OK so this post doesn’t really deal with the Warhound itself but rather the diorama, for which I’ve been doing a bit more research:

Buildings:
As mentioned before I’m going to use a Pegasus Large Gothic Building kit, which I’ve already got ordered. They’re not particularly cheap (although admittedly much better value than GW buildings), but will provide all of the walls needed for the diorama (and then come). I must say though I think they look far more appropriate for an Imperial city than the GW Cities of Death buildings (unless they are heavily modified).

While rummaging around my (actually relatively small) hobby stash I found a GW Manufactorum building kit. I’m not keen on using any of it’s panels in my diorama as in my opinion they are quite unsuitable for this kind of standard city section. Upon opening it however I was delighted to discover that it contains a few of the gothic building accessories (such as lamps and buttresses) – including a couple of spares that I obviously kept when I sold all of my leftover CoD bits ages ago! There should be enough for the small section of city on my diorama. Still the lesson of the day is: NEVER SELL YOUR SPARE DETAIL BITS, regardless of whether you think you will use them!

The buildings will be flat roofed and I’ll probably build an aircon/air purifier unit on the roof of the main corner building to add interest.

Furniture:
I want to have a few pieces of furniture inside the buildings so I did a bit of searching. One thing I discovered is that there is a lot of awful looking 28mm scenery out there! I eventually stumbled across Fenris Games who have some really nice quality accessories.I’m planning to get:
Empty Bookcases
Filing Cabinets
Study Desks
They also do Filled Bookcases but I’m still deciding if there would still be books on the shelf of a war-torn city. I can’t see why not?

Road:
I have to decide if the roads are concrete, asphalt or stone. I’m thinking asphalt, since it would provide the kind of contrast with the concrete sidewalks and kerbing that I want. Can anybody suggest otherwise? I’ll put a manhole or two in the road, and a storm drain along the kerb somewhere.

Since a Warhound would weigh many, many tonnes I was wondering what its impact on the road would be. Would its feet break up the asphalt? Concrete probably wouldn’t suffer as badly. Should I make imprints in the road where the Titan has stepped, and sink its feet in slightly where it currently is?

Getting really excited about this diorama and finally building a highly detailed city section!

I keep promising to post pics of the overall progress so I’ve got some really quick, terrible, low light, blurry shots to share tonight! Yay! Here’s all of the cleaned up and washed parts mounted on skewers and ready for priming/painting. I’ll probably do the priming on the weekend.

I also started planning the diorama layout on my piece of 8mm perspex. The solid line on the right is where the perspex will be cut to size. The light pencil lines show the T-intersection that the Titan will be walking around. The size of the street should be approximately to scale. At this stage I’ve abandoned any ideas of doing a snow terrain in order to save a lot of potential for grief

That’s all I’ve got for now! Better pics next time I promise!

This project isn’t dead! Yeah I’ve been distracted by Warhound assembly, but I have been sneaking in some styrene work in-between

Just a quick update to show how things are looking now with the fattened forward hull. The entire ship is looking quite beefy now – quite a contrast to the “lanky” nature of the GW frigates. The other side of the forward hull still needs a lot of fine detailing. I should make up the other three cannon turret domes on the lathe tonight…

After discussing with some of my mates on the RA forum, I decided that the grille as it was (with the skull cut outs) was no good. The cut outs just weren’t well enough defined. So I went back to the drawing board and ended up with a design that I’m very pleased with:

All of the clean up of the model is done and it’s just the last few bits of assembly (well as much as can be done before painting) left. I had to buy another tube of Zap-a-gap 5 minute 2-part epoxy as I’ve already used up the first one I bought!

I’ll post some pics of the assembled kit before I start painting.

It’s funny how we (yes, I know others of you are the same) go through phases of hobby activity. Personally the latter half of 2012 did not get a whole lot of hobby attention but since Christmas I’ve had my mojo back and have been tearing into my projects. Interestingly, there seems to be a pattern to this as the same thing seems to happen each year: Summer inspires a lot of hobby work and in Winter I tend to retract a bit. It should be the other way around so that in Summer one doesn’t have to be continually choosing between the beach and hobby time (fortunately I live close enough to the beach that I don’t have to commit large blocks of time to one or the other)!

