IMPACT! MINIATURES

lahatiel · Joined: 28 Jun 2006 Posts: 259 Location: Los Angeles

Two circumstances came together this evening: 1) I wanted to test the new camera that just arrived this afternoon; and 2) I needed to take a break from putty work. Therefore, I decided to put up a sneak preview of a couple players from the team I'm building out of the Phil's Phigs multi-part human pieces. These guys are essentially done as far as the building stage goes; they just need a bit of filing to smooth out some of the putty-to-metal spots. Shoulder pads are going on after the filing, and heads will be painted separately and attached as the very last step altogether.

A blitzer, thrower and lineman -- all made with the "Standing" legs:

Unfortunately, what can't really be seen clearly in the shot is that the blitzer on the left has his left foot off the ground, about an eighth of an inch off the base and tucked underneath himself as he's cutting and changing direction. That is as opposed to the thrower in the middle, who's left toe is actually touching the base -- they look a bit similar in this shot, but are quite different.

Also, here are a couple of catcher built with the "Running" legs:

Obviously, they each need a left hand sculpted, too, as the sprues only come with an open-handed right arm, not both.

So there you go. I know it's not much right now and I probably won't update them for another two weeks, but I'm frantically working to prepare the team for a tournament next week so I have little time to spare before then. But it was a nice break, nifty to play with the new camera (so much nicer than the old one, even if these shots aren't that great, themselves) and even at this stage of the project, I figure a couple of comments and criticisms can't hurt!

bouncergriim · Joined: 29 Sep 2007 Posts: 298 Location: Fort Worth, TEXAS

Looking good so far. I am excited to see what this team looks like when it is done. I think a lot of us are curious, having only seen the sprues on the Impact! site.

Keep it up.

sebco · Joined: 13 Jan 2007 Posts: 76 Location: Chambéry, France

Yes, clearly the multi part human sprue didn't interest me until I saw this topic. You and your camera did a great job. I hope you will show us some new pictures soon.

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bouncergriim · Joined: 29 Sep 2007 Posts: 298 Location: Fort Worth, TEXAS

just curious, what do the heads look like? I know you are waiting to put them on but I am curious.

lahatiel · Joined: 28 Jun 2006 Posts: 259 Location: Los Angeles

Thanks for the kind words, guys. :) As for the heads:

This display also doubles as my warning to players on my team who don't perform up to expectations: heads on pikes!

These have obviously been primered already, and on a couple you can see some of the blue-tac sticking out from underneath that's holding them on the sticks. But on the heads in focus in the front, you can also see some primered-white bumps under the front of the facemask; I added those with putty as chinstraps. The heads are basically flat underneath save for the hole where the neck on the torso piece goes, but they have this little circular nub -- I don't know why or what they are, maybe they were going to be a sprue attachment point before Phil added that to the back instead? At any rate, I was getting ready to file them all off when the thought struck me to stick a bit of putty over them instead, and now I have chinstraps. They are placed and shaped such that they fit right up against the neck; having seen how it looks in dry-fitting the pieces, I think it should turn out OK.

As for having only seen the parts on the sprue in the store -- I tried to take better pictures for Tom of the parts before cutting them all off the sprues, but I still had my old camera and the best I could come up with were:

Turned out to be not much of an improvement at all.

And now that I have the new camera, I've already cut off every part from every sprue. *sigh* Oh well, hopefully my work-in-progress shots can give enough of an idea.

Ziggi · Joined: 04 Apr 2006 Posts: 20

Hi!
They look great!

Apparently these minis have a lot more potential than I've given them credit for...

Keep up the good work!

Ziggi
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lahatiel · Joined: 28 Jun 2006 Posts: 259 Location: Los Angeles

OK, so the conversion work I put into building these guys was so extensive as to take way too long; I never had time to paint them, and had to take them to the tournament and play them unpainted. :( So they look a little rough right, as you can see all the bare spots where primer has rubbed off, etc. But I thought people might still like an updated look at them in the finished building stage.

First, a touch of backstory: I live and die for the Michigan Wolverines college team (so yes, this has been a rough season for me :( ); my earliest childhood memory is a U-M game on TV, I've been going in person since I was 9 -- I'm 33 now, and there's only 1 year since I started in which I've gone an entire football season without seeing at least one game in person -- and I went to school there, myself. When Michigan won the National Championship for the 1997 season, I was at all 6 homes games, one regular season away game and the Rose Bowl game itself -- 8 out of 12 total games. It's always been my intention to do a FF team of that '97 championship team.

