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Viewing 23 posts - 1 through 23 (of 23 total)
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  • in reply to: 15mm Mad Scientist's Lab #47832
    Avatar photonheastvan
    Participant

    Love the orb and the electroscope.

    in reply to: African project so far, the river #47798
    Avatar photonheastvan
    Participant

    I’m a ways away from my next table surface (other things to work through first) but I’m totally going to do this.  Still need to decide between tiles and just uneven shapes made from acrylic caulk though.

    in reply to: Finished my alien wilderness terrain #47756
    Avatar photonheastvan
    Participant

    I have this painting/project regimen where I alternate between historical subject, terrain, non-historical subject, terrain (you get the idea) but making 15mm sci-fi terrain makes me want to skip ahead. Nope. Definitely got to get some more dervishes painted.

    But I could do habitat pods and communication towers and storage tanks and barrels and a landing pad. 😀

    Oh, it looks like i forgot a picture with the plants spread out a bit more:

    in reply to: Finished my alien wilderness terrain #47729
    Avatar photonheastvan
    Participant

    My thinking about the tube plants is that they are actually the planet’s greatest resource. Down inside them you’ll find a sticky substance which is the best possible base for bio-plastic production. They grow so slowly that it’ll be a couple centuries before any of the attempts to export them to other planets have any impact on the planet’s industry. The local colonial government has outlawed the destruction of any of those tube plants, so that’ll provide an interesting tactical consideration for anyone playing a force that has to care about that. Something I’m going to consider during scenario design.

    TLDR: By looking down the tube you find a substance that will form the foundation of an new planet wide bio-plastics industry. Congratulations, you’re now space wealthy. All the credits you could want. And from now on the tubular plants are known as hammond tubes.

    in reply to: Finished my alien wilderness terrain #47723
    Avatar photonheastvan
    Participant

    I find fake plants for decoration have far more variety than fake plants for the aquarium. You have to look at them differently though as it’s largely about what parts you cut off the larger plant.

    in reply to: African project so far, the river #47713
    Avatar photonheastvan
    Participant

    It totally makes sense to have the base level of your terrain be water rather than land. It opens up options not otherwise available.

    Absolutely love the idea of the hippos!

    in reply to: African project so far, the river #47627
    Avatar photonheastvan
    Participant

    I like that flooring texture.  I’ve been contemplating how I’m going to do water and do like the idea of a sea level on which you put land on top.  It’d be awesome to have the space to leave up a 12×6 table like that.

    in reply to: Alien plants from dollar store fake flowers #47392
    Avatar photonheastvan
    Participant

    Yeah, the plastic shiny ones are way worse.  I’ve never tried matte sealing them, but I’ll test it on one.  I’d like to eventually replace them with the cloth ones like the red ones, but I’ll give the matte spray a try first.

    in reply to: Made a sci-fi terrain "boil" #47242
    Avatar photonheastvan
    Participant

    I think I will leave it as is rather than go back with another gloss coat. It’s okay if they’re a bit different and it’s always nice to have an item be done rather than needing more work. 😀

    I definitely see them as bug colony related. I need to experiment more but I can see myself making a whole field of these things. This one was made with a 2 litre bottle, but there are lots of other size bottles and I can just cut a subsection of the top of a bottle and make different sizes.

    The interesting thing will be trying to figure out how to make other types of exits than just the top. I imagine if I took the bottle side and cut a hole before deforming it with heat I could make something work.

    in reply to: Posting images #47112
    Avatar photonheastvan
    Participant

    I like imgur. I upload the images and then click on share links and copy the BBCode one and it comes already pre-wrapped in the img tags.

    in reply to: Another 15mm sci-fi tank called "Splinter" #47084
    Avatar photonheastvan
    Participant

    That’s really awesome. Are you going to be building track units for the side or will it hover or something?

    in reply to: Made some (better) desert hills #47079
    Avatar photonheastvan
    Participant

