The Heretic's Ball 2010 - Begin!

[Big Boris]

Around about time I ran another Sculpting contest, I think!

This year, the theme is mainly going to be Sci-fi or Creatures. As in, those are the two areas I really want to see more of in my range at the moment. However, you can enter any sculpt of any type that you wish if you don't want to do soemthing that falls under sci-fi or creatures. Do not make a moulded-on base for the figure(s) you enter as I will need to file it off. I use slottas. I will attach a slotta tab if you win, you don't need to worry about it. Human figures need to fit onto a 25mm round/square base.

Sci-Fi
Basically, I need anything that can fit into a reasonably generic sci-fi setting. I need whatever you do to be usable with the sci-fi humans scale that I have established with the troopers, gangers, inspectors etc. So if you're doing humans, they need to have similar sized heads and hands to those figures I've already done. If you're doing guns, they'll need to fit size-wise to the figures I have made. if you do a Warbot, it should look like something that the people of Earth would definitely be using in the future. If you do an alien, well, you've got free rein there really but scale it against the humans so it doesn't end up accidentally too big or too small. I'll also take vehicles, especially little cool ones like gravbikes, or proper motorcycles with wheels, or big military ones. If oyu go military, I'd appreciate a down-to-earth mundanity to them, look at modern vehicles and see how they look in terms of practicality, durability and design. What sort of doors they have, what sort of shapes. Vehicles are pretty hard to make look great!
You may of course use the guns etc from my existing scifi types, the ones with hands on for instance will save you sculpting new hands and help keep things in proprtion. I recommend you buy at least one fo the gangers or trooper packs so that you know what you are working towards for proportions etc. No big heads, no giant hands! Anatomy is vital to a good sculpt, make sure knees and elbows are where you would expect to see them on a normal person!
A few ideas will be forthcoming from me over the next few days. I'll add them to a list in this post:

• Smugglers
• Bounty Hunters
• Mechanics
• Alien Clone Troopers
• Vermissian Infestor Cult Adherents - from mutating hybrid humans to Celebrity Spokespeople and Bodyguards (limo would be great as well!)
• Battle Suits and other mechanical gubbins
• Gangs of all sorts
• Feisty female friends
• Boffins and other scientist types

For guns, you will need to provide at least 5 gun types to get the £150. (£30 a gun) They must be sharply sculpted, no rounded edges etc if they aren't supposed to be rounded!
You can also expand on ideas I've had a go at if you like. 1970's international task force types would also be welcome, come to think of it!
[/list]


As to Creatures (which can also come under Sci-fi)

• It must fit onto a 50mm round base or a smaller base (or at most one for each foot if you insist)
• It should be awesome.

I will pay £150 to the winning entries. Plus you get the kudos of your name credited as the sculptor. I reserve the right to modify winning entries to make them fit more in line with the Heresy ranges if necessary, or to improve areas that need improving in my opinion.

The contest closes August 31st, you need to provide quality clear pics of your entries, cropped to show just the sculpt and not your bedroom/lounge/s+m dungeon or what have you. If you don't own a camera, you will have trouble with this. DO NOT send me the sculpt unless I ask you to! My decision may be harsh, but it will be final. I may run a poll to help me decide, though. You can either email me your pics directly or preferably post them here on the FOD in the special section in the Gallery Of Doom

http://forum-of-doom.com/index.php?board=61.0

There may be more than one winner if I can afford it!

Any questions, feel free to ask!
Good luck!
ta
Andy

[Klute]

Awesome. Have some ideas floating around.

Question: Do they have to be new, never before seen sculpts and if so do you need starting date proof (pic with newspaper for example) ??

[beefcake]

Woohoo!
Right, now all I need is an idea, and some better sculpting skills.

umm... so whats a vermission infestor cult?

[Bahir]

wow, this is cool.  How many entries can someone submit?

[justice]

Closing date 31st August, to keep to my usual form I'll start one now, not finish it and then start another on August 10th!

Worked out last time...

[voltan]

tempted to enter but held back by the fact I've still not technically finished my entry from 06 

[a_thousand_hats]

I'll give this one a go.



But...

wow, this is cool.  How many entries can someone submit?

 

[voltan]

also are you planning resin or metal for vehicles?

