Slowly Coming Around
The 3D printing craze has been a mixed blessing for the miniature wargame hobby. Sure, it opened up strange new vistas of possibilities, but it also cheapens the offerings in a lot of ways. The 3d sculptors, even after a few years of getting some experience under their belts, still haven’t quite managed to fully comprehend how wargamers use their figures. Sculptors forget that paint brushes need to be able to reach every nook and cranny of a figure. They fumble the ball on figure balance. They assume wargamers have the patience of a full-blown military modeller and give us figures with dozens of individual parts.
Yo, I gotta game to get to here, pal! You have to make a passing flirtation with efficiency of assembly and painting.
To say nothing of that strange and ephemeral quality that hand-sculpted figures take on, that breath of life instilled in them on creation whereby a real-world sculptor imprints a bit of himself in the model. You just don’t get that same sense from the cold, hard light of digital works.
While I will always prefer the heft and mass of a metal figure to a resin or plastic model, the same can no longer be said for terrain.
These shots are all taken from recent additions to my collection, sent my way by Attention Span Labs.
The detail is nice without being overwhelming, they take paint really well, and they are lighter than my own hand-crafted works. It’s hard to speak on the price, given that these were basically Christmas presents, but they are a definite upgrade to my old sci-fi buildings.
It’s gotten so bad that I’m even trawling ETSY and Amazon to see what else is on offer!
At this point I need to score a few more buildings in a similar style, to round out the collection and fill up space created by clearing out the old works. Luckily, the Normandy buildings he sent my way are a good match for the existing collection.
It turns out you can teach an old grog new tricks. That’s all I’ve got for today – I’m praying for you.