The Knight of Blood rises...

[maverike_prime]

Sorry, it's a bit too late tonight for a detailed write up right now so I'm just going to drop this here and come back tomorrow and post more of a detailed write up of this project.

 

So... yeah. The Knight of Blood takes form!
http://i14.photobucket.com/albums/a316/maverike_prime/Warhammer/Chaos%20Space%20Marines/Knight%20of%20Blood/SAM_2312_zpsmfal9jyo.jpg

[deathspectersgt7]

WOW!!!!

[maverike_prime]

Okay so I promised a more detailed breakdown of this particular project. First off understand that this project is not finished yet.  This is just something of more “Here is the idea entering it’s later stages of completion” though considering the paint job I have in mind for this monster even that’s not entirely accurate. The genesis of this particular project was the plethora of Knight Titan conversions I was seeing around the net. The thing that kept getting on my nerves was “Damn it! I can’t use a Knight in my Chaos Army [Cause of the allies chart they would count as desperate allies and thus I’d have to deal with the ‘One eye open’ rule]”. But then I remembered something, I can build a ‘counts as’ option based on the Knight Titan model and use it as a Lord of Skulls instead! That way it can just tromp right along with the rest of my Chaos Marines! Hell I can even tie it into the growing ‘Dark Mechanicus’ themed army I have going. A Dark Magos raising a knight Titan and binding a greater daemon to it? Yeah that works!

 

So the short version of all of this is that I was converting a Knight Titan into a count-as Lord of Skulls. This was a bit more involved then my normal projects so I really needed to start out by getting some kind of visual approach down on paper for it. One thing I knew I wanted to do with was I wanted to have its leg crushing down on something, something that is normally fearsome and dangerous like a Dreadnought or a tank. I settled on a Carnifex because firstly it’s such a stark contrast to a machine like a Knight, and secondly I had the parts for it sitting in my bitz box. I also wanted the finished model to have the same number of weapons as the Lord of Skulls. This was a little tricky since the Knight titan has 2 big weapons while the Lord of Skulls has 3. I also knew I wanted to have this model mounted on one of the Goth Tech bases from Dragon Forge designs, so that it would fit the base themes with the rest of my army.

With those thoughts in mind, went to put some digital pen to paper and get a better idea of what I was going to do. With a $115 for the basic kit before I get anything else this would be an expensive project to have an "Oh, that won't work that way" result come up. So went to the Games Workshop website and grabbed a couple images of the Knight Titan and the Carnifex and dropped them into Photoshop. The first challenge I had to deal with was weapons. As I already stated the Knight titan has 2 weapons while the Lord of Skulls has 2 ranged weapons and a large close combat weapon. Now I know the new Knight Titan kit has the carapace mounted weapons but when I actually started this project that kit was not available, and honestly looking back at it I’m not sure mounting a weapon on the carapace would have actually solved the problem itself. So I dropped some into photoshop and started cutting, and pasting, and moving and moving and moving and… well it took me a little while. At first I just kind of lifted the weapon emplacements from the Lord of Skulls. And… that was a bad idea:

 

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Wkmm3JWckn4/VQhiRf6HaDI/AAAAAAAABeA/CYJk5CbtZvs/s1600/knight-planning-01.jpg

 

So I went back and started moving things around once more. I came upon the idea of mounting a gun over the shoulder, or perhaps even in place of the shoulder armor of the knight.  So That idea led me to this:

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-bUEDMeXAcLI/VQhkKGnfqLI/AAAAAAAABeM/poLpEcpGGlQ/s1600/knight-planning-02.jpg

 

Which… well that's better,  but still not what I want. So I kept tinkering around in photoshop and decided rather than having the Great cleaver be it's own physical weapon, I'll mount a saber under each of the cannons and just have it count as great cleaver. Which brought me to this design approach:

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-7WXcma7BgZY/VQjOaNE-PQI/AAAAAAAABec/ta-6DJiMZ9U/s1600/knight-planning.png

 

While it’s not exactly what I’m going for, it did fit the bill for a direction of approach to everything.  There are still a lot of details that I will do differently on the finished model that are not reflected in the photoshop image. Which is fine. The purpose of the photoshop was to give me some creative lee-way with out investing money into that lee-way.

So, with the idea on paper I started doing some work on it. The first thing I worked on were the weapons. The Hades Gatling cannon was first up to the bat.

http://i14.photobucket.com/albums/a316/maverike_prime/Warhammer/Chaos%20Space%20Marines/Knight%20of%20Blood/SAM_1981-thumb_zps67ux7wcu.jpg

As you can see by the comparison of the size of the cannon to my fingers it's a pretty beefy muther. So it did look like it would fix. But of course the real test comes when you apply the saw to the piece and actually fit it to the shield. So end result?

http://i14.photobucket.com/albums/a316/maverike_prime/Warhammer/Chaos%20Space%20Marines/Knight%20of%20Blood/SAM_1985-thumb_zpsucno8ljg.jpg

Yeah it fits pretty darn well. I took a chaos star icon and added some detailing to the edges of the shield. I'm not going for a full out total conversion to chaos with this, rather a Chaos Aligned sort of look. This is after all a Dark Adeptus machine before it is a Chaos War Machine. The rest of the Hades cannon amounted to assembling the back section of the rapid fire battle cannon.

The next challenge came from the Chain Saber and was two fold. Firstly the Knight Titan kit has a fair amount of Imperial Iconography on it in the form of surface details made out to be the Imperial Aquial, Renaissance era style detailing, and other such material. Again this machine is meant to be a fresh built unit, not a captured or converted one. So I had to take that detail off. This was a rather tedious process as it required me to come in with an exacto blade and do lots of shallow carving passes to cut away the Imperial details being extremely careful to not cut off the raised armor edging. In many cases I then had to come back and, using a plastic scribing tool, carve in a panel separation that had previously been hidden by the surface details.