But I digress!

As is obvious by the post title I have myself a Warhound Titan. I bought it in the first half of 2012 and while I did a bit of cleanup work on it over the rest of the year, over Christmas I felt inspired to get the project going full swing. The very positive response I got to the painting of my SAW also gave me the confidence I need to feel that I can do a decent job of painting the Warhound, which is also an epic task.

Cleanup and assembly has been a big job. There are a LOT of parts and they pretty much all have some mould lines to be removed. All have gates that need removal too. There were a few badly cast and damaged parts but I elected to repair them myself with putty rather than screw around sorting out replacements. All of the joints have been pinned and I’m using Zap A Gap 5 minute epoxy for any important joins. I decided early on that I wouldn’t bother with the interior for 3 reasons:

1. It’s intended to be a static display model in a case so nobody will be looking inside
2. Getting the body to assemble properly so that the internal parts all line up nicely is a pain
3. Painting the interiors would add a lot of time to painting

One thing I did want to do was something interesting for the grille that covers the cooling systems on the top of the carapace armour (rather than the boring brass etch grille supplied). I played around in Inkscape and came up with what I felt was a cool, suitably 40k style design. 10 minutes with my CNC router and some really thin styrene sheet produced this:

To be really honest I’m not completely sold on the skull (yes, that’s what the centre cutout is supposed to be) design. The problem is that I couldn’t come up with anything else that I felt more appropriate routed out in that style. Imperial eagles are too detailed. And I wanted to have a fair amount of open area to show plenty of the details underneath. I’ll think about it some more as I continue assembly.

The other thing I’ve been giving some consideration to is the diorama base for this one. I did a test last night and while I’m pretty sure it will be stand freely without a base (despite the “walking” pose, which you’ll see soon), it won’t be super stable. Plus a nice base really completes a model! Inspired by this Warhound (I’m planning to do a blue and yellow Warp Runners Legion colour scheme too) I am considering a snowy setting (primarily because I haven’t done snow before, and to not do something new wouldn’t be keeping with my hobby masochistic tendencies). But I also don’t want to do such a featureless expanse as featured on the SAW diorama. So I’m now starting to think “snowy ruined city street”, inspired by the building modelling work featured on a recent Eye of Terror blog post (seriously that is one of the best Imperial building ruins I’ve seen anywhere).

The one thing I need to do is make sure I don’t go overboard with the base size: the SAW diorama only just fits into my display cabinet (the base has to be oriented in a specific, non-ideal way). The Warhound is also a very large model (similar footprint as the SAW and a lot taller). Suddenly I wish I didn’t get rid of all of my Cities of Death bits on a previous clean out (although I do have an unopened Manufactorum box sitting around)!

I’ll post some pics of the Warhound itself as assembly nears completion. But really, we’ve all seen assembled Warhound pics a million times before. They’re pretty commonplace nowadays. I wonder if Forge World ever anticipated the sheer number of them they would sell?

Well despite the wild weather we’ve had over the Australia Day long weekend I managed to fit in a little bit of work on the Frigate; namely making a new prow with better proportions. The new prow is a lot thinner and slightly shorter. I had intended for it to be not as tall also, but somewhere along the line that didn’t happen (and I didn’t realise until after I’d sculpted the eagle). The height wasn’t the main problem anyway.

Despite the new prow I’m still not convinced though and I think I’ve worked out the problem: the upper half of the midships section (where the cannon domes are mounted) is too skinny. Above the cannons the design tapers to a really narrow cross section and this causes the whole section to appear skinnier than it really is. So I’m toying with some concepts for how I can bulk out this top level which I think will make all the difference

The path to perfection is never simple!

