#hivefleet leviathan

[silvernome]

Haven't painted Nids before, but wanted to paint one up for my friends birthday to match his Hivefleet Leviathan force. Really had a fun time painting this Neurolictor.

[roemersworkshop]

Welcome to the unboxing and review of Space Hulk Foam by Feldherr! This is a specialist foam set for the famous board game Space Hulk that is designed to house both the miniatures and the gaming pieces within the Space Hulk game box. In the post I’ll be showcasing what the content of the package is and give you my experience in walking through the installation of said set with my copy of Space Hulk. Hop in and see if this is the solution for safekeeping your boxed game for you.

As this is a review for a product designed for the board game Space Hulk, make sure to check my review on it as well, can be found here. I also had purchased a raster foam bag from Feldherr to house Space Hulk miniatures, which I reviewed here.

Let’s begin with the box contents.

There are two of the gaming piece “floors”…

… two separators…

… and two instruction booklets. Here you can see front and back.

This is the main piece, with a thin foam cover to top everything.

Very simple packaging of the goods. Aside from the special cut foam for the miniatures there are two sets of gaming piece slots that go to the very bottom of the Space Hulk box as well as two sets of instructions for setting up the containers, how to stack pieces and a map of the miniatures for the foam. Quite handy and I feel it’s pretty necessary given that there are a lot of pieces to tackle in the box. More on this soon.

I took out my Space Hulk box and met the mess that was pretty much untouched since unboxing.

Yikes! What a mess.

I’m not sure what people do when they want to carry their Space Hulk copy but this is certainly not a good way to move things around – add to this the need to protect the precious miniatures and you have an idea what I’m hinting at. So I got to work immediately with setting up the pieces.

At the top we have the instructions for setting up the containers and the foam.

The pieces give way unless you stick them in the box.

All set with the separators.

Stacking the pieces took a very long time trying to follow the instructions.

These pieces had no reference but I found space for them.

These two large pieces are not mentioned at all.

The instructions suggest folding the bottom and the separators first, set them up in the box, piling the game pieces and then inserting the foam on top which I followed to the letter. As there are plenty of corridors, gates, halls and starting pieces it’s a good idea to have a tally before starting the sorting. The container instructions are quite thorough with expected piece amounts presented next to each picture which helps with the sorting a little. It took me quite a while to make sure nothing was missing and comparing the pieces with the list provided on the instructions but I’m sure more experienced players would have a better go at setting things up. The dice and the hourglass go into the miniatures’ foam.

By the time I was close to finishing (which took about an hour), I decided to just eyeball the piece sizes and set them in the containers which would be the case for future setups. It seems like some markers and the game tracker as well as an entry piece is not mentioned in the manual. The game manuals like the mission book and the rulebook are also not mentioned so I improvised and set these pieces together in a way that doesn’t mess them up. I recommend lightly stacking them over the separators themselves.

All done! neat enough for me. The huge piece can be seen to the lower left. 

Afterwards it was just a matter of setting the foam on top of this and putting the miniatures in their slots. No photos as this would just be a repeat of what is already provided in the manuals. One interesting thing I realized is that there’s plenty of space left for each individual miniature which made me realize I stuck them too tightly in my previous raster foam. The slots are also quite deep so I expect that the company wanted to have a bit of leg room for the miniatures. Not sure if I like the idea of minis moving around in their slots but I’ve seen a similar approach GW’s foam case for smaller models so I guess they know what they’re doing.

Topping everything off with the cover foam everything was good to go.

The most important part for me in this set was the special cut foam for the miniatures and I believe the company fully delivers on this. Even without looking at the instructions the model slots are obvious (it does help to keep the instructions for the first few setups though). The separated containers work great and seem to have the exact height to house the game pieces save for the ones I couldn’t find mentioned anywhere. While all this is great my only gripe is that the box doesn’t close completely after installing the foam. I guess you can avoid damaging your minis by not putting anything else on top of the box but I would have preferred a solution that allows exact fits.

The box cover is permanently lifted a good inch or a half  after the setup. 

All in all I can recommend this product at the retail price of ~20,00 EUR – I deem it needed if you lack any type of protection during transportation. There are also alternatives on the market, primarily by Battlefoam with different prices and layouts so check the market for what suits you best.

Reception: ♦♦♦♦◊ Good

Here’s the link if you’d like to browse on Feldherr.

