All orks get bigger the tougher and older they get, which begs the question: what’s
the upper limit? In my eternal quest to find out, I bought this reaper miniature of a fire
giant. It’s one I’ve seen converted into a warboss a few times and I wanted to try
my hand at it, as it’s pretty much the biggest base model suitable for conversion. For comparison
it’s about the size of a deff dread, and probably comparable to the new Ghaz model.
I started by lengthening the giant’s proportions to give him a naturalistic look and also make
him taller. This entailed taking off the giant’s chest and cutting off the triangle on his
stomach, then filling in the waist socket with plasticard stacks. I did the same with
his arms and legs, though those took an incision first because they’re not socketed. This
doesn’t make him significantly taller, but it does help iron out his proportions a little.
The gaps made by elongating him I filled in with greenstuff. I didn’t worry too much
about making them look neat as I knew most of it would be covered by armor eventually.
One of the aspects I really don’t love about the original sculpt is how rounded all the
armor is. To start replacing it with more orky design language I sliced off his toes
and replaced them with those of a deff dread. My first weapon idea to transform the giant
to a giant warboss was to give him a huge undersung canon. One thing I wanted to avoid
was slicing off his hands because they help sell the idea that he’s a giant ork and
not just a robot with an ork head, and the underslung canon means he can keep his hand.
I absolutely loathe the rounded and chunky gauntlets the giant comes with, so I went
ahead and started slicing them off. To replace them I sawed off sections of this mechanicus
tube thing. Not only are they the correct size, but they also have all kinds of industrial
techy bits on them that add detail and can read as orky. The gauntlets were a little
longer than my ork’s forearms, so I elongated them with a barrel that comes with the kit.
For the inside of the forearms I used a casting I’d made of the half cylinders that come
with deff dread arms. I could’ve used plasticard instead, but the castings are better because
of the detail on them. On the right gauntlet I’d kept the attached
tank so I could combine it with the canon I’d wanted to use earlier and integrate
them into a single piece of weaponry. I sawed off the rounded ends of the tank and the barrel
of the canon to fit them together. They’re pretty much the perfect diameter.
With the canon gauntlet in place I went back to shaving off the giant’s armor. I was
careful to leave the muscled sections intact to again sell the idea that there’s a real
body beneath all the armor. One of the weird side effects of elongating
legs is that they can make a model’s stance kind of wonky. Here they make my warboss look
like his knees are turned inward which isn’t really a strong stance. The only way to fix
it was to slice off his thigh and reposition it at a more natural angle. I also added a
few armor plates where they seemed to fit well.
For the left hand I wanted to use a power claw, but didn’t have any of the proper
size. The largest I had was this dreadnought claw, but it was still too small and didn’t
look very orky. I ultimately resorted to building my own. What I eventually came up with was
this amalgamation of a pair of morkanaut toes, a doubled killa kan arm, and talon from a
meganob claw. It’s a little stubby, but you can still
imagine it as less of a slicing claw and more as a crushing one that latches onto space
marines and shears through their armor. Unfortunately there was no real way to preserve the warboss’s
original hand, but that was just a tradeoff that had to be made to fit the claw.
With his arms figured out I took them off temporarily to focus on his legs. Instead
of just using armor plating to cover them, I tried and create a halfway plausible power
brace. While my warboss is already a green rage monster of muscle and strength, pistons
and power armor would only help him look more imposing and monstrously strong.
While I could’ve left his neck and back uncovered, I opted to shave it down a bit
to fit this deff dread collar over them to help give the rest of his armor an anchor
to hang from. I had to cut the collar the giant originally come with to get it to fit,
which made me realize I could actually just shave the whole thing off. I’ve never really
like it, and cutting it off makes him look taller and more impressive I think.
With the collar shaved off I decided it was time to armor up my warboss. I didn’t grab
much footage of the process because it was essentially just a lot of mixing and matching
and jigsawing various deff dread and killa kan shoulder pads together. I ended up really
liking the squarish boxy killa kan ones for how brutal and powerful they are when fit
together and overlapped. I also added to the back of my warboss another
of the canons he has strapped to his right arm. I’ve always really liked the idea of
an over the shoulder cannon, and it helped give him some real height.
For his head I opted to go with this maxmini ork head. They’re tech freak line are the
only ones big enough to match a warboss of this size, and they’re great sculpts. This
one specifically has a jaw plate already attached to the head which is handy as I wasn’t going
to be adding one externally. For the pose I decided to have him looking down and to
the side, since basically every enemy he’ll ever face will be shorter than him.
To support the head and integrate him into the warboss I sculpted him a big meaty neck.
If I was a better sculptor I’d have added some tendons and made it look more like flesh,
but I still don’t think it turned out too bad.
It wasn’t really necessary, but I decided to add the arms from a killa can to the back
of my warboss’s pauldrons to give them the impression of being powered.
At this point I decided to do what I constantly do in projects for some reason, and explode
everything I’ve done so far by adding a whole new fundamental element. In this case
I realized that the proportions of my warboss was a little off: he was a little bottom heavy,
his legs longer and bulkier than his torso. The only way to rectify this was to strip
off his armor and cut him in half. To widen him I used the technique I usually use to
heighten miniatures which is to slot in pasticard. I then filled in the gaps with greenstuff.
I wasn’t too worried about making it look good as it would be mostly be covered by armor.
I also wanted to lengthen his upper arms, but really the best way to do it was simply
to make him broader shouldered. I wanted to keep the muscle details though, so I sliced
them off at the shoulder and extended the gap which was going to be entirely covered
by his pauldrons anyway. Now with his chest and shoulders expanded,
I decided to try and forge my warboss a breastplate out of this ork vehicle fender. Obviously
it was too wide, so I sawed off either edge, and what I was left with fit his chest really
well. To fill in the gap, I greenstuffed him some man boobs and then sculpted him a new
neck. Later I’d go in and add the parts of the fender I’d cut away to the breastplate.
Before that though I got another fire giant for a different conversion, and it makes for
an effective before and after. I was surprised by just how little of the original sculpt
is left visible: his left hand, his thigh, the chainmail tabard, upper arms, and a little
of the back. You can see how substantially he’s grown too, from the original fire giant.
To get a sense of just how large he is, here he is next to an ork boy. He absolutely towers
over him, and assuming the average ork is six feet tall, big boi warboss is roughly
18 feet in height, a true mountain of muscle and metal and raw xeno rage, dwarfing even
deff dreads. If you liked this video hit the like button,
subscribe if you want to see more, or check out the other conversions I’ve made. Thanks
for watching.