By Mary Kae Marinac
In the gaming industry it pays to be a little weird, especially when it saves you money and time, catapults you in front of industry giants, and pushes the industry's status quo.
Wyrd Miniatures, a 7-year-old upstart company from Kennesaw, Ga., wowed rapid manufacturing insiders recently with its embrace of an all-digital workflow centering on Geomagic® Freeform® for its character skirmish game. Its products are boxed sets of fantasy"war games" where hobbyists assemble and paint miniatures and then play battle games with friends and in tournaments. In this $1B business character detail can be the difference in a game's appeal when compared to other boxed sets on the gaming convention floor or online.
Read more here about Ghost Studio, a product design, engineering and manufacturing firm from Longmont, Colo., and a Geomagic Freeform visionary that helped Wyrd cope with an 80% increase in white metal prices. Ghost Studio's solution was a streamlined, all-digital workflow from art to final part on some 200 fantastical creatures - half human, half mythic - for Wyrd's hit game Malifaux. Wyrd debuted the fruits of its Freeform-driven process at the Gen Con 2012 show this August to raves among gamers as well.
"Gen Con basically proved to us that we did the right thing in the move to plastic," said Nathan Caroland, co-owner of Wyrd Miniatures. "We had customers nearly salivating at our booth. The digital sculpting done with Freeform, when paired with the capabilities of plastic, lets our miniatures retain all the details and animation of the original artwork and really made our miniatures stand out."
Read more here about the highly precise plastic injection mold design that Ghost Studio accomplished with highly sculptural, organic shapes and detail at only 22 to 78 millimeter form factors.
Check out Wyrd's reason for embracing plastic products, a few of their fantastic creatures, and the full story of how, with Freeform, it's possible to achieve greater quality at lower product cost on even hard-to-manufacture products.