The Old World Almanack has diligently uncovered the concepts behind Grand Cathay in great detail over these past two weeks, but with the miniatures available to pre-order in just a few days, our attention turns to these wonders of plastic. We arranged a meeting with Warhammer Design Studio sculptors Alastair, Giorgio, Nicholas, and Ray, alongside Dan from the ’Eavy Metal team, to talk about bringing all of that concept art to life.
General principles
Alastair: The most unique aspect of working on Grand Cathay is their prior visibility. People had a good idea of what to expect because by the time we got started, a full army existed in Total War: Warhammer III, and Creative Assembly had shared a wealth of the concept art themselves.
We wanted to meet those expectations in miniature, and surpass them by giving everything that Warhammer spin. The way that computer game assets look and move has to be adapted to miniatures. There were lots of trinkets in the concept art, lots of fine detail everywhere, and when creating miniatures, you have to focus those elements down into certain motifs that you can repeat across the range.
One area of refinement was the scale armour that you see throughout Grand Cathay. Nailing that was important. Traditional lamellar armour is made up of many panels neatly tied together with string – it’s a gorgeous, complicated pattern that looks fantastic in a video game, but would make miniatures visually noisy and hard to paint across big regiments. Nicholas and Giorgio had a similar challenge with the more fantastical mountain armour (which has been touched on before). The goal was to create something graphic and bold, as well as nice to paint, that works for miniatures.
The layered nature means that the miniatures are still quite rich and busy, just not overwhelmingly so. That’s part of the historical Chinese aesthetic being brought to Grand Cathay, involving luxurious texture and craftsmanship – but we walked a fine line between fidelity and simplicity for painting.
Nicholas: We were also drawing on the historical here, as the ornamentation on armour and weapons – especially some of the lords’ and heroes’ swords – is drawn from the finishing touches applied to real-world weapons of the periods we were researching.
Alastair: Some of the more higher-ranking miniatures initially had this scrollwork style swirl on some of the armour, which you can see on the Gate Master’s horse. That was one of those elements we tried to propagate elsewhere. Grand Cathay is not as gritty as the rest of the Old World, so there are a lot of finishing touches to armour and belts that display their place in the world.
Giorgio: We arrived at these finishing touches through a process of filtering things that appeared in the concept art, and using our knowledge of what works at a tabletop miniatures scale to create a visual language. There are places where you have to lose things – there were a lot of Dragon belt buckles in the concepts, but at the scale we’re working at… there’s no chance that could work.
Alastair: I tried one affectionately dubbed “the sausage Dragon”, and swiftly moved on!
Jade Warriors
Alastair: The Jade Warriors were a great place to start as they helped us establish a place in the hierarchy to work from – a solid middle point. The range as it stands is quite elite, and these soldiers aren’t downtrodden peasants – they’re capable, martial, well-dressed, disciplined, and trained. As we work up the hierarchy to the Jade Lancers and the Gate Masters, we festoon them with extras to make them feel more unique. Ideally the range would include the lowest of the lows and the highest of the highs in the military structure, but every miniature range has to start somewhere, and what is present in Total War helps sketch in those opposing ends.
Jade Warriors present a different angle than we’re used to for humans in the Old World, where we quite often see the disheveled and poorly equipped militia of the Empire as the basic troop. These are elites, who reinforce the status of Grand Cathay, and its position in the world.
Nicolas: It’s helpful to think of them as approximately at the level of Bretonnian Knights Errant.
Alastair: For the miniatures, scale armour layered on top of other cloth creates that richness we wanted as part of their visual identity. It also makes them look bulky and stalwart, which is ideal whether you’re kitting them out with spears or swords and shields – the latter being octagonal, a shape which appears throughout the range. There’s also enough heads to build all twenty miniatures as either male or female, or to mix up your regiment.
It was important as part of the Grand Cathay range that we presented their holistic and harmonious approach to war through the miniatures – they do not have the same approach to military as the Empire or the Bretonnians, and that layered armour ultimately comes across as very unisex.
Jade Lancers
Most of the work for the Jade Lancers was making them feel appropriately more elite. The armour is a touch heavier, the shields are slightly bigger with more metallic elements, and the weapons are fancier. It made sense to continue the raised collar of the armour into the cavalry, who benefit from being locked in for the charge.
