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Post by professorx00 on Aug 18, 2015 19:01:12 GMT
So what is people's opinions on building your own minis or buying them? I am going to be starting a new campaign and I was thinking about sculpting my players characters and then sculpting some enemies and possible even casting the enemies to make a mold to replica them. Anyone have an suggestions or tutorials that would help? or should I just buy my minis and stop complaining about price.
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Post by sgtslag on Aug 18, 2015 19:15:45 GMT
There are inexpensive mini's to be purchased: Caesar Fantasy; Dark Alliance, and others. Those mentioned so far, are all 1/72 scale, but they typically sell for $15-$20, delivered, for a set of 36 figures. There are also such mini's as Mage Knight, and Heroclix, which vary widely in price, but there is a great deal to choose from. The Wizkids mini's also vary somewhat in size, so some are around 1/72, while others are more like 28mm.
If you want true 25mm figures, which are basically 1/72 scale, there are Prince August molds, with various sets available. Even when using the expensive Model Metal for casting, they still work out to be less than $1 per figure. If you cast in lead, you could get the metal for free, from local automotive tire changers: lead weights are used to balance the tires, and they are not re-used -- they pay to dispose of them... Ask for used tire weights, and you likely can get as much as you will need for a lifetime. Mis-cast figures just go back in the pot to be re-cast. The molds are around $15 per set, and an electric melting pot will run around $35, from a fishing supply company (used for casting lead sinkers).
Search these forums for inexpensive miniatures postings. There have been a couple of threads on this topic already. They are full of great ideas, and resources. Cheers!
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Post by nvdberg on Aug 18, 2015 19:16:37 GMT
I agree that building up a basic amount of mini's can be expensive.
I went for 1:72 scale ceaser mini's that, even though they are smaller to the regular sized ones, still are very usable and even scale better to their surroundings. The ceaser mini's are quite cheap compared to other brands and scales.
Making your own mini's will not be cheaper in small quantities. Nor will the results be great for the start as you need to learn and experiment quite a bit. However, it might be way more fun that just buying mini's.
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Post by curufin on Aug 19, 2015 12:23:03 GMT
This is not an easy question to answer. Both have pros and cons. If you have never sculpted or cast minis before, I would say just buy them. With Heroclix, plastic d&d minis, and Bones out there, it will be far cheaper to buy a couple dozen then spending months sculpting and casting.
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Post by DnDPaladin on Aug 19, 2015 20:13:51 GMT
buying minis is the right way to go me think. making minis is a hard and long process. so it really depends on your dispositions toward it.
but know that casting minis is the awesome thing to do once you et minis. aftera ll buying in bulk of the same may cost more in the long run. so casting is cool.
overall, it entirely depends on you. me im too lazy, i preffer buying and then painting some. i think even casting is too long for me.
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Post by adamsouza on Aug 19, 2015 22:12:03 GMT
You could try paper miniatures. Easy to make your own, plus there are hundreds, if not thousands, available for free on the net. onemonk.com/downloads.htmlor cardboard-warriors.proboards.com/Much faster than scultping, casting, and painting your own, if your willing to deal with 2.5D minaitures. I have a couple hundred paper minatures printed, but I mostly use normal minatures. The paper ones are great when you only need certain monster once and you don't want to drop $30 on one.
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Post by kitchenwolf on Aug 20, 2015 0:00:46 GMT
The fact that you're asking the question about sculpting means that the answer is no. If you had the capability to sculpt your own you would already know it because it takes no small amount of knowledge and experience. Feel free to try (I recommend starting with a conversion or two), but it's not the sort of thing that you'll have ready next month. You can get enough miniatures to get through most of a campaign for what your group would spend on pizza for one game night if you start here: www.reapermini.com/Miniatures/Bones/sku-up/page1The paper/counter thing works pretty well too (most games are really only concerned with the base, the figure is sort of a decoration on top), though I recommend gluing them to cereal card just to get them to stay put.
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Post by Meph on Sept 13, 2015 13:33:37 GMT
I personally prefer D&D and Pathfinder pre-painted minis. I have some Reaper Bones and I will work on them occasionally but I would rather spend my time crafting terrain and working on new adventures, since most of my stuff is home brewed. That said, I have a lot of homemade minis for things I can't readily find or am not satisfied with the PPM offerings.
