This was a special one! I’ve been wanting to see a good miniature rendition of the ultimate ruler of Terra since… forever? When I saw the incredible renditions the amazing sculptor known as 3dArtGuy did, I thought I would never have access to anything like that… But loved it! I do not own a 3D printer… nor can I afford to Patreon, but then I saw Spiky Bits was selling a limited run of this one, at an incredible price, printed and delivered at like… a lot of detail! I jumped to get it. It took a long time to get to me, since it was some kind of pre-order… And then I had to pay even more due to customs and our overlords plans to get us all back to the nineteenth Century before the decade it’s over.
When I saw what it got to me I was terrified… The thing came pre-cured (although still seemed lightly sticky and smelled like a burnt circuit board) and still attached to the printing base and supports. I did some research, asked some acquaintances who had experience with prints and was convinced disaster was going to struck any moment, with me snapping everything in a hundred impossible to glue resin shards. Nope. Hot water and they all came out great!
It comes with a helmeted option which I wasn’t very interested in, but anyways decided to magnetize also the arms… For ease of painting, posability… and… Well it’s becoming my staple thing, so why not? I don’t have any other “Primarch-sized” parts, yet… to play 40K LEGO with the thing, but some of the Primaris heads kind of work, and I’m now really wanting a decrepit zombie head with bionic eyes to have a “reanimated” current Emperor version, too!
Painting it was a breeze! No way I could make justice to such awesome sculpt with my painting skills, so I went for my (thankfully still getting better) just-paint-the-thing standard, without going crazy… This was not the time for me to crack that NMM can of worms! Painting minis has to be fun, and for me that comes with eye-candy satisfaction for as long as it takes me to discover, and figure out the details of the thing, while painting them, and get the most by engorging on the finished thing. This one took three days to be where is at. I have a cool idea for a base, but for now I call it done with a simple temporal one… I have a lot of cotton fire to make for my Sororitas, eventually, and when I tackle that, I might add some to the sword of this one too… Sculpted effects, still break my immersion, and the intricate real fibers, appropriately painted, confuse the my brain enough to make it more believable, with close-enough complexity that is impossible to print or cast.
WIP:
Túbal Villar - Virakotxa 
The model is superb and you have done an amazing job on it!
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Thank you! I did… just enough to it, really… It truly deserves someone more patient going to town with it!
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That is really impressive- you’vecertainly done justice to the model.
Cheers,
Pete.
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You are too kind! I’m thinking I called it done prematurely… But really wanted to share it!
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I don’t follow 3D printing much so its interesting to me to see a sculpt like this that shows how good it can be. The level of detail is really, really high and you’re right that it would take a long time to paint this in NMM. You did a great job painting it up in a reasonable amount of time 🙂
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Thanks! You crossed my mind a couple of times, when I was kinda-sorta blending colors, there… I would love to see what you would do with a thing like this! The detail is Fenomenal, indeed… There are some lines on certain angles, but nothing as grotesque as a moldline… And the detail has no blind spots. The machine able to print like this must cost like a car, still…
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That is kind of you to say and I will keep my eyes out for miniatures like this in the future. It does look like a fun challenge to paint 🙂
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That looks superb. I think that you’re probably being a bit harsh on yourself about the painting skills here; this is a result that you can be really proud of.
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Thank you! In a way I’m proud… since I do like what I see when it’s in front of me. But can’t help to think that all this “quick painting, fast results” hides some laziness on my part. I could try and go all zen, on a piece like this… Not rush it, and give it all I got. But since I have not moved on to things like NMM or really smooth blending… Maybe I fear not have all that much to give it, really.
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