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Post by klachowski on Apr 2, 2016 7:29:17 GMT -9
Greetings, I've lurked around your forum for a few years now. Rarely posting, but often being inspired by the creativity on exhibit. Lately I've been working on a wargame rule set for viking age/dark age shield wall combat. The rules are fairly close to finished and play very well with regular plastic and pewter figures. I'm approaching "publication", and thought including paper mini figures in with the rules would be a cool all-in-one bonus. Plus it gives me an excuse to try my hand at paper mini creation. Here's my first try: I'll likely make a version with those thick black lines that this forum so loves, but for the purpose of my rules my figures are intended to look more like this when constructed: The ability to take away shields from the figures due to damage is important to the game mechanics. Thumb tacks in tri-folded paper minis seems to be a good solution for this. Thoughts or input welcome.
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Post by squirmydad on Apr 2, 2016 10:45:30 GMT -9
Nice start. The thick black borders are primarily there as cutting and alignment guides and aren't really necessary if your doing a tent-fold style as pictured. Take a look at some of MadManMike's offerings where he does both borderered and borderless versions of the same figure so people have a choice in how they assemble the mini. Removable thumb tacks are a good solution, are you going to make a number of round shield designs that can be glued onto the tack?
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Post by klachowski on Apr 2, 2016 11:10:25 GMT -9
Nice start. Thanks! Any chance you do me a favor, as you are emperor 'round these parts, and move this thread to the "New Member Artists" section? I looked for that section before posting under this topic, but for some reason my eyes didn't find it until now. Take a look at some of MadManMike's offerings where he does both borderered and borderless versions of the same figure so people have a choice in how they assemble the mini. Oooo... great suggestion. I really like how his "tent" floors are designed to come together. I wanted to do something like that, but seeing it perfected is a lot easier than reinventing it. Removable thumb tacks are a good solution, are you going to make a number of round shield designs that can be glued onto the tack? Exactly right.
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Post by squirmydad on Apr 2, 2016 16:28:54 GMT -9
Done.
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Post by klachowski on Apr 6, 2016 7:53:45 GMT -9
Armor and/or lack-thereof will change the game play significantly, so each of the basic unit types will have variations with no armor, with mail, with helmet, and with mail and helmet. I'm pretty happy with how the mail turned out,a nd I'm curious how it will look when printed.
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Post by klachowski on Apr 6, 2016 16:39:54 GMT -9
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Post by cowboyleland on Apr 7, 2016 5:18:21 GMT -9
These look really good.
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Post by klachowski on Apr 13, 2016 9:07:13 GMT -9
Thanks! I'm pretty well finished with the front of my 2-handed Axemen. Still have shading and highlights to add to the back to be truly finished. Plain Clothed Armored
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Post by klachowski on Apr 17, 2016 9:37:23 GMT -9
Wow, I stayed up waaaay too late last night working on a layered document with 15 versions of this 2-Handed War-Axe viking dude. Well I guess technically 90 different versions of this guy because there are 6 layers of different clothing colors. Plus a layer that has a various colors mix, see the images below, and also a layer with extra bold black lines and a red fold line. I stayed up all night working on the layered file, and still am not quite done with it because after trying a print of it I decided I needed to tweak it. Also The file size is so big it is really slowing down my work flow. For those who work with raster files, what dpi do you typically work at for 30mm-ish scale paper minis? I've also never set up a layered PDF before so any advice would be welcome. I was hoping it would be as simple as opening a layered PSD in Photoshop and then saving it as a PDF, but it doesn't seem to work like that. I seem to recall reading that importing PNG versions into Adobe Acrobat is a way of doing it, but I haven't had a chance to mess with that yet.
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Post by mproteau (Paper Realms) on Apr 17, 2016 12:29:02 GMT -9
I'm away from my computer but I posted a guide to using scribus to make layered PDFs. One suggestion is to make sure the images are no larger than necessary. Making every layer the size of the whole page will waste space and make toggling layers very slow.
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Post by mproteau (Paper Realms) on Apr 17, 2016 12:29:16 GMT -9
Oh, and 300dpi.
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Post by klachowski on Apr 18, 2016 8:06:13 GMT -9
I'm away from my computer but I posted a guide to using scribus to make layered PDFs. One suggestion is to make sure the images are no larger than necessary. Making every layer the size of the whole page will waste space and make toggling layers very slow. Even if the layers are mostly transparent? Interesting. Is there a general file size maximum rule of thumb in the "industry"? Layers are so useful it is very tempting to just keep adding more and more.
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Post by mproteau (Paper Realms) on Apr 18, 2016 9:29:12 GMT -9
YES! I've seen it in other vendors' PDF files. Adobe Reader repaints completely transparent pixels. And beware if you have a lot of layers, it repaints EACH LAYER, so it's dreadfully slow. By clipping your layers to the smallest bounding box necessary, it can be very speedy when loading and toggling things.
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Post by klachowski on Apr 30, 2016 8:07:54 GMT -9
Making progress on One-Handed Axman and head variations.
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Post by cowboyleland on Apr 30, 2016 8:56:25 GMT -9
You might want to consider a more dynamic pose. Bent knees and a wider stance goes a long way. Swinging an axe engages the hips and he would probably twist at the shoulders. Just some thoughts. Having a few guys "half ready" like your first figure makes sense, but you don't want a field full of guys just standing around. What would war be like if no one ever killed each other!?! Utopia, actually, but not good for gaming.
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Post by klachowski on Apr 30, 2016 9:20:05 GMT -9
You might want to consider a more dynamic pose. Bent knees and a wider stance goes a long way. Swinging an axe engages the hips and he would probably twist at the shoulders. Just some thoughts. Having a few guys "half ready" like your first figure makes sense, but you don't want a field full of guys just standing around. What would war be like if no one ever killed each other!?! Utopia, actually, but not good for gaming. I appreciate the feedback! I've given some significant thought to that. The majority of the figures in the game will likely utilize "static poses" like these for a couple reasons. Reason one the game mechanics work best when the figures line up pretty neatly and the spacing doesn't have too much variation. Unfortunately many of the best miniature poses look great on the table, but are a nightmare to move around shoulder to shoulder. Reason B within the game there are distinctions of type that translate into better or worse stats I'm going to reserve the more dramatic poses and distinctive garb for Champions and Warlords and such. I guess my real test will come when I start designing those "distinctive" figures and I can't pretend the figure's lack of dynamism is wholly by design.
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