Best figure manufacturer?

Well, Alpine makes some good figures, and DML does some good guys, even more so if you get their Gen2 figures, what era are you lookin for?  1943? 1944?

     Hope that was of help, Jim

In addition to the aforementioned manufacturers, I also recommend S&T for resin US figs, and TANK for resin Germans and Russians. Jaguar and Hobby Fan can also be good, sometimes. Here's a good site for browser-window shipping:

Colorado Miniatures

figure freak wrote:

yes but go to squadron, they have a major figgy sale goin on right now just go to squadron savings and on criteria got to figures-military and scale 1/35 and last time i checked thee were a ton of figgies on sale

Be cautious here. They are notorious for jacking up the retail to make the del seem sweeter. OI recently bought the Young 75mm LRDG figure for $30 +shipping. Not a bad deal, it lists elsewhere for $55-$60. They had theirs listed at $90. If you see something you like, look around at the other figure sites before committing to a purchase.

As long as you want to let the manufacturers dictate what poses you're gonna use, I reckon there's some decent resin figures and such...  Verlinden makes some of, IMHO, the best ones.  But I buy damn few of 'em, simply because I can't stand being locked down into using the same poses everyone else is using...

Buying you some Tamiya, Revell/IRC, and Dragon sets, you can afford to have a lot of figures to select choice body parts from and create your own poses, which adds much more flexibility to a diorama-builder's story-telling abilities... By buying some after-market heads, you can create many more "personalities" as well...

I know that there's some guys here that are absolute masters at figure-painting, and that their work is, to say the least, outstanding, but the truth of the matter is that you don't have to create figures that you'd swear were about to talk to you in order to tell a good story with them... Base-color, with some shadow and highlight, a face with a five o'clock shadow, some shadow, and well-placed slits for eyes can be as effective as anyone else's work... You just have to remember to CWR (crawl, walk, run) when it comes to figure painting...  A pair of High-dollar figures will not save your diorama if they have a crap paint-job... On the other hand, cheap figures, well-posed & placed, with well-done paint-jobs can be the saving grace of an otherwise mediocre diorama...

My suggestion is to forego the high-dollar figures, buy up a half-dozen or so Tamiya or Dragon figure sets of at least 4 figures each (6-8 would be better), a good razor saw, pin-vise with a #78 bit (for drilling holes to insert wire "joints"), putty, and start chopping up your squaddies at the joints...  If you can get 4 or 5 good poses built out of a dozen figures, you're about par for the course on figure conversions, and no one will have any figures like yours anywhere...  And don't forget to ordder some generic heads... They'll go a long way for little money...

Oh yeah, one more thing... Don't sweat whether you're doing "modern" figures of WW2 or whatever.. Although the uniforms change, anatomy doesn't...Also,adding action & drama to your dioramas is easy when you learn to keep your figures in off-balance poses (even mid-air sometimes)... Quiet scenes, although usually more effective than "shoot 'em ups", can get old after awhile (how many mail calls/map-readings/busted track/flat tire/taking a leak/ dioramas can one do, anyway?), so don't be afraid to get a little crazy now & then...

Too bad we don't reside closer together... It'd take a book-length post to tell you how I do it, but about an hour and a half to show you at the bench...

Maybe I should try to make a Youtube video, lol..

Boba Fett wrote:

I've only used Tamiya figs in plastic, and the new ones are pretty good. Now compared to that resin D-Day bunker dio made by Jaguer...

How much better than the old ones? I haven't bought taimya for 3 or so years. and mostly it was the older stuff than.

You can make most of the leading figures look good if you put a Hornet head on it be it a plastic figure or a resin one the hornet heads are hard to beat.

SMJmodeler wrote:

Guys: I am an armor guy whose figure painting skills have moved up from crappy to lousy...But I continue to try to add fig's to give my builds some scale and context.  I'm to the point now where I really need to make a serious effort to improve my skills and get my figures to look "the part" or not add them at all.  I have only worked on Tamiya fig's and from what I understand they are not the best...so to speak. So what mfr. do you recommend?  what should I expect to pay per figure?  I need some good US WWII figs for some upcoming builds to go with a Stuart, Lee, Sherman...do you have any thoughts on ones I should check out? Thanks for the help. SMJmodeler

I think I would go with the Dragon set seeing as the uniforms never changed much during the war. BTW the Dragon set was made for the Sherman but I don't see a problem using some of the fig in a dio with a Lee or a Stuart.