Secret Release | Ciri vs Manticore

UPDATE: A few people asked and SUNLU kindly provided a discount on resin for 2 months on their Official website. Enjoy!
Site: https://www.sunlu.com/
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Hey friends,

I'm excited to announce the final release Ciri vs Manticore diorama, the project we've been secretly working on since July. Allow me to tell you the whole story.

A few months ago, SUNLU reached out to us and wanted to commission a diorama of Ciri fighting a cockatrice to feature at Formnext Frankfurt in November. As many of you are undoubtedly aware, we don't take private commissions ever since 2023. At all. Without going into boring details, it's simply because they are not worth the effort for us. But I can't deny we got curious this time and decided to make a sole exception this one time, on our own terms. First of all, we replaced cockatrice with a manticore. Secondly, the model would be available to our subscribers. Lastly, we would take the full reign over handling the project, considering the majority of the production costs would be covered by us. SUNLU graciously agreed to the terms and we began cooking.

To start off, we asked our usual suspect kahi.chi (a.k.a.JuicyBits) to come up with a few concepts for us. Once we picked the one we liked most, I went to Darya Lozynina and inquired whether she'd be interested in sculpting Kelpie (the horse). Long story short, if it was literally anything else, she would've declined because of her new job, but Darya is completely unable to say "no" when it comes to horses.

For the manticore, I went to the best creature artist I knew - Veronika Neklyueva. When she heard of the project, she hardly needed any real convincing. And between Darya and Veronica, I knew I had nothing to worry about it.

When it came to Ciri, the choice was kind of obvious. Our team member Vik already sculpted a young Ciri last year and was eager to try her hand at her mature version once again. Of course, that meant we had to put her book version of Geralt on hold for a few months, but I figured most people would forgive us once they found out the reason.

Admittedly, our tech team suffered the most with this project. Hey, want to hear the most elaborate curses from cutters and presupporters? Let them finish their work, then tell them: "I made a slight adjustment, hardly noticeable at all - I enlarged the manticore a bit". Doesn't help that at some very late point we decided the original base was subpar, so we scratched it and made a new one. And then did it again. So... good thing we don't have an office to catch all those awkward side glances and hear the menacing sound of knives being sharpened. Jokes aside, I'm very grateful to Somed, Farenia, and Takokumono for all their hard efforts in making sure this project wouldn't remain just as a cute render, but can also be printed on a printer as small as ELEGOO Mars 4 (for all you mad lads who are not easily scared off by at least 40 print batches).

Speaking of renders, I'd also like to thank our other team member YoruNoAme for the beautiful pics and the turntable video!

In hindsight, it was a great opportunity for us to try our hand at a much bigger project what involved much stricter project management and coordination between multiple people. If we were to re-do it from scratch, we certainly would have approached a number of things differently. But most of all, this model is a learning experience as much as proof that we can handle projects beyond just the monthly grind. As such, I'd like to thank SUNLU for providing the opportunity to work on this diorama and for supplying resin to test-print such a behemoth.

The model is available to all subscribers until end of November 2025.

Technical data:

Scale: 1/8

Dimensions: 535 x 477 x 392 mm

Pieces: 60 + 29 alternative split for smaller printers. Uncut version is also included.

Split by: Somed

Presupported by: Farenia

Happy printing!
Des