that point, you've lost some detail and depth to compression.

the gw studio, when i visited it, had just started experimenting with vaccuum-cast resin partials instead of these metal partials for some projects. this sort of casting, while very laborious, produces a partial which has almost no compression or distortion, and the resin can subsequently be used in the vulcanized master molding process, plastic cannot (which means that if the master shown on the bb page is a plastic/greenstuff composite, they'd have to cast it in rtv or vaccuum resin _before_ going to production masters, which is a lot of extra work)....

notice that the parts which are metal are parts which have not been alterred in any way, the parts with grey/green mixes have been chaged...

no, the evidence is definitely in favor of this just being an all-metal production release, they just fool you by using a grey-colored resin...

Post by **GalakStarscraper** » Fri Oct 04, 2002 1:45 pm

Joshua ... trust Lucien ... he's helped me with a ton of stuff as I'm hoping to cast my own Blood Bowl miniatures here in the upcoming months for two BB greens that I have.

I've also bought some scuplting tools but that's more for experimentation.

Galak

Lucien Swift · Post by **Lucien Swift** » Fri Oct 04, 2002 1:59 pm

i forgot the most important clue that this will not be a plastic miniature, size... when gw does plastic miniatures, the prototypes are much larger than the finihsed piece, i believe they do 6-up masters (might be 7 or 10, i don't remember off hand)... basically, this means that the sculptors make the figure at 6 times teh size of the finished model, so, for a 30mm model, you'd make it at 180mm scale (or about 6-7 inches tall).... the process of creating hte metal pattern mold for the injection plastics reduces the size of the output accordingly...

if this was a prototype for a plastic mini, the metal arm wouldn't fit on it, because a pre-plastic ogre proto would be almost a foot tall!

nope, definitely just grey resin partials...

Anthony_TBBF · Post by **Anthony_TBBF** » Fri Oct 04, 2002 2:57 pm

Defintiely resin, when I saw the Ogre at Res last year it was a resin test cast.

Joshua Dyal · Post by **Joshua Dyal** » Fri Oct 04, 2002 3:14 pm

Ah, well, it was a nice try. I guess the rumor that Store Manager heard was more wishful thinking than reality then.

From the looks of it, who did that miniature? Is that a Bedford piece, d'ya think?