restoring my old beaten up eldar stuff (including revenant titan)

so... the last two days, in a flurry of modelling, i pulled my partially assembled and painted old revenant titan out of the box, i had stopped the project years ago after doing quite abit of work on it, frankly, i was just not at all satisfied with how it was turning out, and fixing everything seemed like such a daunting task, particularly because i had done my best to build it as sturdy as possible

anyway, i finally got around to all the hacking, cutting, sawing, drilling and sanding, and oh boy am i glad i did

As he stands, unpainted, held together by bluetack and in a new dynamic pose:














The first most drastic change to the model is probably the engraved patterns on some of the armor plates, this was done back years ago when i bought the model with a dremel, the idea was to add abit of fancy detailing, but it turned out abit more rough than i wanted, i WAS planning to fill it in and rstore the surfaces, but even if its abit rough i actually quite like the look of it, so i decided to roll with it, adding tiny spikes made from pinpoints embedded and glued into the resin into the middles of the "swirls"





The left tasset also has a design, thoguh its abit hard to see against the sanded down old paintjob




the face plate got a subtle one too, along with a prison tatt- i mean symbolic eldar tear engraving



then there is the weird spine... i felt that the model lacks some detail on the visible "mechanics" between the groin and torso, however, i did not wanna go overboard, as eldar stuff kinda have to be all sleek and organic, so i opted to add a few segmented plates to add to the details and overall organic look




i gave the spine a slight twist to it, to add to the overall flow of the pose, his torso being turned and all


and speaking of organic look, i cut and sanded a groove down the chest plate to emulate pectorals (i filled the weird panel lining on the corner of the left pec after taking the picture)



Another drastic change was the shoulderpads, i was never quite a fan of the "dragonball spiky shoulder pads" thing, and they were horrendously big and kinda in the way here, so while holding my breath i took a saw to them


i added a little peice of plastic card on the new edge to continue the ripped design on the inside, and also to add abit of detail to the otherwise big flat edge



One of the points of the soulderpads were shaved down and neatened up to create a new codpeice, as i simply did not like the stock one much


(a nub of random flastic was added on the inside to fit the ball-join socket on the groin of the model)


It looks much better on the model than the flat stock plate (and with the more bulbous look, no one is gunna think the big lances are for any kind of compensation)



The head was also changed; The neck was extended to allow for more posability and a more agile look, while the little flimsy "dreadlocks" on the sides were replaced with thin plates to emulate big ear-rings somewhat


The pilot was also changed a bit, he received a helmet, cut and sanded down from the old dark eldar range, after i took the pictures i sculpted over the face with grey stuff for a sleek faceless helmet (it makes sense with the eldar titan lore)... also the cockpit was neatened up abit with greenstuff long ago, mostly to fill the big ugly gaps, its much smoother in real life than it looks here



The Base is a few blank CD's glued together (classic CD base) with lots of cork added on top, its made by stacking multible layers of thick cork plates together, the edges "flocked" with more cork scraps to hide the seams... the entire thing is laced with long pins, wire and extra glue, to add strength, and the titan's feet were almost literally nailed down into it, the back end of the thick pins sculpted and sanded over to make the process invisible... the tiles are just cardboard, and the vines thin wire






I also trimmed the greaves back when i got the model, the plan was to do alot of trim like this, but it was probably the most frustrating thing ive ever build, so iam probably not gunna do more, even though iam considering trimming the shoulder pads to add visual balance to the model... it was made by gluing plastic rod around the edge, bending it as i went, slowly working a a few milimeters at a time and cut off the excess



Then there is the big guns, which is a PAIN to straigthen up on this version of the revenant:
I straightened one (still got the other to do) by hacking it up in strategic places, after straightening it as well as i could with hot water, then drilled through and added a thick length of plastic rod as very straight pin through most of the barrel


this is the most notable seam, right in the middle of the barrel, but i think i'll look fine when painted


i used long thick pins, only glued into the barrel, to make them detatchable for transport




the pins are quite large, and the subtle kinks help them lock in tight


oh, and i also shaved down the many fins from the tips, they look WAY better without to me



speaking of which, i made the big vanes on the back detachable in much the same way, also for transporting:



as a small bonus, back when i bought the model, since i had plans of making the barrels detachable, i also designed a close combat weapon (that i didn't finish) just for the hell of it... maybe some day i'll come up with some rules for it


the blade is made from old plastic cards (you know, like credit cards) with the edge filled in to make it curve inwards neatly and elderedly




