with a rebel yell she QQd posted:

New armor in the World of HorusHeresyCraft.

AnEdgelord posted:

Goonhammer has the Liber Mechanicum review up

https://www.goonhammer.com/liber-mechanicum-the-goonhammer-review/

Major Spag posted:

IDK what you're doing in your life if'n yer not posting HH.

Stephenls posted:

Thanks! I'm happy with the effect I got from it. (More on that in a bit.)

I don't really agree that it looks like an off-brand version, but I do think it's a significant shift. It was hard to tell when we just had one of the new armor sets, but now that we have two, I think it's evident that the Heresy 2.0 model line is a much more significant revision to the actual art style of heresy minis than anyone expected.

So, check this out. Here's the original John Blanche sketches for Marks I-VII, plus the Jess Goodwin Mark VIII sketch.










(One of the reasons why I'm so happy with my MkIII upscaling is that proportionally it resembles that Mark III sketch, kinda round and wide and stocky.)

All art necessarily involves deliberate stylization; you couldn't make miniatures that are 100% accurate to those sketches. The original ForgeWorld sculptors made some interesting decisions when interpreting those sketches into 3D. For example, compare the banding along the legs of the Blanche Mark II sketch to this:



The ForgeWorld sculptor has chosen to interpret the banding along the legs as a series of overlapping cylinders. It looks great; I love that design for Mark II and for the back of the legs of Mark III. But it's not accurate to the sketch -- that leg banding in the sketch is flush, not overlapping. The sketch, by itself, almost looks more like this guy's arms than the ForgeWorld sculpt:



(Colossus pic chosen more or less at random but you can see how the Blanche art resembles the classic Marvel method of portraying cybernetic or metal body parts; basically naked bodybuilder flesh colored silver and contoured into cylindrical sections.)

The new Mark III minis aren't an update to the old Mark III minis; they're a reinterpretation of the original sketches. They don't match the sketches perfectly, but they vary from them to about the same degree the old sculpts did -- just in different ways. And as for the art style, when I look at the proportions of the new minis, I see this:



The heads are smaller and the shoulders are bigger and higher up. This is a whole new set of stylistic choices, unbound to the previous choices by the ForgeWorld sculptors of yore. And that's really annoying if you have big old Heresy armies and would like the new ones to match them visually, but, well, artists gonna art. Artists generally want to break free from previous conventions and do their own thing, and I think that's what we're seeing here.

What I expect here is that when we get the updated Mark IV, the helmets are going to look weird. They're probably going to be much closer to that weird duck bill thing on the Blanche Mark IV sketch than revisions to the existing Mark IV plastics.

One other interesting choice I see here. If you look at the back of the legs of the new MkIII, and also the back of the legs of an Intercessor...




It makes the Intercessor look like a technological descendant of the Mark III plate. Which is... I dunno if that's cool? I don't know if I like it. I do genuinely prefer the overlapping plates to the flush ones on Mark II and Mark III. But this has got to be deliberate.

(Also randomly of note, if you look at the Jess Goodwin Mark VIII sketch, you can see the curved armor ridges above the ear coverings; those didn't make it into actual Mark VIII minis but are a signature of Mark X armor now.)

Stephenls posted:

Z the IVth posted:

Is that the Scrotal-pattern armour from the Witcher?

DAD LOST MY IPOD posted:

i would like to see some auxilia characters based on the weirder descriptions of officers from the Great Crusade:

long-rear end nips Diane posted:

They should make good rules instead of bad ones, but this IS 30k James Workshop we're discussing.