The Kickstarter went live this morning. The Kickstarter button at the top of the page will take you there.
We are humbled and proud to finally be sharing this with the world. Thanks to all of you for all of the kind words and support. We literally cannot do it without you.
During our Q&A with Play On the question came up about how we were making the models. So we decided to go into detail about it in this article. It is our hope that seeing production parts and understanding the process will help you want to support our launch.
We have chosen to create our models in resin. There are a few ways to make miniatures; metal, resin and plastic. Metal is expensive and has some manufacturing issues associated with it, so you don’t see it quite as often anymore. It was never really on the table as a choice for us, especially given the large size of some of our construct units.
Plastic was another choice. Prices have come down in making the molds needed and there are some nice plastic blends available. But the initial cost was too high for a model range as wide as ours and we likely would have had to manufacture in China for labor costs. Making everything in the US was important to us, so that and the costs prevented this from being an option.
So we went with resin. Resin models have a bit of a reputation and it is not a good one. From a 3D perspective you can end up with brittle models that break or shatter. From a commercial perspective, you can wind up with really egregious mold lines, warped parts or bubbles. No one wants that. In addition, resin often needs to be treated in advance of assembly or painting by washing it. All of this means that some folks have had a bad time with resin. We want to let you know why we are different.
This is a queenling body. As you can see it has very crisp lines and there is no fill on the curves or recesses. There isn’t even really any flash. The resin being using is a blend which makes it just a tiny bit flexible. This means it doesn’t break or shatter since it can absorb some shock. This means it is quite similar to other model plastics in terms of model flexibility and tensile strength. Here are the queenling parts as well so you can see a sprue.
We wanted to show off the organic curves and just the nice areas where the detail can show in the joints and small limb parts. So what about bubbles and warping? Well we have pictures for that as well.
Note the lack of warping on the multitude of angular flat planes and long straight pieces, like the guns. There is no warp at all thanks to the high forces being used in the casting process. Those same forces also eliminate bubbles from blocks of resin like in the exosuit sprue shown here:
No bubbles at all. Everything is whole and complete with all the lines and details preserved. This represents a lot of hard work and expertise from a variety of folks which we are lucky to be working with.
Lastly we will be pre-washing all of the resin. This means that when you open a box from us, you can get started assembling and painting right away. It is more work for us, but we feel it is important that people have the best possible experience when they first get a product from us.
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