[grekwood]

ohhh i'm in 

right now i need to think what i should try and sculpt 

i shall think not whoiniverse 

any suggestion as to what i should have a crack at   

[Big Boris]

They don't have to be started-now sculpts, although it's more fun for everyone if it's a race. You can submit as many entries as you like, but you are better off spending more time making sure one entry is the best it can be than submitting four entries that maybe aren't!

Vehicles will probably be resin, maybe metal if they're small enough and you make it castable.

The Vermissian Infestor Cult, is basically the cult built around a Vermissian Nexus Spider, a creature that absorbs the brainwaves of the prey around it to increase its own intelligence, then once it has created for itself a secure nest, lures surrounding creatures into it's lair where they are infected with brain-controlling parasites that allow the Nexus Spider to control the victim and leave them without a will of their own. These victims are then used to lure more victims into the lair of the Nexus Spider, which grows increasingly intelligent with each fresh pseudohost. When it has a certain amount of local creatures under its control, the nexus spider grows an egg sac which the 'cult' members then distribute at the edges of the Nexus Spider's (Now a nexus Queen) mental control area. These offspring will grow and develop to a lesser mental level than the queen so long as they remain within the control area; they actually act as boosters for the Queen's mental field, so that more and more victims can be added. It shoudl be noted that on it's original home planet, Vermissia, the Nexus Spider had a limited intelligence ceiling. It was surrounded by primitive creatures such as the Vermissian equivalents of foxes, cows etc and never built any 'empire' larger than a few acres, nor did it's own intelligence develop into true sentience. However, all of this changed when a Human research team landed on the planet, discovered the nexus Spider and decided to transport it offworld and install it in a xeno-zoo in a colony on the planet Lancastria II. The Nexus Spider's own IQ ballooned when it was surrounded by human-level intelligence and it achieved true sentience. Suddenly it was made aware of the whole of the universe and the potential thereof. It firstly snared the zookeepers, then used them to lure visitors to the museum into it's cage for a 'private viewing' and in the end the entire colony was subsumed into the Nexus Spider's mental gestalt. it was only the timely arrival of another research misssion that uncovered the truth and had the colony destroyed by nuclear bomb. Unfortunately, the Nexus Queen had developed physically enough to lay several eggs which had already been smuggled out of the colony on a shuttlecraft by Pseudohosts. Thus the Vermissian Nexus Spider became a galaxy wide threat.
Each of the Nexus Spiders hatched from the original queen had the same level of intelligence as their parent creature had had, but without the dominant mental field of the parent, the offspring were free to develop as individual creatures, now blessed with human-level intelligence of their own. They successfully infested other colonies, and a pattern has since developed where the Nexus Spiders that have been bred form those offspring are smuggled onto a planet, where they ensnare and subsume local humans in positions of power and/or influence to promote the idea of an exo-galactic religion of some sort. As more influential members join, the cult gains what all Nexus Spiders truly crave, Dominance and Power of whole planets, feeding off the psychic energy (as well as the meat of more unfortunate victims) of their worshippers as they pray to their 'benevolent super-being' or some variant thereof. Celebrities are used to present the cult as an acceptable religion, and once initiated, cult members are infected with parasites and from that point on are under the control of the Nexus Spider at the heart of the planet's cult.
As the Nexus Queen grows in psychic influence and political power, a new stage of physical development has been noted. The Nexus Queen becomes vast and bloated, it's brain swelling as it adds more and more creatures to it's psychic web. It's egg sac becomes prodigious in size until it is churning out new Nexus Spider eggs at a terrifying rate. Also, a third stage of Nexus Spider begins to appear - the warrior drone, entirely subservient to the will of the Nexus Queen and seemingly grown purely for combat, to protect the physical well being of the Queen itself, which is no longer capable of much movement, so vastly distorted has it's body become. These Nexus Drones are often bizarre hybrids of the Nexus Spider and human DNA to begin with, but as the cult influence progresses the Drones that are hatched will be refined and beome more alien in appearance and more deadly in terms of speed and strength. It is thought that the Drones actually develop from the parasites layed inside the first human victims of a cult, that then consume their victim from the inside out over time, altering their DNA until the Drone sheds the last remnants of it's human host's body and lurches forth to use it's own reproductive stinger to infect more victims with parasites, that when they develop have less human qualities about them. Drones never develop into true Nexus Spiders, however, and as soon as the Queen or (sub-Queen) controlling them in the local area is killed, the Drones become confused and aimless, lashing out at whatever is near them, losing all aspects of the intelligence they had whilst under the influence of the Queen.
A typical Vermissian Nexus Spider Cult on an Earth-class civilised colony world will have a front consisting of smartly dressed, affluent celebrities and business leaders, who travel by private jets and expensive limos, extolling the virtues of a religion that may or may not feature aliens, spiritual parasites, nuclear extinction and the giving of vast sums of money in exchange for cleansing of the soul and eternal afterlife. (No mention is made of loss of freewill or the possibility of being slowly digested by a huge alien spider.) Also, given that the initial victims are eventually consumed by their internal parasites and mutated into Drones, their disappearances from public life are often explained as unfortunate vehicle accidents, such as a plane crash or car crash, or that they mysteriously ascended into a purely spiritual existence whilst walking around on their yacht one day or suffered an accidental overdose of prescription drugs due to the errors of a family doctor.
Although the planet Vermissian has been declared Forbidden to human travellers, smugglers still foolishly try to collect Nexus Spiders for private collectors who believe that they can either use the Nexus Spider to control a criminal empire or simply want to show off to their rich moron friends how unbelievably rich and powerful they are. Invariably, whatever shielding or other precaution is used to prevent the Nexus Spider from using it's psychic ability to control it's surroundings is breached or otherwise fails and the whole cycle starts anew...