I made a bit more progress over the last couple of nights (would have been more on schedule if damn real life didn’t keep interrupting!). The other side fin has been completed and the standard prow has had a fair bit of work done – I’ve sculpted the eagle head and one of the wings.

The last update showed the prow just after it had had putty applied. It made the prow look much too big and bulky but after it had cured the prow was sanded down and looked much more appropriate. The problem is that with the addition of the wings sculpted on the prow it has bulked up a bit more. I think it looks good side on (some may disagree), however from higher angles the prow looks too wide compared to the relatively skinny hull. This far in I really don’t want to have to rework the prow that dramatically (it would require resculpting the eagle too) to shave off some of the width, but I suspect I don’t have a choice. I’ll deliberate on it…

I’ve just got a quick update for tonight. Have been feverishly chopping and gluing styrene over the weekend making some really good progress on the Zeus Frigate model. Have got one of the two prow styles puttied up and ready for sanding. Actually I think it might be slightly too big so I’ll probably have to sand it back to a more appropriate size. Actually prow size is such an inconsistent thing. In some of the BFG concept art the prow almost dwarfs the rest of the ship!

Note the brass etch eagle wings on the rear of the side fin. A nice little touch if I say so myself

The level of detail is pretty insane – I found myself last night cutting up tiny arched windows less than a millimetre in size! This model is a little smaller than the GW Sword model but has about double the amount of detail! Those hemispheres on the side of the hull will be cannon turrets – they just need barrels added (will probably have to machine barrels out of brass to give them nice fine detail).

If all goes to plan I’m hoping to be finished by next weekend…

I recently had some friends asking if I was going to round out my BFG Zeus designs with a frigate to stand in as a Sword or Firestorm. I had in fact started on such a project over a year ago but in the meantime had gotten distracted by other projects. Having just completed the epic painting project of my SAW kit (pics this weekend I promise!) I decided now was as good a time as any to finish this one off!

Upon pulling out the WIP model I discovered that I’d actually done a lot more than I’d realised, which was a nice surprise! I continued with some more detailing last night and snapped a quick WIP shot. Here it is following a shot I took very early on:

For reference those grid squares on the cutting mat are 10mm. Detailing at this size is so slow and fiddly but I am kind of used to it these days. Wouldn’t want to be doing it all of the time though! The goal is to get this one finished within a few of weeks (although real life may have other ideas!). It should make a nice little addition to my fleet

OK well as everybody knows I love my mecha so when I saw that Fil Dunn, creator of awesome Tau mecha kitbashes was releasing his own kit I just had to have one! The FDV1 Mako kit is pricey but it has a cool dieselpunk style going on and is really massive at 9″ tall.

I was lucky enough to receive kit number 4 of the initial limited edition run (of 25 kits). It arrived just before Christmas in this cool box:

Here’s a shot of the contents:

So over the Christmas break I did some cleanup and as much assembly as I could do before painting (it’s best to leave all of the armour panels, etc. off for ease of painting). Sorry but I don’t have a pic of that for you.

One thing I did decide however is that I’m not a big fan of the fact that it doesn’t have a right arm (take a look at this painted one to see what I’m talking about). Instead it has a drum containing a sensor suite (as described by Fil himself), which although it makes sense, just doesn’t do it for me visually. Although Fil has toyed with the concept of a version with a gun on each arm in the future! But because I’m a hobby masochist I’ve decided to scratchbuild a right arm for it. More to come on that in a future post.

My one big complaint with the kit is the leg design. Fil has proven he can design cool mecha legs in the past but the legs on this one are just odd. They certainly don’t look very functional and leave the model in a perpetual “taking a dump” pose. I don’t know if some reposing would help, but the legs are intended to be assembled in one position only, so reposing would be a real bitch.

Highlight of the kit: that armour plate around the gun arm shoulder. Man it’s sexy! Although really the entire gun arm is a pretty nice design

Watch this space!

In other news my Superheavy Assault Walker Diorama is 99.9% complete so I’ll be taking some pics this coming weekend!