Buying the D&D and Pathfinder minis can get pretty costly though. I bought a case of each the Tyranny of Dragons and Elemental Evil minis. I bought a half case of Dungeons Deep. Those 3 sets cost me $760 shipped. Broken down though its 320 minis so it's about $2.37 per mini and remember, there are a many rares and uncommons in each case which can retail for $30 each. It's expensive but I enjoy collecting them.
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Post by grandinquisitorkris on Sept 13, 2015 16:50:34 GMT
well i guess the question to ask YOU is how much experience do you have at sculpting miniatures ? and followed up by how many hours of free time do you have to sculpt ?
if the answer to the first question is none (which i suspect to be the case) then i would suggest just buying them . there is a HUGE learning curve to sculpting something from scratch , especially if you want people to see it as something other than a mangled lump of "stuff" . also , there is the issues of start up costs , sculpting materials and the paints and etc....... are not cheap if you are starting with none . so to get your party sculted and ready to play you need all the materials to do the whole job , not like most of us here that have been doing it so long that we have stockpiles bult up of materials and paints and glues and , and , and .............
as for the second question , if you know how much effort goes into sculpting sometning , you will also know that one miniature CAN take several days to finish depending on how detailed it is , how many steps are involved , how many materials you use , and how long each of those take to dry/cure .
so lets look at it in terms of cost/benefit . is it worth saving $.15 to a few bucks on ONE figure , only to spend a few days making that figure ? and then multiply that by the number of figures you need for your game on an on going basis . YES , a LOT of the people here make figures for their games , but if you notice , most of those are special figures that they use for special story lines , but most of them still BUY the rank and file guys they will need more often .
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Post by DnDPaladin on Sept 13, 2015 17:39:31 GMT
there are a number of ways to get good minis without the hassle... any dnd board game will yield you a lot of minis and most of them are worth it for the price of the game. exemple... wrath of ashardalon which sells for 80$ yet has tons of minis with a total worth of at least 150$. i mean come on that huge red dragon should be selling around 30$ all by itself if not more. and there is other board games out, ravenloft is one of them... all of them comes with minis that you must paint mind you... but all of them ar elower then 80$ and the minis all by themselves more then make up.
as for individual minis... i've built my mini collection mostly out of 1-2$ minis. going sometimes up to 5$ a mini. very rarely beyond that. and i've got bargains out of black friday on half of them. so buying minis is an investment, you also have to know that your minis unless broken into pieces... will always keep their value. so its a good investment.
i suggest making your own mini only when you get to a point where the inis you want is too expansive. exemple, making dragons, making demons and devils. kitbashing really helps at that point.
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Post by Meph on Sept 13, 2015 17:43:37 GMT
so lets look at it in terms of cost/benefit . is it worth saving $.15 to a few bucks on ONE figure , only to spend a few days making that figure ? and then multiply that by the number of figures you need for your game on an on going basis . YES , a LOT of the people here make figures for their games , but if you notice , most of those are special figures that they use for special story lines , but most of them still BUY the rank and file guys they will need more often . That is exactly how I look at it myself. I do make specialized minis for my campaign but I prefer to buy bulk for your average everyday monsters. I didn't like the wimpy pre-painted Purple Worms so I made one like DM Scotty's, I wanted an epic Giant Octopus for the final encounter of our gaming session of the winter so I crafted it. I wasn't happy with the new size of dragons in the D&D PPM line so I bought one from AC Moore and repurposed it for my needs. I made a white worm (Caecelia) for a one of my encounters. Shriekers & Yellow Mold for another. [/URL] But when it comes time to fill the ranks I don't mind buying new sets as they come out. Plus I get to be like a kid on christmas opening all my presents
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sotf
Advice Guru
Posts: 1,084
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Post by sotf on Sept 13, 2015 23:27:20 GMT
In all honesty, sculpting and creating minis is something fun to do, but it's also a VERY time consuming thing to do a lot with. Buying and painting up minis, and working on conversions while also fully creating a few is what most people end up doing. It also takes a bit of dedication to start up with...and even then, you would probably want to invest in a pile of various dollies various places have for different body types along with gender and racial differences for making humanoid forms. For players minis, having a few generics (Something like the D&D 5th edition minis starter set and perhaps a few Reaper Bones) for players to use works a lot better than sculpting minis for the player characters. Most either don't care about the mini representing their character, or they would like to locate and paint them up themselves. Hell, the D&D board games (Ravenloft, Wrath of Ashardalon, Legend of Drizzt, and Elemental Evil) are also good starting points for piles of minis that you'll probably be able to use in D&D that you can largely start painting up if you want to or leave like they are (And you can play the games as well which are quite fun for days where you may not want to DM and just want some fun, plus all four are compatible with each other for a pile of heroes and monsters among other things to play with). But it's normally not the best idea to start out aiming at sculpting and molding full minis, you aren't going to start out making things that you'll really want to keep around unless you're very lucky, and it takes a while to get the right scales and appearance you like. It's like every other hobby, because you will develop the skills, but if you start out with simple things like adding capes, reworking arms or details and similar, well, you'll develop the skills over time in making conversions and can then go on to working from a lot less without as much direct learning issues.
