Scultping and producing an Ogre Kingdom army

[Lex]

It's the 10mm dollies are just to damn fiddly to make. I much prefer to modify or convert existing minis although I do have some scratch sculpts in my collection, Greasus Goldtooth for example is entirely scratch scupted but he was built on a 28mm dolly so it was somewhat easier. Dollies are wire armatures sort of like skeletons in case anyone doesn't now what I'm talking about.

Hmmm  you do realize that there is 6, 10, 15, 20, 25 and 28 mm dollies for sale   9-)     

I guess that if we'd pool up some resources and get Dave to start doing serious sculpting (together with Bel maybe, who also has some excelent Ogre stuff), we could trigger the casting service that Az mentioned to produce an entire Ogre army...

[DaveC]

Lex do you have a website for the 10 and 15mm dollies The smallest I've found is 20mm. As for sculpting the whole army if there was enough interest I might be interested in giving it a go. I'll put a thread in the fantasy discussion forum about it. If people can post in that thread about it and not here as I want to keep this thread for my own work. 

[DaveC]

As some of you will be aware I have been working on some Ogre Kingdom stuff. Lex has suggested that I consider sculpting figures for the army for production and get a company to produce them like wargames factory as suggested by Azrael71 however I believe they use plastic only and their own sculptors who have to use computer sculpting but no matter. I have contacts with Troll forged miniatures they produce the miniatures in Resin and might be interested if anyone knows of any where else.

To start with I'm thinking of the following

Character Pack - Tyrant, Bruiser/Hunter, Butcher, Thunderlord
Bull Ogre pack - 12 minis
Iron gut pack - 12 minis
Leadbelchers pack - 9 minis
Rhinox Riders pack - 3 minis

That covers the basics and more could be added later. Gorgers, Yhetis etc. Gnoblars might be a bit beyond me but I haven't tried them yet.

Anyway this is just to get the ball rolling. I'm not promising anything so please don't get your hopes up just yet this may come to nothing. It would take awhile to do as well.

Please discuss.

[Lex]

Split and merged into this topic, Dave, shall I put up a poll ??

[pw]

Having seen the quality of your current work I'd be most interested in getting my hands on around 2000 points worth. A couple of thoughts at this stage:

1) I'd much much prefer metal to resin.
2) I'd prefer to know that there would be a full range available (I'm not skilled enough nor time-rich enough to fill the gaps myself).
3) The closer they look to their WH equivalent the better.
4) I'd not be too concerned about the price so long as the army isn't much more expensive than a GW equivalent.

How exciting! I really hope you'll be able to go ahead with this project.

[azrael71]

This is extremely exciting news.
While I am not all that bothered in regards th OK army, the fact that fans of the game and army are willing to start making a resource for similar minded fans is great.

Let us hope that this is the beginning of a revival for warmaster and as a result it gets a little bit of help from GW
Then again let's not get carried away.

[DaveC]

Yeah if you can put up a poll Lex that would be great. I really just want to see that there's enough interest to justify the work to be done.

Having given it some more thought I reckon about 25 miniatures should cover all the Ogre type units. I'll need to sculpt 3 base bodies and then detail them from there. I'm fairly confident I can produce something close to warhammer range in look with only a few compromises because of the scale.

The non Ogre based units would come later. That would be Gorgers, Yhetees, Gnoblars (not sure about these) and the Slave Giant (which doesn't need a mini).

[Meister.Petz]

Ogres hm?

Sound good and yes, maybe I even would buy them if they are metal. But I'm not interested in them now because my Skaven Army isn't painting itself
And those sculpts are %$&§" whohooooow great! 

Greetings
Peter

[jchaos79]

Hi, it seems very positive the mood that it is taking this threat.

The poject that could be long and not easy, so I give my full support to the idea but I agree with Dave C that he is completly free to :

promising anything so please don't get your hopes up just yet this may come to nothing. It would take awhile to do as well.

It is not good being under pressure.

The idea I think is lovely, I have not very experience in games companies or figures developtment but If it is something needed or could help in anyway you can count on me.

My feelings are:

· The material (plastic, metal of pewter) doesnt really matter to me. Going ahead with whatever is positive as the figures fit with 10mm.

· The looking of figures close to GW style is not really important for me. The exciting is have new range of 10mm figures. And in my opinion it is not worth getting into problems with GW. The quality of DaveC is superb, I will very pleased if the figures look as half of good as DaveC conversion look.

· I am interested in all range of 10mm. It is true that ogres is not my favoroutie army, but, I am not going to do the big effort! so I think the opinion of DaveC, maybe Bel and the people involved directly would count more. I will support any army.


lovely idea I would like to be helpfull if something is needed

[Bel]

3) The closer they look to their WH equivalent the better.

Something like these ones?

[pw]

Very nice Bel  .

Thinking about materials I guess when I said metal I really meant 'not resin', decent plastics would be fine too.

Where can I find rules for WM Ogres? I'm assuming there's a playtest set around?

[Bel]

on Warmaster Yahoo Group

[DaveC]

I checked with ebob miniatures today and he won't have the dollies I need until the end of June so there'll be a bit of a wait for them. I use a mix of his dwarf and halfling puppets for the Ogres as they're almost the right scale I just need to modify them slightly plus the heads are already sculpted all I have to do is remove the mouth area and resculpt it for variety. Both the Tyrant and Hunter conversions use these heads. I've ordered some Procreate to try out as I'm sick of the inconsistancy I've been getting form green stuff recently. I've noticed it before some batches are great others are terrible.

Please keep voting in the poll the more interest there is the more likely the project is to advance.

[DaveC]

I've done some research on production and found out the following and I now have a contact for a metal casting service.

A master mould costs £60 to make that will produce around 12 - 28mm scaled figures so maybe a bit more 20mm sized. So I'll need 2 master moulds to start I'd say. A master cast costs £2.50 for a spin. You can't use a master very much you then need a production mould.

A Production mould is £50 and will produce 18 figures good for about 150 casts. So probably 3 or 4 moulds there depending on the set up of the units.

A production casting (one spin) is £12 for white metal (contains Lead) and £20  for Lead free pewter each per Kilo of metal used.

So probably £350 to get set up. Then priced based on initial set up costs and production runs. Hopefully I can keep the price down as much as possible but I'll be looking to cover initial costs and whilst I'm not looking to make much out of this some profit would be nice  . Shouldn't cost anymore than a GW unit (£8) and hopefully cheaper.

Anyway thats all for way down the road have to sculpt the stuff first. 

[pw]

@DaveC - that all sounds very promising  . I look forward to seeing the sculpts as they progress, should be a great project to follow. And I agree entirely that you should see some profit from this. I guess these things turn a profit in the longer term rather than the short term though.

@Bel - I've scoured the Warmaster Yahoo group for files with no luck. Can you give me any clues? Or better still a link? I thought it might be interesting to draw up a 2000 pt list to cost up an army based on DaveC's tentative figures.

Cheers - Paul