This is in reaction to a series of post regarding Tre Manor's sculpting style. Tre owns Red Box Games and does freelance sculpting for Reaper and a couple of other companies (I think he may have done some work for Hasslefree, either that or he is just a huge drooling Kev White fanboy, I forget which).
When all is said and done at the end of the day our terms of 15mm, 18mm, 25mm etc are meaningless when someone introduces the term scale. 28mm, as an example, is not a scale its a measurement. When someone says that a miniature is a 28mm Heroic mini it tells us nothing, it could be 5' tall, it could be 6' tall. There is nothing about 28mm that gives us that information. Now if I said a miniature was sculpted in 1/48 scale then I know exactly what that means. In this case it means that there are 48 scale inches in one real inch or 1 inch equals 4 feet. So if my mini is suppose to be 6' tall then he should stand 1 1/2 inches from the soles of his feet to the top of his head.
Military scale modelers and model railroaders have no problem working in specific scales, in fact scale is everything to them. It tells them how big everything should be, it allows them to relate reality to miniature form and everyone will know exactly what it should look like, what the proportions should be. Ultimately I think that moving our miniature hobby to a specific scale would makes the sculptors life much easier. If he needs to sculpt a halfling to be 3' tall and he is working in 1/48th scale then that halfling will be 3/4" tall. He knows what the proportions should be and how it will compare to the 6' human fighter. Now this is not to say the characters can't be of heroic proportions but now you know exactly how those proportions will look like in direct comparison to your standard 6' tall human. There are plenty of pictures out there of bodybuilders to give a sculptor the proportions for that heroic character.
Our 28mm miniatures are approximately 1/56th scale. At least that's what the WWII folks have, more or less, decided. Some of the companies that are producing resin WWII vehicles have decided that 1/56th is pretty close and that's the scale they are using to produce their vehicles. Others have decided 1/48th scale plastic kits are the way to go. I totally disagree with this scale its much to big for the size of our 28mm miniatures. The argument is that the height of the bases on our miniatures makes up for the deficiencies in actual miniature size. Okay, I can agree with this as far as the look on the table top, but even mounted on bases they are a bit on the small side. 1/48th scale vehicles are readily available at this point and I would never tell someone that they can't use something because the scale is different, if it gets the job done it gets the job done and if you made it look good in the process then I can appreciate that.
Now as a way of comparison let's take a look at a picture.
From left to right: Reaper (28mm), Wargames Foundry (25mm), Black Scorpion (32mm), Dixon (25mm) and Brigade Games (25mm).
Reaper Miniatures introduced the concept of 25mm Heroic Miniatures when game stores balked at carrying their 28mm miniatures. Wargames Foundry is pretty close to what we would refer to as "True" 25mm this miniature measures about 25mm to the eyes (some might argue that true 25mm is measured to the top of the head). Black Scorpion is pretty much as advertised 29mm to the eyes. Dixon calls their miniatures Large and they are certainly larger than Wargames Foundry but they are only the second largest in the photo. Brigade Games comes out slightly taller than Dixon so I guess they are also Large. However, when you look at this photo for proportions, the Reaper figure appears to be the largest miniature in the line up, but he is several MMs shorter than the Black Scorpion mini.
In a perfect world I would like to see the miniature companies get together and decided on an actual scale for miniatures rather than our current helter skelter proliferation of mm sizes. I'm also convinced that this would be akin to herding cats and is not likely to happen, there are just to many logistical things to deal with.
And if you want to re-read my post on proportions you can find it here: S Scale vs On30 for Calamity
