Shimmed vs Gothic Pattern Truescale

[Moonstalker]

So, it's spring and I'm looking at finally getting my HH force off the ground.  I've always wanted to do this force with some kind of truescaling.  I've decided to base all of my marines on 30mm rounds.  I'm reserving artscale/doghouse/terminator-leg truescale for IC's.  It's just too much sculpting work and too bits-expensive to do for all 46 bodies I need at 1500, and I want my IC's to look truly heroic and really stand out in the force.  The extra height and bulk from that kind of truescale will give me that.

 

For my line troops, though, I'm left with trying to decide between 'shimmed' and doghouse's Gothic-pattern.  Gothic pattern is what I originally was going to do, but it just keeps seeming like an insurmountable amount of work.  I love the striding pose that it gives the models, as well as the proportioning (hip width, height, etc).  However, it will require that I spend the extra money and effort to get a Chaos Warriors box, sculpt greaves for each set of distinct legs, and then cast them in resin which I am not set up to do.  Buying a vaccuum/pressure vessel is pretty much out of the question for me, so I have to do room temperature/pressure casting.  It's either that or 4 boxes of Chaos Warriors and a looooot of sculpting.  It just doesn't seem very feasible.

 

The shimmed troops would be much simpler but still work.  Jeweler's saw, cut the legs, plasticard spacers, a little GS/magic sculp to blend.  However, it's simple enough that I wouldn't really need to set up to cast them, nevermind that I would have the legs anyway since I have to buy enough bodies to get the 40+ chests, arms, heads, backpacks, etc that I need, so I am not buying Chaos warriors and casting materials.

 

This is all just a long-winded set up for my question, which is does anyone have a shot of these side by side?  Preferably shimmed Mk3 Iron from FW compared to any pattern of Gothic Scale?  For anyone that has experimented with both of these methods, which did you end up preferring/general opinions?

[Grotsmasha]

Check out THIS thread, it's the original (iirc) shimmied Space Marine tutorial.

 

Cheers,

Jono

[Kaedes Nex]

That thread is really cool. It's amazing what a couple small discs can do to get an impressive stature without having to go all-out on the sculpting and true-scale.

 

My only concern would be if you played with a lot of terrain that had very low walls that normal marines could hide behind but larger ones wouldn't be able to.

[Moonstalker]

Grotsmasha - Between that thread and Veteran Sergeant's, I've seen quite a lot of shimmed marines.  I was mostly hoping for a side-by-side with doghouse's Gothic pattern marines, to see how they stack up in a direct visual comparison.

 

I'm not too concerned about terrain.  In fact, being larger than the nominally-human-sized terrain you would normally play on is just an added bonus to properly scaling an 8 foot tall genetically-engineered killing machine.