My take on conversions can be summed up easily:

Space Zoat Titan

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Back from oblivion (again)?

Personally I think that wonderful Zeppelin does look like something from the W40k universe, particularly something from the Krieg style - there's the cover from that one Fanatic magazine that had zeppelins on I recall. To my mind GW have one aesthetic (which can vary from army to army or over time), FW another and the black library novels by some of the better authors have another. Even if it doesn't look like precisely like something GW would have made a model of it still feels like something from the W40k universe to me and no further from the current standard GW aesthetic than that is from the FW aesthetic.

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Quote: (Warhead @ 08 Mar. 2009, 10:33 )

*...Blinded by awesomeness, Warhead can't see the keyboard to type his overwhelmed feelings of wonder... He hits emergency "too cool" button!...*

+++EMERGENCY! THIS IS TOO COOL! DROPPING RAY SHIELDED BLAST DOORS+++

Gathered Onyx - I appreciate it's the judging of the extra conversion competition that's being discussed and that nothing would be excluded from entry, it was just your suggestion that the criteria of a 'good conversion' should be favoured towards conversions which are gamer friendly as opposed to display pieces which I take issue with and feel quite strongly should not be the case.

Golden Demon is solely for display pieces.
Epic-Comp isn't and should not try to be. The majority of entries are game pieces.

While I like the idea of having the "playability" of a model factor into EpiComp, it would just add another layer of subjectivity that would complicate the judging process.  

Like GlynG mentioned, several Epic FW models verge on being unplayable and there is a pretty big grey area.  Not everyone is cursed with the same degree of ham-fistedness.

If you were to add the playability of a model as a determinator, you would need to know a whole lot more about the models construction in order to bring some objectivity to the process.  Whether someone used resin or p-card or Magic Sculpt or Kneadatite or brass or steel or pins or Liquid Nails all will have a significant impact on the fragility of a model.  Simply put, there are some models that might look fragile, but you could football them across the room without fear of losing a bit.

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WAAARGH!!
The Lost & the Dipped

Some very interesting points indeed

To clarify: While I agree there is a difference between conversion and scratch building you definitely tend to enter a grey zone with some of the more extensive conversions, so for the sake of simplicity let's just use the term in it's broadest sense, signifying anything that is not a straight out of the box miniature.

blackhorizon's "rule of cool" definitely has merit. In reality this is definitely how it tends to work out. To quote the GothiComp as an example, the judges each picked a handful of miniatures they "liked" based on gut feelings. We then compared out choices and it was of course hardly surprising that we'd chosen some of the same entries. The difficulty arose when we then had to argue what we liked about the 2 or 3 models in question. It is easy enough to pass an aesthetic judgement for yourself. Here gut feeling is a major factor. But when you justify your choice to the other judges you tend to try and find some semi-objective criteria that can communicate this gut feeling to others.

The point I' trying to make is that of course the "objective criteria" should not be seen as a series of checkboxes where you grade the entry (and entrants most definitely shouldn't speculate in these terms when they make the miniature). They are merely meant as a tool to structure the discussion and make it more nuanced than just "I like it" or "I don't like it". Judging thse things certainly isn't an exact science and for the same reason I think it would be valuable to get a lot of different perspectives on the matter.

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Sofa General

Nobody expects the Inquisition!!!
http://theepiclounge.wordpress.com/

Whatever army I'm playing, in whatever game system, I just have to convert the vast majority of the models. I don't see the appeal of using models straight from the blister.

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http://www.troublemakergames.co.uk/
Epic: Hive Development Thread