So yeah, that is pretty much the current state of things, i got that one barrel to do, and maybe a tiny bit more detailing (trims?) and then this big boy will need a shiny coat of paint... and i mean shiny, i got chrome on my mind...

salvaging all my old mistakes was alot of work, hardest of all probably the pose, as mentioned i had build this thing the last. i feel lucky that i could work with most of which i had made in the past (legs and head) to create a proper nice dynamic pose that i can be happy with, and only had to do limited sawing and cutting to repose his left arm.
oh and i guess butcher the inside of the chest cavity with a drill to allow for more degrees of movement:

(which is also why i skipped the "belly plate")

In a word, wow!

Everything, from the base, to the tear on the helmet, to the modified shoulder and cod pieces, looks... nothing short of superb.

I can only imagine how much time this took, but the results really speak for themselves.

Have you played any games with this magnificent contraption yet?

That looks pretty rad. Good call on the shoulder pads.
I'm such a sucker for the dynamic pose, and I think you nailed it with this one. By far the most interesting revenant titan I have seen.
I'm looking forward to seeing it painted.

Holy moly!

thank yo'all! iam certainly quite happy with it myself as well

as for games... none yet, i generally dont get to play much, since i have a sad habit of making playable armies slower than GW can completely turn the rules upside down.
i would be lying through my teeth if i said the new updated rules for the revenant were not part of the motivation, though, and the fact that it is a lord of war choice for eldar and dark eldar


in other news i realized what sort of detail i felt this thing was lacking, i came to the scary realization that it does not have a single skull to be found anywhere, and i have already come up with a few spots i can add them (along with a spike for each to keep them in place).
My work week starts now though, so it might be a few days before an update on the titan front, but till then i'll try to get some pictures of the army the big boy will ride with, probably when i get home today

Looking very good!

Update time! (even if much delayed)

the big guy is basically ready for paint now, i fixed the second (black) barrel and did some greystuff cleanup here and there in addition to skulls, ive actually had the guy at this state for quite a while at this point, but work have taken its toll lately and delayed documentation of it all...

anyway, skulls!



I added some on his chest, almost like medals i guess, or ornaments for the big spirit stones





i also added some to the big jump pack thing, as ornamentation to the bulges/stones





and finally, the trim above the feet got abit of grim ornamentation, something to literally shove in the face of the enemy... iam contemplating adding more to this area





The skulls themselves are greystuff "prints" made with a simple one-sided push mold, left to dry and then cleaned off and shaved down to fit the surface where needed, some have been concaved out on the back so they snugly fit over the stones and bulges, as i wanted to avoid digging into the titan should i ever wish to remove the skulls

Great work! I am not too sure about the skulls myself, but very keen to see the end result to be proven wrong!

kiblams wrote:

Great work! I am not too sure about the skulls myself, but very keen to see the end result to be proven wrong!

yeah i think i may end up removing the ones on the shoulder-jet things, they will end up looking quite "tagged on" come painting, especially with no obvious way for them to actually be sticking to the surface (like spikes and the like), the chest ones i do like though, because they look rather integrated, and i plan to actually paint the bulges underneath as spirit stones... i'll try to find other places for a few skulls and spikes, and try to be abit more subtle about it...

maybe a small spike or blade on each jet-bulge would look better?

something kinda like this?

carnosaur93 wrote:

maybe a small spike or blade on each jet-bulge would look better?

something kinda like this?

You read my mind!

Look awesome, great work.

UPDATE!..
not on the revenant, but other eldar stuff...