[Big Boris]

If anyone does a 'woo-hoo!' Tom Cruise type, I will be most amused, by the way!

[gi6ers]

If anyone does a 'woo-hoo!' Tom Cruise type, I will be most amused, by the way!

well then 'woo-hoo!'

You really need to read some Neal Asher sci-fi by the way

[beefcake]

I was actually jumping up and down on the couch shouting woo hoo as I read that.
Sounds quite cool.
So would the hybrid/drone creatures be quite spider-like then?
You've obviously thought about it a fair bit.

"suffered an accidental overdose of prescription drugs due to the errors of a family doctor."
Hmmm didn't that just happen to someone recently who has seemingly been shedding some sort of exoskeleton their entire life... too soon

[a_thousand_hats]

Mechanics

I think I'm going to try these - complete with grease monkey (I've had him as an idea for a while)... heh... (might start a WIP thread with some concept sketches a bit later)

[Mr Teufel]

Y'know, the type of sf characters I'd like to see, but are rarely done as sculpts, are character robots. Bounty hunter droids, droids that affect human mannerisms like cigars or jackets, things like that.

[Bahir]

Would it be ok to enter the contest if my sculpting skills are... shall we say, sub-par?  That way I might gain some experience and feed back on how to improve from those much more talented and I.

The last real sculpture I made was in the 2nd grade... I think it was supposed to be an ash tray but somehow it turned into a paper weight with holes for pencils.  I thought it was ugly but my mom liked it 

[grekwood]

will there be a wip thread? .....dunno if i should show wip though this year, never seem to finish when i do  

Would it be ok to enter the contest if my sculpting skills are... shall we say, sub-par?  That way I might gain some experience and feed back on how to improve from those much more talented and I.

 thats what i'm doing...entering for fun and to improve.....  i don't expect to get far, what with the pros out there.....

[Big Boris]

You should definitely have a go regardless of your actual skill level. Practise is the only way anyone gets better at anything!

[Klute]

Bah just watched Avatar..........MUSTRESISTGIANTBLUEPEOPLEMUSTRESISTGIANTBLUEPEOPLEMUSTRESISTGIANTBLUEPEOPLE.......

A mech on the other hand 

Bahir....go for it man, its great fun and good practice.

[Gothy Beans]

Well I'm having a go at something fuzzy for "creatures" off my own bat, does it need to be sci-fi related?
My idea's a little bit whimsy. I might start a second if it's not suitable. 

[Mabus]

Do you already have Vermissian Spiders? Or, in the works?

Really what am trying to get at, is do you mind if we do some Vermissian Spiders? I have a few ideas that involve a queen, drone, and others.

[beefcake]

 
Do you have some concept art people could get ideas from or do you want to see a range of ideas about them and see what comes of it?

[Ajsalium]

This is what I have been able to find:

http://www.heresyminiatures.com/vermissianlifecycle.htm

[Hive Trygon]

I'm going to try real hard to get an alien out to you. I need to be reminded on a daily basis so subscribed. You can figure mine as a donation from me when finished, that is if you want it.

[Penfold]

Is it me or do the infestor hybrids look just what you need for if you were trying to find some alternative genestealer hybrids and magnus for a genestealer army