Resin or white metal ...

[Khadrin Stonetooth]

I am wondering why most people prefer white metal to resin in 15-18 mm.
It seems to me that resin is cheaper, lighter and gives sharper details but I may be wrong.
What do you people think, what are your pros and cons on this issue ?

[Westfalia Chris]

What subjects are you talking about - vehicles and other large models, or infantry?

For infantry, I'd prefer white metal for durability. Vehicles I don't mind either way.

[Khadrin Stonetooth]

My bad, I was thinking of footed and mounted figurines.

[OSHIROmodels]

White metal purely because of the weight.

cheers

James

[beefcake]

Yep. The weight. plus it can stand some bending.

[vodkafan]

I like the weight of metal in any scale. It is so pleasing.

[Conquistador]

I break (dropping mostly) more metal miniatures than I like to admit.  I am uncomfortable with the thought of resin infantry and cavalry.  AFVs/Spaceships seems reasonable.

I have resin AFVs in several sizes but that is about all I have bought that is not metal.

[Elbows]

I'm generally fine with resin for bits and maybe large vehicles, but as a whole I've been hugely unimpressed with resin for gaming figures.  I find it to be brittle, often poorly cast, and prone to snapping/breaking/etc. with any kind of handling.  I do prefer metal for these reasons.  I also don't mind having a bit of heft.  I'm fine with plastics too when they're well done but I find they often don't have the undercuts I like for ease of painting (details are generally shallow, despite how fantastic many plastic kits are they don't seem to take my kind of painting well enough).

[Connectamabob]

Resin has got a bad rap in the gaming world in no small part because of the drive to make things cheap. In the gaming market, individual customers are motivated to buy a lot of minis, especially if they're playing strategy games that require armies instead of skirmish/RPG games. When you're literally buying minis by the score, costs add up fast, so there's a lot of incentive to make minis as cheap as possible (GW is an exception, but they've put A LOT of effort into cultivating an audience they can abuse like a monopoly).

Resin isn't cheaper than metal when it comes to gaming minis. No idea where people get the frankly bizarre idea that it is. It's only cheaper when you're talking about larger stuff like figures in the 50mm and up sizer, or vehicles/terrain. This means resin minis, especially smaller ones, are not economically viable unless the manufacturer is cutting corners BIG TIME. Which unfortunately many do, driven by the need to appeal to a market that so strongly prioritizes low cost.

You also have a lot of mini producers who are totally inexperienced with resin casting (all their experience is in metal, which is a completely different kind of molding and casting process), so their forays into resin are fraught with bad, amateurish molding and casting that produces bad minis.

Plus there's the availability of good resins, which varies a lot from country to country. Here in the US, I can source casting resins designed for industrial machine parts which can handle way more punishment than white metal. From what I've read, option in the UK are much more limited, and in, say, Italy or the Ukraine almost non-existent. Producers in these areas may not have the option of doing resin well even if they have both the desire and the know-how.

Often enough, these conditions are present in combination, resulting in resin minis that are just atrocious, but are unfortunately seen as the norm for resin by the gaming demographic. That's all they've seen, so that's what they think resin just is.

...Which, to be fair, it might as well be, so long as those issues persists on the manufacturers' end.

I've got a whole bunch of resin bases from a well regarded UK maker who's a respected member on these very forums, which are all completely unusable because they're all warped from corners cut in the casting process, and the warping can't be heat-corrected because of corners cut with the resin itself. The detailing is beautiful, but I just can't do anything with them because of problems directly resulting from bad casting practices. And this is from a respected maker, so imagine how well the more anonymous guys do.

I love well cast resin minis, and vastly prefer them to metal when they're done right. Unfortunately the companies that are doing it right are vastly in the minority, and their figures cost too much to be purchased for anything other than special hero or RPG characters. Even if more minis were available in resin, I'd still probably buy a lot in metal just to avoid breaking the bank.

Of the various reasons to prefer metal, weight is really the only one where metal has the advantage over proper high-quality resin. But as established, the vast majority of resin minis don't even approach such standards. Resin can be better than metal, but it so rarely actually is that that doesn't really matter.

What I do really, really hate seeing is manufacturers trying to cast minis over 50-60mm or so metal. Around that size metal starts to become exponentially more materially expensive, more difficult to both cast and to build, and less durable the bigger you go. Trying to make stuff larger than that in metal is a huge sign that the producer has no idea what he/she is doing.

[beefcake]

... there's a lot of incentive to make minis as cheap as possible (GW is an exception, but they've put A LOT of effort into cultivating an audience they can abuse like a monopoly). ...

I'm sure that GW actually do make them pretty cheaply. Just they cost your left nut to buy  (I know, that's not what you were meaning though)

[Khadrin Stonetooth]

Ok it seems a vast majority is for metal vs resin then. Thanks for your answers !