So ive had my head in a vice lately on exactly how to proceed with not just the revenant, but my eldar stuff in general, frankly the dark eldar codex sucks, in particular raiders i feel, which makes me mad when i have 7 of the bloody things, and when my main source of inspiration is the warboys from madmax
so after literally a week of pondering and thinking about he different eldar 'dexes, ive finally decided to go for corsairs, lore-wise that is what i was gunna do for an army anyway, but the main driving force (harr harr pun) is to actually build something from my huuuge collection of random beat up eldar models and not have to buy new stuff

the first order of buisness is to make me some bikes, falcons, and hornets, engines for the engine god.
I have 3 beat up modern raider hulls/chassies, and 4 of the old, most are in a relatively okay state but some, much befitting the madmax theme, seen better days:


(this was after the first round of repair work)




i spend some time on it the other day though and managed to fix at least the modern hull back up to something that resembles a raider (still a ton of filling and sanding to do though, and then onto the actual conversion work):




(i dont even remember why i cut it up in the first place :I)


the current plan is to use the modern raiders as hornets, i feel like they have a decent size for it (hornets have close to no bulk, but they are actually almsot the size of a wave serpent), however to do so i need to mount a pair of pulse lasers, and make it not be open-topped, and i feel like i found some pretty satisfying solutions to both:






(this is probably what i will aim for as the final height/position to the "sail roof")




(placeholder tube... but the sides of the hull feels satisfyingly suited for a pair of guns to me, the way you can sorta take advantage of the sleek inward curve, it also means that the guns will be in roughly the same layout as on the official hornet models for rules-purposes)

My plan for falcons is to use my 4 old raiders, but bulk them up abit with side armor and add a tatooine skiff style roof on them as well, then add two little ramps to the back of each side platform (back entry point) and two seperate gunners, one at the front of each platform (one with a bright lance, one with a pulse laser), and maybe a couple of extra dudes with plain lasblasters to represent the underslung twinlinked one and add to the busy man-powered look...
i dont have a mockup of this yet, but i feel like it would look pretty neat and fit my theme quite well, with a sorta "war rig" style feel to it almost...

(EDIT i made a very rough sketch) :


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completely unrelated to all of the above, i made a wraithseer today:








i once bought a wraithlord just because i liked the model, and i wanted to style him like my revenant titan, but like the titan, this guy got exiled to the back of a box because i hated how it turned out, the original plan (for both) was mossy old granite statue look, but making "animated statues" as miniatues just plain does not work, as they just end up looking like weirdly posed statues, lacking the whole "animation" part, the main problem with this in retrospect is that the cleanup work is daunting, so much texture and paint gotta be carefully scraped and sanded off;
most troublesome was the back of this guy, which had also seen some drastic structual changes that needed fixing


(it looks messy, but its nice and smooth after much work)

being a wraithseer, i needed to do abit of converting, i made my own D-cannon from a missile launcher and spare bits... i think i might lower the cannon abit after looking at it a few times, to sleek up the overall look of the model:




i also had to make a shield thing, and opted for something fairly simple, a gemmed antenna from the eldar guardian kit, and a big spirit stone:




(i make my stones by rolling spare greenstuff into little elongated balls of different sizes, then cut them in half when i need to add one to a surface)

Finally, i added a loincloth to add to the ornate eldar look of the guy, rather than a pure war machine... this is the one that comes in the box, but carefully bend to a more billowing and dynamic shape:




all in all he/she is not super ornate, but i feel like thats okay, its unlikely i'll ever get another wraithlord anyway, and i really quite like how they look by default (hence why i got one in the first place)

maybe one day this guy will lead a small pure wraith army... one day...

