Do y'all recast miniatures for personal use in your games? What about casting your own, original miniatures...

Do y'all recast miniatures for personal use in your games? What about casting your own, original miniatures? Do you find it difficult to capture details?

Could one design original proxy models (avoiding copyright concerns) and have them 3d printed on demand, then recast more copies? How to avoid print lines in the master model?

HeroForge is a thing where you can have extremely custom minis 3D printed for you. Check out their website.

Yes. No. No. Yes.

Just recast your miniatures. Unless you're playing at an actual GW and brag about it, no one's going to know. They're your miniatures; as long you don't sell them, nothing's wrong.

I need to figure out a way to recast bits and the like. I do a ton of conversions and some of the parts I use are from very old and hard to replace sources. I'd like to just make a copy to carve up and leave the originals intact.

If you recast anything, be sure to mark on the bottom of the base if it has a recast part on it. That way you won't sell it down the road on accident and give someone a nasty surprise if they strip it.

Look into blue stuff. I hear it's pretty good. I'm gonna try it myself here pretty soon.

HeroForge is expensive as fuck.

Why, what happens if the strip it? Other than realizin it's a knockoff I mean.

>Oh hey this is a nice metal miniature.
>Time to break out the acetone!

If someone can't tell the obvious weight difference between a resin recast and a regular fucking metal model when they first pick them up, then they deserve any unfortunate results when it comes time to paint strip them.

How would you go about recasting a hero forge miniature, considering its all in one piece? I don't think most of the poses have a nice way to bisect them without leaving chunks completely buried.

Use modeling clay and some polyvinylalcohol to get the the molds and casting breaks on a 3D model to turn out well when you go to make the molds. You might actually need to make a 3 piece instead of a 2 part mold for some application.

I don't do too much beyond using Oyamaru and green stuff to recast parts. I don't find myself recasting forty tactical marines at a time or anything, but if I need a couple more of the same dude for a skirmish game or I am trying to make extra bodies to use all the bits in a kit then I go for it.

Yes. Yes. No. Yes

> How to avoid print lines in the master model?

SLA is your friend, or so I hear.

>How to avoid print lines in the master model?
Get it printed on a high end commercial printer and then spend a bunch of time cleaning up the print lines and support structure.

I'm using Oyumaru & greenstuff at the moment to recast a few things for basing and pistols I don't want to pay like €1.50 for on bitz sites.
Here's my results, quite pleased.

That looks pretty good. How do you go about doing two part molds with Oyamaru? Do you just cut it apart?

Does hero forge still print with shapeways? If so, what ShapeWays material corresponds to the new grey plastic.

You should get some Milliput, green stuff is way too expensive for this.
Milliput is easier to use for this because it's alot softer.

Just as a sidenote, if you ever want to do recasts of metal figures with Oyumaru, make sure to also heat up the metal mini in the water with the Oyumaru.

To begin with, I tried the conventional method, pressing the original into one piece, then another on top, but I've found it loads easier to sort of fold the oyumaru around the original (carefully, trying to avoid bubbles), then getting a sharp hobby knife to cut the mould in two.

my first attempt at recasting some conversions bits ect

not perfect but perfectly servicable

How to recast? I want to mass produce Imperial Guard and Orks now.

Is that a gas mask I see there? Krieg?

steel legion

How much green stuff do you find you use to do torsos? How economical is it? How long does it take? I'm seriously considering it so I can make use of all my spare bits left over from making my skittarii, but id like an idea of how it goes.

Not him but kneadetite, not the overpriced blocks that GW sells is very economical. In my experience it doesn't take very long. Wedge the GS in the mold and use some rubber bands. It doesn't take very long for GS to cure.

K. Thank you. While we are on the topic of green stuff how would one go about learning to model and sculpt with it? I really wanna sculpt kilts over some scions carapace armor, but I've no idea how to learn. There any tutorials online or classes I can take somewhere? Or is it just kinda trial and error?

Not done a torso yet, but I'd guess it would be a piece about the size of a torso? Sorry, I don't know in grams or length in cm.

Yeah, I use kneadatite bought in bulk off eBay. I usually leave my GS overnight to be safe.

This is the only real way to avoid them, to be honest.

>not recasting in metal
pleb.

Dude don't even get me started.

Figuring out the right alloy for 6mm miniatures is killing me!

>Do y'all recast miniatures for personal use in your games?


Yes it has changed my life.

The bottom line is this, if you don't have at least a vacuum chamber then I would not bother with resin casting.

I somehow managed to lose an entire fucking defiler leg. So I tried my hand at my first recast of one of the three remaining legs. It's far from perfect, but since I go all Nurgle on my stuff, it'll work out just fine.

Lately I've had a go of making objective markers and casting them to make duplicates. These are fairly simple ruins-themed objectives. I'm hoping to make some totally-not-Eldar-themed, junk/orkish-themed and daemon/chaos-themed sets as well.

Examples of a bare marker, an inked marker to show detail, and a painted marker.

If I knew how I probably would.

Could you expand on the role of the vacuum chamber?

These look good.

The vacuum chamber is what gets all of the air pockets out of your casts.

Ideally you want to use vacuum and pressure chamber but you can get away with using just a vacuum with the right venting.

Thanks, user! I've considered getting into making and selling custom markers and bases.

Later I found an older oop Beast of Nurgle and decided I liked him, wanted more in that style, and figured I could use him to practice casting. I broke him apart and widened the two halves of the model and extended the front a bit. I wanted to make him a bit bigger to help him more closely match the current model's size and general size creep. Made a mold of the final result.

Worked out well enough. Tentacles are simple enough to greenstuff for them.

Have any models with/without using it to use as a comparison?

Not the user you replied to. I posted the objective markers and I can use them as an example. You can see various small imperfections on them from bubbles trapped in the resin as it cured. I've pointed them out in the attached image.

Small bubbles are easy enough to ignore or fill with modelling putty.

Thinner components that stick out, like horns or spikes, may not form all the way if air is trapped at the tip.