Prelude

Spud: So did you hear the leaks for the Hordes colossals?

Dan: Yeah, they sound okay. The Skorne one was a bit disappointing, though. It’s weird that they also just have, like… bigger titans.

Spud: What would you do instead?

Dan: I dunno, but there are tons of options. Skorne capture all kinds of different creatures, so why couldn’t they find some totally different type of horrible monster out in the desert? Like a giant Starship Troopers beetle that shoots acid goo, or another type of their dinosaur beasts? It could literally be anything. So it seems weird that in the faction known for huge beast diversity, they’d opt for “same, but bigger.”

Spud: Fair enough.

Dan: Or they could do something totally bonkers and make it, like, a giant Ancestral Guardian statue. Just a huge ****ing statue walking across the battlefield stomping on people.

Spud: Hmm… that would actually be awesome, but I don’t feel like that would be a warbeast.

Dan: Why not? Isn’t the Circle one just a huge Wold? And they made that a warbeast.

Spud: Sure, but Wolds are beasts to begin with, even the smaller ones. Ancestral Guardians are solos, so whatever’s going on with them, they don’t seem to “interact” with a Warlock in the same way a Wold does. So while I could totally see a badass giant Ancestral Guardian, my guess is that it would be a battle engine, not a colossal.

Dan: I guess that makes sense.

I have related this story back to Dan after the fact, and he does not remember the conversation. It did happen, though. So whether he remembers or not, all of this is squarely his fault.

A History of Magnanimity

Every year at Christmas time, I spend a few months making presents for people I know. I pick different people every year, making something neat that I think they’d have fun with. After five years the list of these projects is starting to get pretty expansive:

• Presentsplosion 2010: Themed army terrain for Gday, Paul, and Dice Monkey (scroll to Project 3)
• Presentsplosion 2011: The Drop Bears for Gday
• Presentsplosion 2012, group 1: Wonder Troll for Boots, Herb and Lindy for our gift exchange, Graffiti Renegade for Valrus
• Presentsplosion 2012, group 2: Gestalt Mammoth for Tom, Der Amtmann for Pablo
• Presentsplosion 2013: Ghostly Deneghra for Nick, High Naughtymonger Santa Reznik and the Kringlecrackle Workshop for our gift exchange.
• Presentsplosion 2014: Chibi Yaum for Yaum, one I haven’t published yet, and one I haven’t made yet. (What? I’m busy!)

As you’ve hopefully noticed at some point in the last nine months, it is now 2015. However, the subject of today’s article is not a project slated for Presentsplosion 2015 (which would obviously spoil the surprise!), nor is it an overrun project from ten months ago’s Presentsplosion 2014. No, to find the original promissory date for today’s debacle, you have to go back a bit further.

2013, then? Well, that’s close. But back up just a biiiiiiit more.

Do you see “2012, Group 2” up there? Tom and Pablo (or Plablo, as he liked to be called before… the unpleasantness) were part of my Tuesday night card and board game group. The previous years’ recipients, and indeed the vast majority of my productivity for half a decade, had all focused on my local Warmachine scene. However, when it came time to allocate my benefaction for 2012, I looked back on the year that had just passed and decided that the group that had brought me the most happiness was not the community for what I considered my “primary” game, but the simple huddle of nerds who clustered on Tuesdays to partake in whatever silliness won the vote for the night. And so, I decided to sculpt something fun for each member of that group.

By December, I knew I wouldn’t be finished (or in fact, started) in time for when “The Man” says Christmas ought to fall, so I instead gave each of the members of the Tuesday group a small wrapped box. Attached to each box was a note that read:

DO NOT OPEN UNTIL CHRISTMAS-IN-MARCH

The boxes were empty, save for a note admonishing the recipient for peeking. Come March 25th, I still wasn’t finished working on everybody’s models, but brought in what had been completed to date. Plablo’s stern administrator was fully sculpted and painted, but lacked its signature base; and Tom’s totally legal Mammoth was about midway through being sculpted, but had plenty of detail to give him an idea of where it was going.

After Christmas-In-March, I kept plugging away on the models, and had Tom and Plablo’s models in their hands by July 2013.

Which would be the end of this story, if the Tuesday board game group had three members.

Unfortunately, however, it had four.

Dan’s gift was more problematic than the others. I knew from the outset that his was the larger of the three projects, and figured that while the other two would likely take 2-3 weeks each, I could probably finish Dan’s project in a month.

Maybe two.

Three on the outside, surely.

So how did my estimates turn out? Well, Der Amtmann was pretty much spot-on, so that’s one point on my tally. The Mammoth was quite a bit off, as the detailing and painting took me just short of two months to complete.

And Dan’s present?

