What's WRONG With D&D Minis? - Wizkids / 3d Printing / Sprue Kits

bent swords lost detail mold lines and artifacts this can't be fun to paint right when we resin print something or buy a model kit for a game like Warhammer we're expecting highquality minis with great detail that'll be fun to paint so why is this the official line of the most readily available Miniatures for DND why is this okay and that's not a dig that is a genuine question like there must be a reason they keep making these right they're cheapish I suppose so maybe it's all right that they're not perfect but then again comparing that to resin printing where a miniature overall might cost you about the same in material or a miniature from somewhere like archon Studios that do third party minis designed to work with DND they're way better and often a lot cheaper so today I want to have a bit of a look I want to paint a few I want to compare and I want to see if I can figure out why these are the most readily available and most official Miniatures for DND D I'm not going for display pieces here just a nice quick paint job that'll get these ready for the table in half an hour to an hour painted for combat you could say starting with a vibrant green for the spell sword's coat followed by a 50/50 mix of blue speed paint with water for the pants and then some brown for his undercoat boots and hair some flesh tone for the face and finally an undiluted blue for the spell effect before doing a quick dry brush of some of the lighter Colors Over the model admittedly this model is quite well thought out the areas of detail here don't have a bunch of tiny details you need to pick out so you can just drop in Big Blocks of color across the model which is great when you're using something like speed paint trying to get these painted up fast and looking across some of the other Whiz Kids models I have sitting on my shelves they're actually all very similar in this regard but that could just be the seven or eight that I have here my first impression of these is that they are meant to be painted fast something like speed paint is perfect for this with the caveat that some of the detail is going to be lost in the casting process this model is a good example of this the details on the face are very soft and even have some mold imperfections in those areas so the speed paints really don't have much to pull from here and if anything they're kind of exaggerating the fact that the face is smooth and featureless well a spell sword done it's time to move on to our DR warrior from bite the bullet her skin is Co in a vibrant speed paint purple her clo in black and her armor in various diluted mixes of black mixed with a few drops of brown to give it some variation and then for the various Furs and hair on the model I'll give these a dark wash followed by a couple layers of highlights I think the biggest thing I noticed painting this model compared to the Whiz Kids immediately is the heroic scale that it's sculpted in and you'll find this a lot across 3D printed Miniatures and model kits this more heroic scale that increases the size of features like faces and hands that allow you to really capture details in those areas she's roughly the same height as our wiiz kid's mini and she doesn't feel shorter even though her face and hands are almost twice the size she still feels like she's between 5 and 6 ft tall but we can actually see her facial expression and it goes without saying that the detail of a 3D printed miniature will always surpass that of a whiz kid's mini a 3D printed mini isn't limited to the same casting and molding process of a plastic mini like this next up we have a bear from the deep from archon Studio's recent world of delay Kickstarter I'm not sure if this is the intended proxy but I'm going to be painting this up as a bar Guist I'm not sure how to pronounce that but they're these cool goblinoid shape shifters anyway this model is a plastic kit it was clipped off a sprew and glued together this model was around four pieces that I had to fit together before I hit it with the same primer as the others he gets a black speed paint on his fur then a diluted black mix with a tiny bit of brown for his exposed body with some flesh tone dotted on while it's still wet on the knees and elbows then the skin got a nice light skin tone mixed with a tiny bit of brown offwhite for the eyes fangs and Claws and a few dots of red for the scars across his body plastic hits are by far the best when it comes to Quality and Detail in a miniature and when you're getting those minis from somewhere like Games Workshop or archon Studios you know they're going to be great sculpts my favorite part about spr kits is how easy they are to customize this might not be the best example this is a monopose model but many plastic kits come with optional arms or different weapon variations for your Minis and when you don't use all of those for a single model it's very easy to Kit bash these and this is what I want to see with minis these highly detailed highly modular kits that are easy to customize as you see fit and you get a little bit of this with 3D printing some sculpts will allow different weapon options for their minis but the mess and the cleanup and the process of resin printing isn't for everyone especially if you're like me and you live in a small apartment I literally cannot resin print at the moment so I would love to see more plastic kits for dndd and it actually seems that Dungeons and Dragons and whiz kids might agree Frameworks are whiz kid's newest line of minis made out of the same polyyne plastic as Warhammer and archon Studios and this is a great step in the right direction these look like well sculpted wellth thought out kits that have a little bit of modularity and customization to them they give you the Torso and legs for these Minis and usually include one or two different weapon options and a couple of different faces but the biggest issue for me at least locally is the price one of these framework series minis goes for $25 almost twice the price of a whiz kid's blister pack which usually contains two and forget getting something like a bolder 70 bucks whereas it's ready to paint version is 20 that doesn't add up especially when you compare it to something like a box of Space Marines that come out at maybe $10 a model and they often have more options in those boxes than we're seeing with the framework minis even all of these boxes from archon's Kickstarter I mean this cost me $700 but the contents of the boxes that works out to almost a dollar a mini and that's including some of the ganu and Minis that they've gotten here even if you're buying Aron minis retail they're only going for a few doar a mini when you actually break down the price of these boxes and some of these are multipos with different weapon options so what I would really love to see is Frameworks minis at a slightly lower price but include a few in a box I would be more than happy to pay a 100 bucks for a box that contained 12 mini sprws let's say one for each core class with a few different weapon options a few different faces I think that would be great I'd buy that so quick for using with PC or NPCs it would just be so much fun to build and paint but I get it the preassembled minis are the go-to cuz they're approachable they're cheap they're easy to paint and they're available at most game stores that said it's nice to see that Whiz Kids and d and d have noticed the Surge and popularity among mini painting it's great to see them stepping into this ring trying to put out these highquality plastic kits to rival things like Warhammer and archon Studios it's going to take a couple more series worth of Frameworks until they've got a nice diverse set of minis here and I do think the price is going to continue to be a problem these are officially licensed minis so inherently there's some extra cost to that but with that said I would still like to maybe see them come down to match something closer to Warhammer overall my takeaway is the pre-assembled ready to paint minis are great if you are a dndd Enthusiast if you just want some models to put on the table when it comes to game night but if you're like me and you want your minis to look really nice even if it's a quick paint job something like Frameworks archon or even some age of Sigma minis might be the bit bit but if you're just looking for a quick character or creature that you don't mind if it doesn't look great downfalls aside these models will do the job like And subscribe and as always have a good one

Channel: Painted4Combat

Views: 5,509

Keywords: D&D, 5e, TTRPG, Tabletop games, table top games, tabletop, miniatures, minis, mini painting, miniature painting, dnd minis, d&d minis, dungeons and dragons, dungeons & dragons, 3d printing, 3d print, Wizkids, Archon Studios, Dueslair, World of Dueslair, Archon, resin printing, Resin Print, BiteTheBullet, Dark Elf, Drow, Spellsword, wizard, barghest, dnd monster, dnd mini, wizkids, resin 3d print, resin mini, resin miniatures, sprue, plastic model, plastic, tamiya, kitbashing, speedpaint

Id: tnkmGXy0E_g

Length: 8min 24sec (504 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 07 2024