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Post by bluecloud2k2 on Sept 14, 2015 3:30:20 GMT
You could try paper miniatures. Easy to make your own, plus there are hundreds, if not thousands, available for free on the net. onemonk.com/downloads.htmlor cardboard-warriors.proboards.com/Much faster than scultping, casting, and painting your own, if your willing to deal with 2.5D minaitures. I have a couple hundred paper minatures printed, but I mostly use normal minatures. The paper ones are great when you only need certain monster once and you don't want to drop $30 on one. Creating your own paper Miniatures is easy if you have a basic image editing software (Gimp works great for this, btw).
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Post by professorx00 on Sept 14, 2015 9:44:43 GMT
Thank you all for the good information. I have taken lots of sculpting class but you are correct in that I have not done any casting or anything as small as minatures. Yes I realize that minatures would take time. The paper option just doesn't work for me I start to feel like a board game. Though I have to decided to play with casting some minatures a lot of people came up with some great low cost alternatives that I will be looking into. Thanks everyone for the great advice.
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Post by michka on Sept 14, 2015 11:34:00 GMT
Since you have experience sculpting I say give sculpting figures a try. There's no rule that says your miniatures have to be the same size as the ones coming out of a factory. The only real reason people try to match standardized sizing is so they can mix and match what they make. You could also try making the larger monsters first. (That's what I did.) People won't usually complain if a giant doesn't match the scale of the player characters.
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Post by DnDPaladin on Sept 14, 2015 12:58:31 GMT
yeah paper minis even though looking awesomely... just doesn't cut it for me either, hence why i build myself a collection. but im definitely not sculpting. though i will likely take to making monsters out of hot glue and foil !
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Post by bluecloud2k2 on Sept 14, 2015 17:20:10 GMT
Since you have experience sculpting I say give sculpting figures a try. There's no rule that says your miniatures have to be the same size as the ones coming out of a factory. The only real reason people try to match standardized sizing is so they can mix and match what they make. You could also try making the larger monsters first. (That's what I did.) People won't usually complain if a giant doesn't match the scale of the player characters. Yeah Making the larger monsters is so easy. I posted psuedo tutorials on my blog here: cloudcraftsite.wordpress.com/2015/09/12/scaldara-a-fire-elemental/And there will be another one scheduled to post in a few days on the Roper I created. Here's a quick view of my Roper:
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Post by gnomezrule on Sept 19, 2015 22:00:00 GMT
PaperfriendsThis is another site with a ba-jillion paper minis already made.
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Post by bluecloud2k2 on Sept 20, 2015 4:47:23 GMT
The ONLY thing I don't like about Paper Friends is they are tent-style.
But that's nothing a little kit-bashing can't fix.
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Post by adamantinedragon on Sept 20, 2015 16:54:40 GMT
Here's a link to my blog's miniatures category. If you scroll through the whole thing you'll find a lot of ways to save money and save time using a bunch of techniques ranging from sculpting your own minis, through kit-bashing and finding cheap minis that will fill your collection quickly. rpgobsessed.wordpress.com/category/game-aids-and-tools/miniatures
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