I used to hear how bad resin was for board game miniatures. Every time somebody mentioned Forge World, they ended their sentence sadly with "too bad it's resin." I had no idea why, just that they were bad. Recently, I wanted some historical miniatures that I just couldn't find from any miniature vendor. I ordered them from a local vendor, who essentially had a 3d printer and a license to print and sell some STL files from a variety of sculptors. It didn't occur to me that I was buying resin miniatures, and I'm not sure I would have cared had it occurred to me because, as far as I knew, plastic was plastic. I couldn't have been more wrong. Here are 3 reasons I'm avoding resin miniatures from now on.
Forget resin for a moment. Here's what "normal" plastic is like.
I didn't really realise it until I started building Games Workshop Citadel miniatures, but I enjoy the process of building [some] things.
Sure, I have a level of tolerance, but Lego and Citadel miniatures are about the right amount of work for me.
It takes time and effort, but not too much of either, and in the end you have a cool toy you get to play with.
Especially with Citadel miniatures, that might seem superficial. Unlike with Lego sets, when you build a wargame miniature you're assembling pieces of a model that only fits together one way, right? Well, as it turns out, not really.
Citadel miniatures frequently have build variants, meaning you have different options for how you build them. In the [excellent] Genestealer Combat Patrol box, you can build a Goliath Rockgrinder or a Goliath Truck. They use the same vehicle chassis, but they're otherwise drastically different models. In the same box, you can build Acolyte Hybrids or Hybrid Metamorphs. Even the Magos has a different option for what she's holding in her left hand.
The same goes for the Adeptus Mechanicus Ironstrider models, and the Knight Armigers.
Sure, very often the basic profile of a wargame miniature doesn't change all that much no matter what choices you make, but there are meaningful choices. It's no Lego set. Except when it is.
It turns out that after you've bought and built a few model kits, you have a bunch of bits and pieces left over. Those bits and pieces quickly become raw material for model hacking ("conversion"). I started doing this early on, because it seemed like the obvious thing to do. When you have 2 sets of 7 traitor guardsmen to build, you don't really want every two of them to look exactly the same. Sure, a different paint scheme for each helps, but why not take a spare spike from this mutant arm that never got used and stick it onto this guardsman's armour? How about an extra tentacle poking out from the head of this genestealer cultist? It's can be surprising how much you can change a model by [literally] cutting and pasting parts of different models together.
The reason I'm talking about what you can do with "normal" plastic (I have no idea what kind of plastic it is, but whatever the plain gray plastic that Citadel and other miniature comanies, like Wargames Atlantic, use) is because you can do basically none of it with resin. I mean, you can...technically...cut resin. It's not magically indestructible. But it doesn't cut like plastic, and it definitely doesn't paste like plastic. And anyway, resin is used in 3d printing, so it just makes sense for a miniature to be printed exactly the way it's supposed to look in the end. There's no assembly required because 3d printing doesn't have the same physical limitations as molding.
If you're a 3d sculptor, I guess you can hack a miniature's STL file a lot more than anybody can do by hacking plastic, but then again if you're a sculptor using physical media then you can just sculpt whatever you want. For the hobbyist wargamer, though, plastic is a nice middle ground between taking a think somebody else has designed to look a specific way and creating something completely original.
Maybe it depends on the quality of the resin, or the practicality of the sculpt, but in my limited experience with my first (and hopefully my last) set of resin models, I've found resin to be a lot more brittle than plastic. Out of the box, spears handles and sword blades and arrow tips had popped off several miniatures. Plumes had popped off of head gear. (Cruelly, some supports that the vendor forgot to remove managed to survive the shipping process.)
It hasn't just been in shipping that the miniatures fall apart, either. I've had sword blades snap off miniatures after getting snagged in my sweater sleeve cuff. It's obviously not impossible to snap the spikey bits off of plastic models. I had an antenna pop off an Ironstrider Ballistarii once.
Once.
I get it. Plastic breaks, espcially when it's thin. But resin seems to break a lot.
I don't like how hard it is to customize my resin miniatures, I don't like how easily they tend to break, but to make all that even worse is the fact that the glue you use for your plastic kits doesn't work on resin. You can try Citadel plastic glue or Tamiyo Thin Cement, but they won't create a bond with resion. You have to use super glue or, apparently, some kind of epoxy (which I haven't bothered looking into, but the Internet says it works).
The problem with super glue is that, despite its name, it's apparently also brittle. I used to think super glue was basically permanent, but apparently in the world of plastics it's basically one step above cellotape ("Scotch Tape" in American). I've glued bits of resin using super glue and it's a coin toss as to whether it holds on the first try. Even after you get it to stick, it's still just a thing you stuck together. It's only a matter of time before it snaps back off.
I didn't mean to hate resin. I have no nostalgic fondness for the ubiquitous gray plastic. Resin put in the hard work to earn my disappointment and total disapproval. I fully intend to avoid resin in the future, except maybe for some cheap miniatures for a board game.
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