 

http://i14.photobucket.com/albums/a316/maverike_prime/Warhammer/Chaos%20Space%20Marines/Knight%20of%20Blood/10891533_378414305654886_1271157578271235654_n_zpst4de0gpv.jpg
Here you can see an example of the armor plates with the ones on the left still with their surface details, and the ones on the right with the detail removed.  I had to perform this same operation to the sides of the Chain Saber.

http://i14.photobucket.com/albums/a316/maverike_prime/Warhammer/Chaos%20Space%20Marines/Knight%20of%20Blood/SAM_1990-thumb_zps6ddppq6b.jpg

The second challenge with the Chain saber was mounting it to the carriage of the Hades cannon. The top of the Chain saber is not actually flat, and like wise the shield the cannon is affixed to comes down nearly 4mm below the bottom of the cannon body. In order to address this I carved down the top of the Chain saber to give it a flat body, and then built a mount using a section of 1/4" squad styrene tubing. This gives it a good solid foundation for the Saber to mount to.

 

The next thing I decided to work, and honestly this is where I screwed up the most on this project, was the face. I’ll explain why this was my screw up point later, but as I said I wanted to have this beast with glowing eyes. I didn’t want it to have super-bright eyes, I wanted them to have a subdued glow, like it’s real power was being contained and held back. For this I opted to go with colored fiber optics in the eyes. So the first thing I needed to do was cut out holes for the fiber optics to sit in.

 

And then I needed to make sure the holes would lead back into the body where the LED itself would be housed. I used two rods of 3mm styrene rod to ensure the fiber optics would pass into the body properly. This way I didn’t need to worry about tacking down the optics or anything like that.

 

http://i14.photobucket.com/albums/a316/maverike_prime/Warhammer/Chaos%20Space%20Marines/Knight%20of%20Blood/freem_zpsntdvngec.jpg

FREEEEEM!

 

The base was a fun sub-project in it’s right. I already knew I wanted to use Dragon Forge’s Goth-tek base because it’s the same base style I used for the rest of my army. So that gave me this great visual starting platform for it. I took the Carnifex parts I had and assembled them into the main body and the head. In order to get the dead body sort of stance for the Carnifex, I used a belt sander to flatten out one side of the body before mounting it to the base. I used a head gut to soften its tail enough to make it pliable and then bent it into a mostly limp form that is pretty close to the same level as the top of the base itself. Then I went to town beating the crap out of it. I took a large drill and bore several shallow holes into the back of its’ carapace and the crest on it’s head. To break up the holes some I came back with an exactly blade and carved out notched and breaks in the armor plating. Using a dermal with a cutting wheel I carved out a section across its back to look like damage from the chain blades.  Finally I just went for the kill and used a drill to blow out the back of its head. With all of that I glued the head in place. I’m going to add gore effects dripping from the back of its head and body after I get to painting the beast.

I used a wooden mount to provide the extra depth that would be needed to accommodate the battery pack and switch under the base. In order to cut out he space for those components I had to get in there first with a drill, then a larger drill, then a space bit and then finally with a router. That was a fun, if somewhat messy process since it sent wood particles flying in pretty much every direction.

http://i14.photobucket.com/albums/a316/maverike_prime/Warhammer/Chaos%20Space%20Marines/Knight%20of%20Blood/SAM_2192_zpsmsiorqcw.jpg

Once the battery, wires and switch were installed I passed the lead wires up through the Carnifex body.

With that complete I went to work on the legs. I knew I was going to reposition the legs so I broke them down into their respective segments. I also separated the hydraulic pistons into their respective sections as well. In order to deal with the new position of the ankle I took a 10mm bead and cut it in half to create a new ball joint in the ankle while cutting away the half ball that was originally on the leg. That is that orange section on the ankle plate.

http://i14.photobucket.com/albums/a316/maverike_prime/Warhammer/Chaos%20Space%20Marines/Knight%20of%20Blood/SAM_2109_zpsmytvpm15.jpg

Knowing that the hips were going to be positioned differently than the model had originally been designed for, I cut away the detail on the outside of the hip joints of the upper leg and used a hemispherical piece I found in the jewelry section of a hobby store to replace the ball joint. That's that grey plain looking section in the hit there.

 

 

Okay I think that's enough of a break down for one day. Will come back day Teusday and post more info about how I got to this point with this monster.

[paz]

Whaaaaaaaaattttt.

 

This is gunna be too cool.

[HardCoil]

Nice idea. IMO the skulldozer is silly, and this thing is going to look way better.

[maverike_prime]

Got most of the Armor plates in place. Going to add some more Chaos stuff to it. Some hooks, some more icons. Gonna take the Herald from the Throne of Blood kit and have it riding on top of the monster. And then.... ohhh and then I have to paint this monster. THAT is going to be a real challenge. Thankfully I have an air brush now so that should help a fair amount in that department. Still haven't figured out what I'm going to do with the left ankle. I mounted the foot to the base in such a way that I can't put the hydraulics in place. I may try my hand at sculpting some musculature around the joint and up into the leg itself. Give it some connection to the HelBrute model.

 

http://i14.photobucket.com/albums/a316/maverike_prime/Warhammer/Chaos%20Space%20Marines/Knight%20of%20Blood/SAM_2315_zpsnkbo0gyx.jpg

http://i14.photobucket.com/albums/a316/maverike_prime/Warhammer/Chaos%20Space%20Marines/Knight%20of%20Blood/SAM_2314_zpsmsbr6fys.jpg

[Grimm Blade]

Very cool.