Disparity of Design Philosophy in Games Workshop

[lansalt]

 

I think Visions of Heresy acted as an intermediate layer of concept art between John Blanche's work and the HH miniatures.

IIRC, BL's Visions project was mainly Alan Merret writing a Horus Heresy series bible using Blanche and the TGC artists to illustrate it. It worked and the rest it's history.

[DuskRaider]

 

This actually came up in my local GW today. Everyone felt that, at least as far as Space Marines go, GW has shifted to an aesthetic style influenced by Marvel rather than what influenced Firstborn and that HH is closer to 'classic' 40k. 

 

Even if that isn't true it certainly feels that way to a degree. 

 

Though I do think with the right paintjob Primaris (in particular the hover tanks) can still look grim dark. 

 

I suppose at the end of the day it is a very subjective thing. 

A good paint job can make just about anything look good, to this I agree. I do think their analogy to Marvel is a pretty good one as well, it’s hard (for me at least) to accurately describe what is going on. 
 

FWIW I actually really like the new GW Mk. III kit. It has nice proportions and I love the new helmet design that does indeed grab inspiration from the old artwork. 

Edited October 5 by DuskRaider

[Agramar_The_Luna_Wolf]

I agree with this post. Something strange happened in the Design Studio in recent years. It's like no design unified patterns at all. And in some cases is like a step or two down if you compare with previous designs. And in theory, with new technology,techniques and software must be quite the opposite.

[Cactus]

I'm reminded of when Carlos Ezquerra* began colouring his work digitally instead of with ink or paint. The early results were a little messy and sometimes garish but some of his later work is phenomenal and absolutely was worth the growing pains. I'm sure there is an element of new art direction, new sculptors, internal politics and the rest at play here but also fully expect that overall the CAD assisted miniature design work will improve with time. There'll still be turkeys and things that don't jive with us individually but the good stuff? I'm excited to see that.

 

I'm on a break from building malstrain genestealers right now and the complexity of the poses is breathtaking. More like this please!

 

* Comic artist and co-creator of Judge Dredd and Strontium Dog.

[Robbienw]

GW has been using CAD for 19 years.  Forgeworld (leading into specialist games) specifically for 10 years or so.  It’s not a new thing.

[skylerboodie]

I definitely think its a case of style not CAD; i like some of the newer stuff, and it's been an improvement material-wise and easier for painting, but there is clearly a cartoonish/Marvely effect that has come in for some ranges, which I've always felt best represented by the journey of the Night Lords doors from the awesome gothic horror originals to the cartoonish Deimos ones. The difference between the first and last is not a positive one.

 

[Vassakov]

Oof. Good lord, those Night Lords ones are bad.

 

However, I will say that in my view they are the worst by miles - I've got the Word Bearers ones for one of my Rhinos and those are detailed, have runes etched into the panel and the daemon skull/flaming book icon and it's both very nice and consistent with the OOP design scheme.

 

Weirdly the Night Lords one almost looks like the early mock up that then got put into production?

[Evil Eye]

Those Night Lord Deimos doors are atrocious. I would liken them to 3rd party upgrades but that would be extremely unfair as there are some really good 3rd party bitz out there. Those look like a really basic digital kitbash someone made trying to learn the ropes of 3D modelling that GW decided "eh, close enough" and released anyway.

 

The other thing that bothers me about the shift in direction at FW is they're completely failing to take advantage of resin. Plastic is great but it will never be able to have the same degree of detail per part as resin, because the steel molds used for plastic models can't support undercuts the same way as a flexible rubber mold for a resin (or metal) model. You either have to accept a slight loss in detail or divide the sculpt into lots of parts (thus giving loads of seamlines that need to be filled). With resin on the other hand, you can get much more detail in every direction on a single part and just unwrap it from the rubber mold. Now granted, the lack of join-seams on a resin model is definitely a bonus, as the amount of seams that need filling on plastic models these days is ridiculous (TWO PIECE SHOULDER PADS) but they could do so much more with their sculpts given that, short of Bandai-tier mastery of plastic molding (those guys managed to mold fully articulated limbs for their Gunpla model kits onto sprues. Ready assembled. Absolute geniuses I tells yer) will never be achievable with plastic. There is a very good reason that scale aircraft modelers still swear by resin for engines and cockpits after all.

[BitsHammer]

On 10/6/2024 at 9:01 AM, Robbienw said:

GW has been using CAD for 19 years.  Forgeworld (leading into specialist games) specifically for 10 years or so.  It’s not a new thing.

Could be a new program though. I mean I hope they aren't using ten plus year old software.

 

From what little I understand they used to use zbrush but no idea what they use now 

[Marshal Rohr]

They would have a contract and/or license from zbrush for continuous support. It would be difficult (especially given their track record with IT) to try and implement one of the open source tools. 

[Orion]

Slight necro/off-topic:

This thread reminded me again to finally pick the OG praetor.

Sculpt is even more impressive in person!

 

 

Other head is going on Zardu:

 

Cataphractii guy will just get another bare head.

[sbarnby71]

I don't think you can blame CAD for the current design culture, as someone who works for a company that writes CAD software, it's not the software at fault.  One element that might be in play here is the whole process, if you look at the end product, you have to work backwards from that and that process has to be cost effective, so the design could be impacted by keeping the production process as cheap and as simple as possible. 

 

You only need to look at some of the 3D prints out there to see the issue is not CAD.

[Stitch5000]

Consistency of the end result in mass production is to "blame".