Though I really love how my first fire giant to warboss conversion went, in that build
I was very specifically trying to avoid the armored box with limbs silhouette that most
ork warbosses have. After I was done though I started getting curious as to what it would’ve
looked like if I’d steered into that design language instead of away. To that end I bought
another fire giant and got to work. The first thing I’d need for a proper orky
warboss is the armor box for the toros. For that box I settled on using a deff dread body
as a base. The proportions of the deff dread don’t really match a real body though, so
I snipped off the top hatch of the deff dread and sawed off the cylinder chest.
I planned on tipping the deff dread body forward 90 degrees and have the shoulders as the front,
but the deff dread body isn’t really wide enough to cover the chest of the fire giant,
so I sawed the shoulders in half and placed plasticard between. Instead of going through
the headache of trying to carve and construct the armor to fit around the fire giant’s
arms I just sliced them off. It’d be much easier to simply glue them onto the outside
of the armored torso much in the way the actual mega nob kit does, and hide the fit with pauldrons.
I sliced off the belt from the fire giant and started on his boots. I didn’t bother
to try and make them look naturalistic since I knew they’d be covered. For his legs I
wanted to outright copy the power legs from the meganob kit, and decided to scratch build
them out of plasticard. For the toes of his feet I glue in place the toes from a deff
dread as I did with my first fire giant conversion. To make up for the belt I’d carved off I
glued in place this armor plate. The original meganob armor I was trying to copy actually
has an integrated crotch portion, but I knew that was going to be a pain to replicate,
so this seemed like a good alternate option. With the basics of his legs in place, I went
back to working on his torso armor. After a lot of iterations, I ended up with this
armored box. I ended up disliking how the shoulders looked as the front of the armor,
so I tipped them back up to the top and filled out the back of the deff dread armor with
a few armor plates to look like a breastplate. This makes it so the deff dread armor is essentially
backwards, but it still works pretty well. The next step was to fill in the chest beneath
the armor, which I did with greenstuff, and put in place his head. One of the greatest
frustrations with building big orks is the lack of good head options: normal ork heads
just look silly, but in this case I had a plan to try and trick the viewer into thinking
the head was larger than it is by using two jaw plates. The way the mind works I’ve
noticed through a lot of conversions is that it tends to think of armor as the actual body
parts of a model. Even with the double jaw plates though the
warboss still wasn’t quite looking right, the head too small. What I realized is that
a part of the model I’d thought about but then forgotten to implement is that I’d
wanted to create the impression of a head recessed into almost a cave of armor, half
glimpsed and red eyes shining balefully from within. I dug the head and first jaw plate
just a little further into the shoulders and chest, and that helped immensely with the
head issue. While I really loved the boxy look of the
squarish legs, I’m still not that good at scratch building and I realized it was going
to take a lot of work and frustration to add enough detail to hide their plasticard origins.
These deff dread arms are already bent at nearly the perfect angle, so I just stripped
off the plasticard and put them in their place. Chest and legs done, I moved to trying to
figure out my warboss’s arms. To avoid the goofy huge gauntlets from the original model
I wanted to shrink the diameter of the forearms of my warboss so I started shaving it down
to size. The plastic it uses is really easy to cut, and actually looks less like flesh
and more like crudely beaten metal, so I wasn’t too worried about how it would look where
it would peek out from under armor, especially if painted correctly. Which is a bit of a
mute point because I have no skill at painting and so never do it.
Unfortunately I didn’t have any tubes of the right circumference to make said armor
from. To compensate, I heated and bended this killa kan shoulder armor until the curve matched
the greenstuff armor plates I’d casted from deff dread arms. Note my skill at doing it
entirely off camera like a dumb ass. I love power claws, they’re just such a
quintessentially orky weapon, but a properly sized power claw for a boss of this size outside
of new ghaz basically exist. I ended up making my own out of three deff dread claws snipped
to fit each other. Wasteful? A little bit, but the end product was worth it.
I glued in place the upper arm and started dry fitting it in place to get a sense of
the angle. Doing this I realized I’d made his arms too long for his frame and he was
beginning to look like the yellow power loader from Aliens, more like a robot and less like
a huge ork. I shortened them to be more proportional, and fitted to the back of the upper arm pistons
I stripped from a battlewagon to copy how the original mega armor looks
I glued the arm in place and bulked out the back of my warboss’s armor with some bits.
I also cut up an imperial reactor part to look like an oversized reactor able to power
the one ton of armor he’s wearing. All respectable warbosses can dish out dakka
as well as mix it up at close range, so for my warbosses right hand I knew I’d need
something that could match the power claw in power and size. My first attempt was this
amalgamation of canons and shooters I bundled together. While it looks cool, the design
language felt more chaos-y than orky, and didn’t really read well.
After iterating on it for a while, I ended up with this gatling gun gauntlet. The guns
are from a space marine vehicle of some type, and the hand from a ghorgon. The hand is a
little small for his frame, but the canons and brace help hide it and make it look like
it fits. And with that my warboss was done. I’ve
always thought blocky ork armor looked kind of dumb, but it really works here, and I love
how he turned out. While not quite as tall as my first warboss conversion, I didn’t
bother to expend his prorption because it’s a pain, he’s still a solid sixteen feet
in height, vanilla orks and humans looking like toddlers next to him. I sincerely doubt
this will be the last giant ork I convert, so if you liked this video hit the subscribe
button, hit the like button, or check out my building bigger orks conversion playlist.
Thanks for watching.