    Thadeus Blanchette. I like your table. If you do glazes and washes, you might want browns instead of blacks as the rest of the terrain doesn’t really go that dark.

    in reply to: Working with Cork #47076
    Avatar photonheastvan
    Participant

    Cork will suck up all the paint just fine without priming. Drybrushing and glazes are a great way to paint it. When you glaze cork, basically you’re making a wash, but don’t flood the piece. Instead paint it on to get an even coat where you want it. After glazing in your darker colours, go back and drybrush the edges with your brightest one last time. Sometimes you may need to go back and drybrush from your mid tone all the way to the brightest if the glaze was too heavy or applied to far onto the lightest areas.

    Some times you’ll work through your drybrush colours and sit one piece next to another and they won’t match. I did a hill where I didn’t do a thick enough dampbrush/overbrush of the base brown on the black so by the time I worked through the tan and ivory it looked very grey. I ended up glazing it with the original brown and then doing the drybrushing again and it matched (well, mostly). Enough that matters.

    I’d recommend cheap craft paint for cork over hobby paints. It’s usually thicker/gloopier so it drybrushes better and it usually has less pigment so it glazes easier. The glazes will dry less strong than you think. It’s also super cheap. 17ml of Vallejo is like $4, but 60ml of craft paint is $1.25 or $1.50 here.

    I’ve also heard that test pots of house emulsion/latex paint from the hardware store works absolutely great on cork and is very cheap. It has similar properties in terms of being thicker and having less pigment.

    EDITED: Another great way to paint cork is to work from white and then all washes like how model railroaders do plaster castings. You’ll need a stainable surface like a white automotive primer rather than a smooth acrylic or emulsion eggshell surface.

    You can make your own scenic cement (I varnish all my terrain with it) by diluting a good PVA/white glue with 1 part PVA, 2 parts water. If you use wood/carpenter’s glue, you’ll need 5-6 parts water, 1 part glue or you’ll get yellowing. Also, you should be able to dilute pretty much any paint or pigment to use like those washes in the video, but you may have to experiment with the ratios to find out what stains your primer surface the best. Make sure to let the washes dry before applying the PVA/water mixtures.

    in reply to: Made some (better) desert hills #47075
    Avatar photonheastvan
    Participant

    Cork is my favorite material. Anyone in Canada should check out Dollarama locations as they have both tiles and kitchen items in cork for very cheap. I also use their cheap craft paints for terrain (Vallejo and Coat d’Arms for miniatures).

    For the modular thing, I just started with a tile and measured from each corner and then left the factory edge.

    in reply to: Made some (better) desert hills #46881
    Avatar photonheastvan
    Participant

    Thanks. Painting them also stiffened them up quite a bit. I really wanted the high contrast topographic map type look, so painting them had to happen (though at one point I was tempted to just use stain like minwax or army painter type stuff).

    The corner pieces and edge pieces can also form hills by joining together. The seams are a little more pronounced than I’d like, but I think they still work.

    in reply to: Made some desert hills #46692
    Avatar photonheastvan
    Participant

    In the end cork wins out. It’s just so reliable. I can get the tiles at the dollar store along with different thicknesses in the form of trivets and other kitchen related cork pieces. I’m probably going to give these hills to a couple 12-13 year olds who started playing miniature games at our local monthly club day. We’ll see how they stand up to their rough treatment 😀

    in reply to: Made some desert hills #46679
    Avatar photonheastvan
    Participant

    You can also maybe stick bamboo skewers horizontally in the corrugation to help keep it straight.

    That’s a very interesting idea.  If I make more I’ll give it a try.

    Cork tiles are calling to me though.  They have a few major up sides (I have decade old terrain pieces that never warp and have held up to regular use) like a built in texture.  These card board hills are labour intensive compared to cork.

    in reply to: Made some desert hills #46678
    Avatar photonheastvan
    Participant

     

    Impressive, keep us up to date on how they wear over time.

