Why is tabletop plastic all gray? Warhammer, Battletech, Frostgrave, I don't think I've gotten miniatures that weren't some shade of it. Not that I'm complaining just wondering why we don't see white or black or any other color too often.
>>97296621Gray is a neutral color that's easy to paint over, wasting as little material as possible. This is basic information that carpentry painters are taught too; if you need to paint over a color, always start with gray as the base. White will make it appear brighter, and you'll waste more paint trying to compensate, as black will make it appear darker.When the plastic itself is gray, it's a rare pro-consumer move that helps the buyer save a little more paint.
>>97296621Its very common at 1/72 scale.
>>97296621Can't see details if white or black
>>97296621There's little point colouring the plastic because you're going to paint them. Aren't you?
>>97296621The formulation of styrene plastic best suited to this type of injection molding is gray. You can add colorants and dyes if you want, but any additive affects the properties of the finished piece.So, for example, the red dye Games Workshop used for the characters in Blackstone Fortress made the figures more brittle and prone to breaking, which is why every single Amallyn Shadowguide's rifle broke in the exact same way, often while it was still on the sprue. Similarly, blue dyed pieces like the Space Hulk Genestealers tend to flake when abraded, like while cleaning mold lines.Since most of these models are intended to be painted, anyway, the gray plastic is the best compromise for quality and durability - so everyone just casts their injection molded plastic models in gray.
>>97297213This was interesting, thank you anon.
>>97296658You're not supposed to paint over the grey plastic. You're supposed to hit it with an opaque layer of primer, allow that to bond, and then paint onto the primer.
>>97297213This post seems like a mix of facts and headcanon.Almost all raw material styrene (ie. Plastruct, Evergreen) is white, not grey.Anecdotally, having worked with at least a dozen colours of GW plastic, sometimes the died sprues are actually softer and more buttery than the standard grey. Quite similar to the consistency of their old light grey recipe, if you're an oldfag and bought models in the 2000's. My Amallyn's rifle is also intact. There are fragile bits in new grey plastic GW kits that are equally prone to damage (the latest Horus Heresy boxset had some kind of issue with this, although I forget which exact unit it was).
>>97297452I do remember that GW used to use a lighter shade of grey plastic that was much harder than what they use now.
>>97297477I know the Rogue Trader Beaky plastic is very light, but if you're talking post-2000s I assume you mean a different lighter grey
>>97297452The only headcanon here is your reading comprehension. Unadulterated styrene is slightly off-white and is suitable for molding into simple shapes. The formulation used for injection molding plastic miniatures is gray, because it is not unadulterated styrene - it has a variety of chemical additives that enhance flow at high temperature for injection molding so that it will completely fill the complex shapes of the injection plates.As it happens, this is why GW stopped using their lighter gray formulation - because that early 90s styrene mix was not suitable for the increasing amount of detail and complexity present on their modern sprues.>But what about Evergreen and Plastruct! They're white, not gray!You mean the consumer product sold to scale modelers and architects in flat sheets and simple extruded shapes that don't have to hold any detail more complex than a vacuum-formed brick face or shingle pattern? Different purposes, different plastics. You might as well argue that because German Shepherds are brown, all dogs are naturally brown.
>>97297879What about Bandai?
>>97298400Less detail than GW stuff. It’s pretty common to complain about the lack of sharpness in certain bandai models (looking at you, armored core) despite the fact that they are a lot bigger than the average GW model.
>>97297879Based knower.
>>97296621Painting is pretty much a meme.If you can actually use speed paints over a smooth drybrush or even just basecoat, wash, highlight and you have tidy bases with some flocking or sand on them, and you can scale this up to two wargaming armies and do it with a degree of technique, ie thin your paints and apply them neatly you won. You are kicking arseI respct display painters but if you can army paint without just slopping the paint on, painting is essentially solved.
>>97299880What the fuck are you even trying to say?
>>97297879Based knower is based.
>>97297213>You can add colorants and dyes if you wantPS is colourless. Making grey PS is already having added two colourants.I'm sure you guys can deal with me calling it PS and saving styrene for the monomer as IUPAC intended.>>97297879>Unadulterated styrene is slightly off-whitenta who talked about headcanon, don't want to get into a silly namecalling spatUnadulterated PS is, as I just wrote, colourless. Like styrene it can degrade to transparent or translucent yellow but that's outside the scenario here.>The formulation used for injection molding plastic miniatures is grayThat really depends upon the manufacturer and the desired product's properties. Flow additives tend to be colourless, maybe slightly transparent yellow, or white. Fillers are also usually white powders, and some can help as flow additives. The black colour is normally carbon black isn't it, which is why it ends up grey. As well as a pleasing colour it improves a few useful properties like strength and durability and, not really the most important property for a toy that's used inside and painted, UV resistance. But there are other things than can be added so the grey is at least partly an aesthetic choice when very similar physical properties could be obtained by other means.
are you black
>>97299909You don't know?
>>97299880Anon, he's not talking about how people have only greytide armies on the tabletop. He's just wondering why plastic models for wargames appear to be uniformly grey on-the-sprue before any painting even happens.
>>97299989NTAbut it sounds to me like you could care less about what had to say and you were impatient in waiting for the conversation to naturally steer into a general painting direction. So you tried and failed to derail it.
>>97296621Because GW is practical monopolyst who bend market to it's will and now charges paypigs with retarded prices for inferior product.
>>97297175The gray is colour, the plain PST is white.
>>97296980This is the actual, true answer for miniatures casting
>>97296621Because people tend to prime their models White or Black or Grey. White + Black = Grey. Grey is therefore the most neutral to all three.
>>97299949My guy, I appreciate that you pursued a degree in organic chemistry but I'm not trying to get into the underlying materials science. It's a casual answer for a casual question, we don't need to get into the specific composition of toy soldier plastic - it's enough to say that it is a blend of polystyrene and additives to achieve the combination of detail and durability that makes it suitable for toy soldiers.Most people don't care about the science, they care about their personal experience. They care that the plastic is soft (but not too soft) and gray, and they remember that it used to be harder and lighter in color. The explanation is that it was a different blend with different characteristics, and these are the reasons that it changed. That may be a simplification but there are no bonus points for being technically correct and it comes across as pretentious to strut in here with your, "you guys can deal with me calling it PS," Chem 201 jargon.
>>97299880Thx chat, I cum on cat she hiss at penis
