If you follow any of the rumour mills out there you'll have seen recent talk that GW is abandoning finecast in place of plastic and that forgeworld will be coming more "in-house". I'll probably be the only one to say this, but I'll be sad to see finecast go.
It's got problems, major problems, but if you step back from the rage for a moment, you'll see those problems have a lot more to do with the casting process than they do with finecast. Bubbles, flash, misaligned casts are all symptoms of casting resin and certainly not exclusive to GW or finecast. In fact I've seen the same people bitch and moan about all these things with finecast, but just put them down to par for the course for forgeworld because it is made from resin. Double standards much?
A lot of the problem comes from GW marketing finecast as the best thing since sliced bread. A bold claim they couldn't back up with product, but get a problem with either their or forgeworld's respective products and they will replace them without question (at least in my experience, others may differ). If only they'd taken some advice from forgeworld on casting techniques and problem solving, or had a decent quality control system (less of a problem with plastic, but I've still come across problems), I don't think they'd have had half the bad press they did.
I can only hope that we may see forgeworld start to use finecast so we can get their delicious detail without risking our health every time we try and clean and trim models. I also hope forgeworld getting closer to GW won't see their excellent customer engagement start to suffer, and that we might see a softening of GW's policies as they learn from those that are eternally loved.
Anyway, that's my 2 penny'th.
Andy
Finecast had great conversion opportunities given it's light weight. However, My 40k 25th anniversary marines's banner went limp in the display case after one year. It literally is sagging under it's own weight. I won't be sorry to see it go, but I won't be dancing on it's grave either ;)
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