Friday, August 1, 2008

Hellhound 2: Turret

The standard hellhound turret looks like a chimera turret with some extra armor on it and an inferno cannon instead of a multilaser. I didn't want to depart too much from the standard model here, but I wanted something that looked home made, like it was built or enhanced by nomads. So I started with the standard chimera turret, but reversed it, covering the multilaser port with the slightly-trimmed basilisk driver's hatch door.

I have a bunch of these dual heavy flamer nozzles lying around from old-school vehicle sprues, so I doubled up a couple of them and stuck them to the back of the turret to make it into the front. Then to make sure it didn't look like the turret was backwards, I used spare pieces of the chimera kit and some other old rhino parts to set up a blast shield:

I think the trick with this kind of work is to (1) leave as many rivet heads showing as possible so it looks more like metal and less like plastic and (2) not to go overboard, unless you're converting ork vehicles. For nomad vehicles I can already see that the biggest challenge is going to be to strike a balance between making things look like the nomads modified them, versus crossing over into ork-like bricoleurism.


Okay, so once the basic turret is bashed together, it needs a gunner. I gotta make this Cadian gunner torso topped by an Empire Fantasy militia head into a proper ash nomad head.Step one, he needs a shoulder cape and hood to cover up all that fancy Cadian uniform piping. The shoulder cape starts with a flat ribbon of green stuff:
The ribbon wraps around the crewman's neck and shoulders, and gets smoothed as much as possible.
Notice also that I've filed off the line at the edge of the Empire militiaman's do-rag to make it look like he's bald. The bandanna-headed guy is the easiest to convert to bald.
Next I made a little cone of green stuff (picture above) and stuck it to the back of the shoulder cape.
That cone gets smoothed in and shaped into the flattened hood shape below, using a sculpting tool and plenty of water.I freely admit I'm not the best greenstuff smoother, but I figure hitting it close is good enough. It's supposed to be rough cloth anyhow, and it'll be in camouflage color later on anyway.

Now for goggles, cut a couple of little bits of greenstuff from a greenstuff snake.
Stick em on the model's eyes and flatten them out until they are shaped like dished disks.
Flatten a section of that tiny green stuff snake above and flatten it around the head for a goggle strap.
And there it is below. The hellhound turret, with homemade Ash Nomad gunner. A trimmed hatch from an old-school rhino and hatch ring from the old vehicle accessory sprue complete this part.
Next time: a surprise twist for the hellhound's hull.

1 comment:

Liam said...

I like this idea. this would work great for me to use for a less common Immolator variant