Dan: As will be common throughout a lot of the answers from the designers, the job for ’Eavy Metal was made interesting by the vast library of concept art and the in-game work done by Creative Assembly. There was less generation of assets and coming up with new colour schemes than we usually do, and more working within a strong set of guidelines and focusing on render quality because we had a strong sense of how things were meant to look. There were places where we made different decisions to the established work, or deviated slightly, but all in all we were working towards a specific vision.
With Miao Ying as the primary character for this release, we were tied by the lore into the Northern Provinces and Nan-Gau for this release. This meant that red appears a lot as the primary colour on uniforms. The way that Jade Warrior armour works in the setting means this red uniform is covered with armour featuring sashes, plumes, and tassets in that jade-green colour, so you only see it on the shields and on the trim that hangs below the leather and scale armour. The flipside is that jade is only really the primary colour on these infantry and cavalry, and nowhere else.
Alastair: Hobbyists of course are free to paint the armour whatever colour they want, there’s no-one policing their paint jobs and we look forward to seeing what they do, but for the official miniatures there are rules to follow.
Cathayan Grand Cannon
Alastair: The Total War concept for the Grand Cannon had a quite uniform crew. The only thing that we kept really was the core uniform, but we changed it up by having them all wearing it differently. Each one has their own personality this way, too. The “health and safety” guy is smoking a pipe while holding a rocket, while the person who lights the fuse has his makeshift ear protection and safety squint.
A cannon this size in reality would be a terrifying thing to fire, but it’s Warhammer so it works. Then there’s the old man who has probably survived this long by just quietly loading ammunition – while the gunnery commander who is pointing and yelling “fire” has put her hair up in a ponytail, after all those times it got singed.
The Ogres came from a conversation about how they would even load this massive cannon. There is an old guy with a wheelbarrow, but in the Warhammer world surely you’d just get a big strong Ogre to do it? They are mercenaries after all. There are a few options for him to mix them up across your army, and the cannon itself can have the Dragon head left off if you want, so it can look a little bit more “historical”.
Dan: Painting a predominantly East Asian skin tone across Grand Cathay was a new challenge for us. It’s easy to assume there is one correct recipe or paint scheme to go with, but that’s not faithful to the wide variety of skin tones in reality. At the same time, it’s a range so we have to make it all feel relatively consistent and uniform – with exceptions for the Ogres, who are likely mercenaries and thus can be from outside the kingdom of Grand Cathay.
We primarily focused on a small selection of paints to give ourselves a strong foundation for the skin tones – around five or so tones – and the way we established variety was by starting at different points on that scale for lighter or darker skin. Shading up and glazing down appropriately, but working largely within a tight run of paints. There is some organic variation outside of that as well.
There are other points of interest, even among the Jade Warriors, who are otherwise quite uniform. They’ve got an arrangement of trinkets, gourds, and even teapots in some cases, which give our painters – and the customer! – some room for fun and expression. These are all signals to the humanity of Cathayans, despite being an empire led by immortal Dragons. With the regiments being split amongst a small team of painters each, there are a few variations that crop up, from more humble pots to some ornately detailed ones, helping add a bit of a narrative to these individual soldiers.
Gate Masters of the Celestial Cities
Giorgio: These were developed after the Jade Warriors and Lancers, which set the standard uniform for the range. As the Gate Masters, we needed to elevate a lot of the details and elements to make them work as generals. The helmet for the horse has been expanded to a full Dragon mask here, the swirls on the armour have been made slightly more ornate, and they are decorated more with sashes and ribbons. The octagonal shape of the design vocabulary has been introduced to the horses’ armour too, in lieu of it appearing on the shield.
We remained faithful to the original concept, and the biggest change is the modularity between both characters. The banner can be held by either, just like the sword and shield, and there are interchangeable heads. The designs of the wargear, and especially the shield, are unique within the army, and these Gate Masters also have capes – in video games like Total War these are perhaps less viable. There is an interesting difference between working from concept art, as we frequently do, versus executing character sheets that have been created in tandem with a video game – a big part of our job was ensuring that the Warhammer feel was nailed.
The team will be back tomorrow to discuss how they created the Sky Lantern, Cathayan Sentinel, Shugengan Lord, and Miao Ying herself. On Saturday you may pre-order everything for the first time – except Miao Ying, who is soaring into pre-orders later in the year alongside a second Arcane Journal.
