Polyversal PacFed

In the recent Polyversal Kickstarter, one of the starter armies available featured our PacFed models. We’re going to have to cast several thousand PacFed models to fulfill our part of the pledges, and we had already decided that we’d need to create some new moulds to do this. And we figured that if we were making new moulds, it would be an ideal opportunity to update the designs to match the resculpted 15mm versions. This means that everyone who’s ordered our PacFed models in their pledge will get these lovely shiny new ones instead of the original versions. We’ll be doing the same with the Catroux as well – a major change to this model will be to get rid of the separate wheels and make the hull a 1-piece casting.

Now there seems to be a commonly held misconception that because a digital version of a model exists in one scale, it can be magically resized to another scale with a single keystroke, new 3D masters can then be printed and away you go to the casters. Not so.

Think about it – our 15mm vehicles have separate crew hatches. Would you really want that in a 6mm model ? So small parts like these have to be attached/welded to the model (in some cases it’s as easy to simply recreate the geometry from scratch). Our 15mm Wombat has three parts to the hull – two metal and one resin. Again, this makes no sense in 6mm, so they have to be joined together, which invariably creates duplicate or redundant points and faces, so these need to be cleaned up. Scaling some 15mm parts down to 6mm makes them too small – in particular this affects gun barrels which generally end up too thin to cast, or even if they do cast they would be too brittle so that they would bend or break. So gun barrels have to be made fatter, but that means they no longer fit their mounting point so that has to be remodelled. I also sometimes make whole pieces (turrets especially) slightly bigger in the Y-axis – it just looks better. Some pieces of detail have to be enlarged to that they will cast better, and I often make hull plates thicker or recessed details deeper.

The same is true of the reverse process – taking a 6mm design and scaling it up to 15mm. In this case models often have to be broken into pieces to cast, and some details scaled down as they simply would look oversized in 15mm. Gun barrels have to be removed from turrets and hatches opened up – and so on.

So after that brief rant, here’s the result of some of my work – I’ve been taking the 15mm versions of the Ocelot, Wombat and Catroux and converting them to 6mm, and I’ll also have to create a version of the Quoll, which doesn’t yet exist in 15mm (still working on that).

Once the Polyversal KS has shipped, our plan is to finish the job and remodel the entire PacFed 6mm range to match the new 15mm versions and replace everything at one go – this is quite a task that will involve replacing lots of moulds, but one that should be worthwhile. It further benefit is that some of the vehicles that have yet to be made in 15mm (the Quoll, Koala, Tanami and Bilby) will also be made available in the larger scale.