some progress has been made, i now have a servicable legal 600pts crosair army to get started playing a few little skirmishes!
:EDIT: Once i get some reasonably sized bases going for the bikes! :EDIT:












balelights with lances, 2x4 bikes with shu-cans or scatterlasers, 3 with venom blades, and a kitted out prince
i fiddles abit around with the army list and made room for 2 more bikes after priming the entire thing, thats why i got two very uninished bikes hanging out there... in fact, the primer has revealed some stuff i wanna fix on some of them so i'll do that, and they'l get a new coat of paint anyway (because i realized after the fact that priming black would be better... in fact, i spend abit over an hour just now going over all but the gunner-bikes with black by hand)

most things are at least lightly converted, the classic reaver jetbikes drastically cut down for a more sleek simple look:





the balelights, former scourges (i got some vague lore for this), pretty much all have custom guns to a varying extent, the idea sorta is almost across the army that no non-eldar player can really tell eldar guns apart anyway, so generic rag-tag looking (by eldar standards) laser weapons of varying sizes and shapes should have me pretty much covered, as long as i stay consistent size/silhuette wise:











Then we have the big boss guy himself, a corsair prince riding atop his trusty fire-spewing custom chopper-like steed of eldar antigrav technology, this was a rather extensive conversion, but iam really happy with how he turned out:








The bike itself is an old classic eldar jetbike, initially i wanted to use it for the more authorotarian leaned back pose of the rider, but quickly saw the chance to make it into an impressive beast among jetbikes, as is probably quite noticable, i added an additional engine, both to add in size, but also bring it mroe in line with the dark eldar jetbikes of a single central engine,
however, i elongated it further than just that, addign a big spacer under the hood:



(the back-engine had quite abit of plastic-card work done on it, to integrate it into the frame somewhat, using peices of tubing and some bend rod)




(the rider himself is a mix of many parts, mostly from the warhammer fantasy cold one riders from the dark elf range, his head however is a standard kabalite warrior head with beastmen gor horns carefully added... the sword arm is actually from the banner of the cold one riders, with a sword hand from the same kit added, his left arm is a corsair upper arm, with the lower arm of a kabalite warrior added upside down to hold the handlebars (the armor matched that of the cold one riders)


(his back is quite horny, the idea of this was to emulate a sort of throne almost, yet with a savage twist to it)

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Finally, a small update on the wraithseer:

he has been primed, and i lowered the D-cannon down abit closer to his shoulder, making it look much sturdier:

(ahh... much better)


(now that he is primes, you can see that he is in fact quite alot smoother than he looks in the initial pictures)

hmm... i could had sworn i took more pictures of him all neat and primed... oh well

oh, and at least i dont have to re-prime this guy, grey is exactly what i need for the wraith color-scheme i have in mind, iam gunna go for pale dirty wraithbone, but with a gloss almost-black dark green head, to faintly hint at biel-tan colors, the fluff for my pointy-ears being that they were once exodites who lost their maiden world to an imperial invasion, now driven to frenzied pirating as a sort of mourning, and having rather limited resources to deal with aside from what tehy could bring with them from their home (like, some old allied biel-tan wraith-things that came to aid in the battle... and a revenant titan)

a small update on the revenant:

i removed the jump-jet skulls and added some "blades". basically, i remembered the old jes goodwin artwork of the revenant titan which was the inspiration for adding some more detail to the jumpjets in the first place, and opted for some little fins:



They were made from thick plastic card, cut in two different sizes, shaved to roughly the right silhuette, and then sanded to hell and back slowly shaping them up as desired, basically sculpting with rough sandpaper and cleaning up the surface with some very fine grit afterwards:







the reason i went for these was not just "jes did it" though, i figured that it also helps add some visual balance to the model, echoing the shapes and designs on the legs:



finally i added one last skull (after romoving the six on top), and this time more in line with the other ones i put on the chest and legs model:


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with all that, the revenant is now complete.
well... the model itself, the last thing i gotta do before i can paint him is to rebase him, the problem is that with the new pose, the CD base does not quite cut it. The model is very front-heavy and prone to falling over in full assembly, back when i got this guy and made the legs though, no better options were available and i did not at all have this problem.

but times have changed, and with the advent of huge citadel models more base options have become available, so in a big-ish order i made today (the new knight box!.. iam gunna build a slaanesh renegade house! ) i opted to get an extra large oval base, its almost as wide as the CD's, but quite a lot longer, which i think will do the job, its only really unstable at the front, like some sort of huge expensive resin hormagaunt