    Definitely. I’m a bit worried about them. I’m still of two minds whether I’m going to make more terrain with the double corrugated cardboard. I have a lot of it, but it’s unknown future prospects make me want to just go back to cork and foam.

    Thare are about 50 types of cardboard, I always feel bad throwimg it away but like you always assumed I would end up with warped junk…. got a link to your tutorial?

    .

    I’m still unsure how they’ll last.  It could be the first time the humidity shifts, they’ll bend and all the filler grit will crack and come off.

    There’s no one tutorial, but on youtube there are channels like thedmscraft and dmginfo.  I have noticed though that the guy who has been doing thedmscraft has switched to cork and foam lately.

    The key seems to be hot glue rather than water based glue.  I cut the cardboard into rectangles that go in layers with perpendicular corrugations and stuck them together with hot glue.  Then I cut the shape with a box cutter knife.  Then I took hot glue and ran it along the seems and any place the corrugations were cut lengthwise (which was all over thanks to the perpendicular arrangement).

     

    in reply to: The Hakuna-Matata Wars #45823
    Avatar photonheastvan
    Participant

    I’ve been considering 3mm. You’ve gotten some amazing results for only 6 hours of work.

    Time to go ponder my future with 3mm. 😀

    in reply to: Imaginations in 42mm #45775
    Avatar photonheastvan
    Participant

    I read your latest post about the bridge between hobby and professional wargame developers.

    I’ve actually spent some time doing playtesting for some of the hex and counter games that have been used in the classroom of military colleges and officer training programs. Our key directive as playtesters was to try to do what was done historically (when we have the record of when formations where where on the battlefield) and see if the game produces the historical result. Not in a determined or forced way, but in an emergent way. Do the various components of the game (movement rules, turn structure, combat rules, organization/breakdown of units/commands, etc.,) organically produce historical results? And then add in variables and variations as directed by the designer/design team. Keep reporting back. Once you have a system that produces historical results just by using it, and does so consistently across similar situations in a given period, making the next hobby game of a different battle in a given conflict becomes more a matter of research than game design. And when you take the same system and try to produce the results of a different battle and it works, it’s like the equation solves for the right answer.

    Early miniature wargame designers got this as well. A lot of the stuff from the late 50s and 60s is based on modelling historical results in very direct and simple ways to make an organic system. It was only in later decades that people got this wrong headed idea that realism can only come through complexity. This idea that complexity equates to realism has totally poisoned the well when it comes to talking about these issues, especially on the internet.

    in reply to: Imaginations in 42mm #45734
    Avatar photonheastvan
    Participant

    Love the Mechanisch Geschut. The blue country B guys look great.

    A subunit neatly occupy a single Kalliastra hex. The rules – which still have to be written – will accommodate for this.

    This is really smart. So many rules start with abstract ideas about the period or what the designer wants to represent or whatever, but starting with the practical activities like putting figures in a hex is such a great way to start thinking about actual game play.

    I’ve never really followed blogs or feeds, but I’ve added your feed to an aggregator. Along with phdleadhead, yours is the first blog I’ll be paying regular attention to.

    in reply to: Imaginations in 42mm #45319
    Avatar photonheastvan
    Participant

    These are awesome. I ended up going with 54mm but 42mm looks like an amazing scale for a classic toy soldier imagination. I ended up going back to your blog and reading all the 42mm tagged pages. Love the Major General style mountain backdrops as well as the BRP hardcover book. 😀

    in reply to: Essential Mechanics in Rules #43679
    Avatar photonheastvan
    Participant

    I like rules where there’s interaction between players during a turn. I make an exception for very fast games. For example, Neil Thomas’s One Hour Wargames has contained turns but the game is so fast it doesn’t really matter. I also occasionally play Warmachine/Hordes and find the wait times for smaller games fine, but once the model count gets up there, it crosses a line for me.

    So I guess I find having only short periods of inactivity for a participant to be essential.

    PS. Hello everyone! First post here on TWW!

Viewing 23 posts - 1 through 23 (of 23 total)