December 5th, 2014. That’s 23 1/2 months from inception to completion of the sculpt. When you add in the paint, Dan ultimately didn’t have the model in his hands until the latter half of July 2015. Over two and a half years from the tiny little box-of-nothing to the finished product. Dan, for his part, was never troubled by the wait; I’d offer him updates periodically, seeking to allay doubts he did not actually have, but he repeatedly told me that “Dude, it’s fine. It’ll be done when it’s ready to be done.” So for Dan, that two-and-a-half-year wait wasn’t really that big of a deal; he knew in the back of his mind that things were probably progressing, and other than that he seemed to give it little thought.

For me, though?

For me, those two-and-a-half years marked by far the most excruciating and miserable period of my sculpting career. I didn’t work on this project continuously, of course; that should be obvious, given that I did not disappear from the Internet from January 2013 onward. I would work on Dan’s gift in bursts, always starting with an idea of how far I wanted to get in the month or two I had available before I knew another project was scheduled; and each time, I would end that burst having accomplished nowhere near what I had planned.

The Scale of Human Misery

Before I get into the details of what today’s project actually is, I’d like to take you on a bit of a tangent so that you can understand why this article is going to contain so much whining. For you see, this project was enormous, and its scale made everything vastly more complicated. I’m reminded here of one of the most useful mathematical principles I’ve ever learned: the Square-Cube Law.

The video I linked above is excellent, but this screenshot explains the Square-Cube law pretty well. Essentially, the law states that as you increase the size of an object while maintaining its proportions, the object’s volume (which is the height cubed) will increase at a much faster rate than its area (which is its height squared). So in the case of this image, doubling the height of the block multiplies its area by four, but multiplies its weight by eight. Generally speaking, the Square-Cube law is used to explain why scaling objects up doesn’t tend to work very well after a certain point; this is because the strength of the object is determined by its area (which grows slowly), while the load the object exerts on itself is determined by its volume (which grows quickly).

This is why a giant ant wouldn’t work: scaled up to 5ft long, an ant’s legs would be only a few inches across, while its fat globular body would be several feet across. Without a bony skeleton to hold all of that up, its legs would just give out immediately (and its carapace would likely burst when it hit the ground– so bring paper towels).

If you want a more awesome example, the Square-Cube Law is why the person-shaped giant robots in Pacific Rim don’t actually work– Gipsy Danger is 45 times the height of an average person. That means that while a 260-foot tall Jaeger is over two thousand times stronger than it would be at the five-and-a-half feet of a normal human, that frame has to support ninety thousand times as much weight. At a certain point, you run into the upper limit of how much weight the Jaeger’s materials can support, and the giant robot just collapses under its own weight*.

*Or it would, if it wasn’t made of Del Torium, which is a material** theorized by the aforementioned Tom that has whatever properties Guillermo Del Toro needs it to have in order for giant robots to fight giant monsters without pedantic assholes like Spud ruining it for everyone.

**We decided that Del Torium is what the Kaiju’s bones are made from, which is why we don’t have any of it today in the real world. Gotta wait for the giant monsters to show up before we can start building our own giant smashy robots.

So, why am I prattling on about all of this? Because the Square-Cube law also goes some way toward explaining why this project was so goddamned miserable to work on. Most of the models I sculpt are somewhere around 30mm tall. Dan’s gift, on the other hand, was built on a skeleton a bit over 150mm tall. While this makes it “only” 6 times the height of the models I’m used to, the resulting surface area is over thirty-six times that of a standard mini.

This vast scale difference has a huge effect on the sculpting process. Smoothing a 1 square centimeter surface can be done very quickly because most people won’t notice a slightly imperfect finish; however, that same slight imperfection in a surface six times the size (and thus, thirty-six times the area) will be much more noticeable to the naked eye.

So in the end, not only did I have a much vaster tract of space to fill with sculpted detail, but the features within that space needed to be detailed to a much higher degree of precision, since the same error scaled up becomes vastly more noticeable.

I am explaining this at the outset so that you can read the following walkthrough in the correct context: that of a well-meaning human being slowly driven to madness and despair. I hated every minute of this process. Progress was glacial, and frustration was constant. The project was nearly halted entirely as a result of unforeseen tragedy. By the end of the process, I was unable to shake the mental image whenever I sat down to work of throwing the model out my window into the tantalizingly busy traffic outside.

When I was finished, I burned my orange Fimo in the parking lot behind my building and will never buy that colour ever again because of the dark places my mind goes when I look at it.

Even now, I’ve written 1800 words of preamble to this blog post because I’m doing everything I can not to look at the images that I know lie just below. I’ll probably tap out a few hundred more before I give up and start captioning pictures.

But throughout these years of horror, I persevered. Partly because I knew the end result would be amazing, and partly because Dan is amazing and making him happy warranted a bit of suffering.

So, alright then.

No more procrastination.

Let’s do this.

*deep breath*