Then, when this year's Underworld Cup came up, it was the 10-year anniversary of that championship season and here was a tournament being held at the school, my alma mater, during football season. With my parents still living just under an hour away from there, it was the perfect excuse to build the team, play them at the school itself, and I could visit the family, too. Thus, these figures are the result:

Catchers and Thrower
86 - Tai Streets - Wide Receiver
2 - Charles Woodson - Cornerback - All-American, Heisman Trophy
80 - Jerame Tuman - Tight End - All-American
14 - Brian Griese - Quarterback - All-Conference

Blitzers
8 - Chris Howard - Running Back
29 - Marcus Ray - Strong Safety - All-Conference
93 - Sam Sword - Linebacker - All-Conference
81 - Glen Steele - Defensive End - All-American

Linemen
49 - Jay Feely - Kicker
68 - Zach Adami - Center - All-Conference
76 - Steve Hutchinson - Left Guard - All-Conference
58 - Rob Renes - Nose Tackle

Of course, I only built the 12 figures I needed for the tournament because that's all the time I had. I will be fleshing out the rest, though, with each Michigan player, position and pose already planned -- including using Jon Jansen, the 6'7", 320 lb. All-Conference right tackle, as my Ogre :). I'm not happy with the blitzer #81 Glen Steele -- I think the figure looks good, the pose just didn't turn out as I'd envisioned it at all. Therefore, that figure will get turned into a lineman, and Glen will eventually get a brand-new figure with a brand-new pose.

One note about Jay Feely, to go with the fact I always give my first lineman to skill up on any team the "Kick" skill): Michigan's kicker for field goals and point-afters that year was Kraig Baker, but Feely handled kick-off duty. Since kicking off is the only role of a kicker in FF, I figured I had to go with Feely on my team!

And, a few notes about the making of the figures...

Legs - Since there are only the two types of legs available, I had to do some converting. I've lined up a few players of each type so as to highlight the different poses I managed to achieve. The first pic is the Running legs and the second is the Standing; in each pic, the first player's legs are unmodified.

Hands - Unfortunately, there's only an open-hand option available for the right arm -- so for Streets and Woodson, I had to sculpt my own open left hands to get the poses I wanted.

Height - Obviously, I'm going for as much realism as possible with this team. Therefore, I did my best to scale each player to his real-life size. In this pic, I've lined up four players to try to illustrate the difference and included their real-life heights:

Skin tone - You might have noticed the different tones used in the previous pics. Again, it's all about realism -- I studied a high-res team photo, comparing each player to the others in the same shot, and from that assigned each player one of four skin tones. Clockwise from the top: pale white guy, tan white guy, light-skin black guy, medium-skin black guy. There'd also be a dark-skin black guy, but none of the real players who'd have that tone will make it to being a miniature. (Note: I only had time to put on one thin coat of each skin tone, and all of them will need at least one more coat just for the basecoat, and then the shading and highlighting will change them a lot, too; basically, the 2nd and 3rd aren't/won't be nearly so close as they appear here.)

Finally, I thought I'd point out one last thing: I've tried to do a variety of realistic football poses, but there's only one for which I tried to capture a real-life moment. In the first half of the Rose Bowl, Charles Woodson made an end-zone interception that was captured in an iconic photo. While I couldn't copy his pose exactly with his figure, I like to think I came fairly close:

Hope everyone likes what I've done so far -- I'm not the fastest when it comes to producing this stuff, so I figure I've probably put in at least about 60 hours into them so far. I'll put in more pictures once I finally get them painted and in the meantime, questions and comments are more than welcome, as always!

Dark Lord · Joined: 23 May 2006 Posts: 2682

I'm looking forward to updates on these.

They look great...you made me want to get those multi-part humans, for sure.

Great work. You should start a blog site for them and just link to it.
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GalakStarscraper · The Big Man Joined: 24 Nov 2005 Posts: 6176

Very nice work ... permission to use in the big pic links for the multi-part items?

Galak

lahatiel · Joined: 28 Jun 2006 Posts: 259 Location: Los Angeles

Ted Striker · Joined: 06 Oct 2006 Posts: 159

lahatiel · Joined: 28 Jun 2006 Posts: 259 Location: Los Angeles

Xtreme · Joined: 06 Apr 2006 Posts: 251 Location: Indianapolis

You've done an awesome job so far, pulling off a big project where you weren't willing to take any short cuts is quite the accomplishment. Now get them painted I can't wait to see the finished product.
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Lychanthrope · Joined: 22 Nov 2006 Posts: 367 Location: Bristol, IN USA

Great idea, great work. Can't wait to see them in Blue & Maize.
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Stout Youngblood · Joined: 29 Nov 2006 Posts: 356 Location: Lombard, IL

I think Orange and Blue would look better (at least you KNOW the Illini will tank every year sort of like the Cubs).