I hope you enjoyed this review! Be sure to like/leave a comment – I’d love to hear what you think of the product or its alternatives.

  Unboxing: Space Hulk Foam by Feldherr Welcome to the unboxing and review of Space Hulk Foam by Feldherr! This is a specialist foam set for the famous board game Space Hulk that is designed to house both the miniatures and the gaming pieces within the Space Hulk game box.

[roemersworkshop]

Small update for the beginning (more or less) of the week. The new year started slowly for the hobby department when it comes to the workshop. As you can see I’m still trying to shape out the Tyranid Trygon I’ve been working on for some time here, but every day I’m meeting new challenges. And then there’s the daunting mountain of models that stay primed and beg for attention. Hopefully I’ll be able to switch to new projects once the Trygon is finished. More WIP pictures and a little bonus after the jump.

I probably mentioned this before, but painting lighter colors on a large surface is quite a challenge. Having Hivefleet Leviathan as a theme means that aside from the red weapons and purple carapace I’ll have a very large surface of cream or white to apply as skin. So far I have held 2-3 short sessions of thin paint application on the skin areas with a broad brush and have accumulated a good 7-8 coats of paint just to get the base color right. While painting the lower body I made some mistakes in lining with the main shade color which I had to correct (still working on it, the damage looks extensive), and that took a lot of time. But the main problem was keeping all the painted areas clean enough to have the smooth surface!

With Screaming Skull being very transparent it’ll take a lot of layers to correct my mistakes.

This is the result after 3 coats over a darker base. The workplace gathers dust very quickly so it’s a challenge to keep the surface clean at the time of drying.

Another reason was the stippling I did when trying to reach the recesses, I guess I couldn’t avoid the pattern.

So, yeah. It’s becoming frustrating to work with the lighter color but it’s also a nice challenge to paint under such circumstances with the brush. It’s obvious I would have an easier time with an airbrush but I wanted to keep things consistent across the model. Thus, a large brush, thinner and lots of patience for each session. I’ll get there slowly.

I also wanted to distract myself with some other brush work so I laid down the base red for my Bloodletters and the claws on the Trygon. Seeing some other spot colors eases my mind.

Needless to say that needs another layer to be solid red.

What got me distracted from the hobby this weekend? General procrastination mostly but I also spent an entire day skiing in Uludag, which turned out to be a blast for me, my wife and my buddy from high school! Now that’s time well spent.

This week is hectic work-wise but towards the end of it I may have some time to spend on the minis and at least have things moving towards reaching my targets. I still have to think about the Bananalicious and Random Encounter events I planned out, so have my hands full. And that, I think is a good thing.

Challenge of Painting Small update for the beginning (more or less) of the week. The new year started slowly for the hobby department when it comes to the workshop.

[roemersworkshop]

Starting the week with a short but significant update today. I took the time to start painting the Trygon in the Hivefleet Leviathan color scheme and naturally the light colors gave me a little trouble. Check out the progress with a few WIP shots after the jump.

The Leviathan color scheme focuses on a cream-colored skin with purple highlighted carapace and red talons. With the colors I now have the bone, skin and talon parts are covered. Hopefully by the time I get the color range for purple and blue I’ll be able to tackle the chitin as well. I must say I had real coverage trouble with the lighter colors largely due to the fact that I’ve used a black primer. It was a valuable lesson however in seeing how different base colors allow lighter colors to settle on a model, especially the ones that have a lot of transparency.

Other than this I once again took out the Foldio to make a few test shots for the Trygon tutorial page I’m preparing. With the feeble camera phone I took a few photos from different distances and see now that the best way to represent colors as we see in daylight is with both LEDs on and using a white (almost cream actually) background. Here’s a few shots of the black matt primed Trygon to show the difference.

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A cropped image of the black background. I don’t think this is a good option for posting tutorials…

OK, the colors are way off. I even received feedback that it looks like I used a grey background. Moving on…

Even though the image has shadows it shows the painted colors better. I’ll stick to this until I switch to the DSLR for photos.

It seems that the black background on the far left will be a good choice to prepare display quality shots for the showcase model. Here’s to hoping that we won’t have to wait long for the finished model now!

WIP: Tyranid Trygon #1 Starting the week with a short but significant update today. I took the time to start painting the Trygon in the Hivefleet Leviathan color scheme and naturally the light colors gave me a little trouble.