Second Sphere

http://trollsforge.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=sculpt

Great bunch, if a little quiet over there now. 

Well done to all who entered A nice variety of minis on display.

Entry C was good, nice conversion and solid enough painting, IMO the reason why the votes went poorly for this one was the photography. Never, (i mean never ) take pics of your minis with flash on your camera. It washes out the detail and depth and makes everything look flat. Id like to see some pics in good daylight of this mini, i think it would display this nice conversion much better

Entry E had a similar problem, the overall effect of the mini was good when viewed as a whole, the first picture is nice (although it needs a better undercoat). But the extreme closeups dont do it justice, any mini is going to look worse and pick out any mistakes or anything when a 5mm area is blown up to a 800x600 image on your screen - you want your pics close enough to show the details as a whole, but small enough to hide any imperfections

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If the winners can all drop me a PM with their shipping details, i can get some shiny dice sent out to them. And if you have won and you live in australia, please move to europe since aussie shipping is painfull  lol

And Jon - gratz on 1st place ill sort your £10 coupon via PM

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Narric - Comp points are 5 for 1st, 3 for 2nd place and 1 for third
Good job running this contest and thanks for dragging the contests back into the light of day (kicking and screaming) while the rest of us are a bit lost hopefully there will be many more Narric-esque contests!

How are your putty sculpting skillz going? Was it yourself who did the tervigon conversion set for chapterhouse back in the mists of my long term memory 

Blender is worth learning really, push past the learning curve! Once you know blender; maya, max and mudbox are much easier to grasp as the next step on.
As well as using 3ds max, I had to learn Multigen Creator 2 at work... that 3d software is nearly as old as i am - its painful to use!

Ahh ok, i thought Google Sketchup was more for buildings, my bad 

Sounds good, reminds me i still need to finish a bike i did a while ago :S needs a rider! be sure to post pics when its finished!

If you want any 3d printing or casting - drop me a line I can do most objects at Z 25microns res now for a competative price

Looks like a good start Helmets are coming along nicely.
Although if thats Blender, there are a few too many boolean operands going on Booleans should be a last resort really, since they screw with your topology, smoothing groups, and make it a nightmare to apply UVS if you are wanting to texture things later.
If i could make one suggestion, keep things quads where possible - its going to make your life a lot easier when you think about adding sub-D, smoothing and its easier to make changes if you want to modify something, if it has a nice quad edgeflow. Its trickier to do and model, but its a good habit to get into

Any plans for future bits?

Would be nice I think that is the holy grail stage for all mini companies - perhaps we will take a few more steps towards that in a few months time, then we can start turning out more releases since im giving up the dayjob!

At any point will Zealot be making its product range more stand-alone?

Hmm, in what sense? Legs?

If anything ever comes of the myriad of collaborated universes Sotek and I have done, we're going to poke you to make models for us.

Always good to work with some fresh background materials. I remember doing an initial sculpt for a confederacy of malan marine project we had on here a while ago, that was good fun. (albeit done with epoxy putty before i started digital).