On Friday I posted a teaser pic of a Warhound Titan. This little beastie is the Venatrix Nocturna, and she's the titan my friend Dave Pauwels will be bringing along the to Adeptus Titanicus game at AdeptiCon next year. Dave is an absolutely brilliant painter (as his many awards will attest), but he'll also admit he's quite slow. Therefore, to avoid missing out on the game, he asked me to assemble her for him.
About two years ago, I assembled and painted a Reaver Titan, so some of the pain of that ordeal had worn off. I jumped into this task in a fairly positive way; soaking and washing all the many, many parts.
I read through the FW instructions several times and, after cleaning up all the parts (trimming off almost three pounds worth of resin pour channels and "tabs"), I started building her from the feet up.
In these photos you can see a deconstruction, as Dave will be painting the interior. I had to make sure there was plenty of accessibility to all the fiddly details inside. Dave also wanted some flexibility with his weaponry (who wouldn't?), so I've added very strong rare-earth magnets to each upper arm, allowing for a fairly straightforward swap of weapons as required.
Anyway, I'll let most of the photos do the talking : )
Above you can see the washers embedded in the guns. These are more than enough for the magnets to grab onto : )
For easy of packing/transport once Dave has painted the model and attached the front of the torso to the rear of the torso, I added another magnet to the rear torso and a washer to the column above the waist.
It seems the Warhound comes with four shin plates, allowing you to make it quite Imperial (with two big eagle pads) or less so (as I expect Dave will be doing with this traitorous beast!
There's even a sheet of etched metal for the grille looking down into the reactor section.
And finally, instead of gluing in the resin cabling to the weapons (and destroying that flexibility), I replaced them with small lengths of network cable. These are glued into the body, and can slip into the sockets at the back of the weapons Dave sees fit to load her out with.
I hope you've enjoyed these photos. I'll have some more of my new Reaver build and paint coming in the New Year. I'm working on a Loyalist Titan for the very same game!
If you have any questions about the build, just ask.
Cheers (and Merry Christmas!)
Dave