Solar Auxilia

Taken from the interview in 28mag Vol. 2. page 114

Q. Do you have a favourite project or sculpt that you produced for FW? If so, can you explain why it is your favourite?

A. By far my favourite was the design work on the Solar Auxilia range, which started as a personal project.

At some point Daren Parrwood and Blake Spence from Forge World mentioned that they were planning to do a new Imperial Guard Regiment.

Both of them are straight-line designers – specialised in tanks and hard-surface modelling – but one late afternoon one of them mentioned the project to me. It was actually my dream for a long time to design some new Imperial Guard or, as they are now called, Astra Militarum.

I produced some early concepts and we were discussing those pretty much in secret, as we just wanted to be able to start something and keep the discussion with the rest of Forge World for a later date. Keeping it a secret felt liberating in the way I tried to explain earlier, as I somehow became free of having to think about what people would enjoy and just dived into the creative process.

It took several months until I had a decent design template for the range to show. At that time, I was learning ZBrush and digital sculpting. Unfortunately, the Games Workshop management couldn’t support my transition to digital, so I had to do that alongside working full-time. I even took a month’s sabbatical and went back to Vienna to practice ZBrush and develop the design concept further.

I eventually came back with something that was pretty much what would become a Solar Auxilia Lasrifle Section Trooper. The management were very happy with it and I sold the design to GW, and they put me on the project for a couple of months. It was a brilliant experience;

I was even drawing concepts at home in my free time. Alan Bligh was putting together an army list and wrote the background for them, Dominik Oedinger coloured in some black and white artwork I rendered out using some modified 3D files that I tweaked for more realistic proportions.

It was a childhood dream come true to design an entire new range.