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Post by Aestelon on Apr 3, 2009 6:50:13 GMT -9
Ah, the kazoo - the greatest instrument known to man.
I never leave home without mine! ;D
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Post by Aestelon on Apr 3, 2009 4:05:02 GMT -9
I think the mech is the Jotun from Ebbles. I don't know about the plane, though.
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Post by Aestelon on Apr 3, 2009 2:38:51 GMT -9
Ha ha! Fear the Hello Kitty! ;D
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Post by Aestelon on Apr 2, 2009 10:26:38 GMT -9
Right. Mods made, this should work a lot better. As a basic set of directions: All lines can be scored from the front, except for the two marked on each chute, which need to be scored from the back. The three main walls of the tower fold round, and it seems to be easiest to attach the two chute pieces to the front wall first. When attaching the lower chute, line the short edge of the trapezium up with the bottom of the door, then attach the adjacent tabs to the front wall accordingly, making sure the top edges fall just inside the edges of the adjacent walls. The walls will then fold round and attach to the other tabs. Close the wall with the two tabs last, they're designed to fit round the lower chute once it's glued to the other walls. Once the tower's attached to the base, you can attach the retainer wall to the front and fold the slope over, gluing that to the base as well. The four tower barriers glue individually to the top of the tower, the short sides on the front and back, and the longer ones at the sides. The barrier corner trims can then be glued on to cover the gaps in the corners. I want to get round to making something resembling an actual instruction sheet soon, but I don't have time at the mo. But hopefully those directions make some kind of sense.
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Post by Aestelon on Apr 2, 2009 7:13:42 GMT -9
After seeing this ,I thought to my self," hey self, wouldn't it be cool to make a dice tower like this, only out of girders, so you could see the whole insides of the tower!" This would make for an interesting design challenge, but would look very cool. If I find free time, I'll texture up a version of this. JIM Cover the interior of the girders with clear acetate for added strength and so that the dice don't come flying out. That's actually one of the reasons I designed it with solid walls. I was inspired to do it by one of Claudio's towers - while it looked great, I found it entirely useless, as dice would bounce out the sides or off the top, and if they made it to the bottom would just sit under the platform where you couldn't see them. With this tower, the walls keep the dice in all the way down, and the lower chute makes sure they all come out into the tray where you can see them. I'll have a go at redoing the lines now, Jim - the ones currently showing don't quite work properly. I'll make the appropriate fixes and post them ASAP.
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Post by Aestelon on Apr 1, 2009 9:34:32 GMT -9
Turns out I had a few minutes to snap a couple of pics after all, so here's one to be going on with. I'm sure it could be textured better by someone else (I do decent people, but I tend to suck a bit at terrain), so once I've patched both this textured version and the linework so they've got the two long barriers, I'll post them up so someone else can have a go at doing a better job of it.
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Post by Aestelon on Apr 1, 2009 7:27:14 GMT -9
If I've got time to snap pictures later I'll post 'em ASAP, but my mum's crashing at ours tonight, so I need to make sure the spare room's suitable (which may take a while ). I've built it up, and it seems to work fine, although I may have to alter the punch-grate barrier wall and top hoarding. It's okay at a distance, but if you look at it too closely the tight pattern may mess with your eyes! For the record, that one's basically the 'recessed' pattern fill from GIMP. I'm also going to need to alter the top hoardings because somehow I've managed to copy three short hoardings and one long one (there should be two of each; short ones for the sides and long ones for the front and back). That's a pretty easy fix, though. Floyd's sloped side definitely helps you to scoop the dice out of the bottom, so big thanks to him for that idea.
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Post by Aestelon on Apr 1, 2009 3:48:12 GMT -9
Right. Hopefully, I've finished texturing the dice tower. It seems to look pretty decent on screen so far - time for a test print.
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Post by Aestelon on Apr 1, 2009 2:55:23 GMT -9
Somebody totally needs to do backs for the Deep Ones and newt-things as well to go with this lot. Brilliant stuff.
By the way, are you basing these the normal way? because that would seem fiddly. Or are you just using flat bases and gluing the feet to the top?
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Post by Aestelon on Mar 30, 2009 14:54:37 GMT -9
As an extension of this project, I've started work on a slightly heavier mod, this time combining elements of the Stalker and Buzzer models to create a Hybrid "Springer", with leaping poses and tasty scythe-like claws. I was going to submit it to the Hoard, but I'm probably not going to have time to finish it tomorrow. The black-and-white version's nearly finished, I just need to finish grafting on the scythe claws to the Stalker arms and making more short-clawed arms for the middle sets (which can be used as a second pair of legs to enable it to run faster).
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Post by Aestelon on Mar 29, 2009 14:42:39 GMT -9
That second one isn't Bumblebee - this is Bumblebee. The third one you pointed at doesn't even have a colourscheme. It has eight, as I recall (I have four).
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Post by Aestelon on Mar 29, 2009 13:14:22 GMT -9
Those look absolutely bloody brilliant! I think my favourites are the red (really striking) and purple (just plain cool), but they're all awesome. For the black one, have you considered just going for a really dark grey? Other dark versions of colours can be used to represent black very well too, especially cool colours like blue or turquoise, without looking too... well, grey.
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Post by Aestelon on Mar 28, 2009 3:38:54 GMT -9
I did notice when putting together February's hoard that some files were not to scale but still had the correct base tabs and dpi. Again I think this is just a program difference rather then something actually wrong with the figure. Give Gimp a try see if that works if not we can rack our brains here and see what we can come up with. Wouldn't that be a case of the figure being slightly out of scale in the first place, if the tabs are correct? Or am I missing something? And yeah, I'm finding GIMP to do a fine job of scaling PDFs so far. When you open it up, it gives you the option of what resolution you want it opening in, which obviously also determines the pixel dimensions you get, so it's pretty easy to make sure your scale's on.
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Post by Aestelon on Mar 27, 2009 6:46:45 GMT -9
Normally you can just copy and paste the bits you want to copy into separate QUOTE tags, but here it's a bit more complicated, as the quote tags also contain extra information, like the poster, board ID, post ID and time of posting.
Easiest way I find is to right-click the Quote buttons on the posts you want to quote, then open them in new tabs in your browser. Except for one post, where you can just click the Quote button and go straight the reply field.
Then you can copy and paste the quotes you need from the other posts into the reply field (and edit out the bits you don't need).
Hopefully that makes sense. I think it may actually be easier to do than explain.
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Post by Aestelon on Mar 26, 2009 19:27:12 GMT -9
I think I've nearly finished re-texturing the tower now; hopefully tomorrow, once I get a new magenta cartridge, I can print it off and do a test build.
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Post by Aestelon on Mar 26, 2009 16:42:52 GMT -9
Heh. Glad I can amuse.
Andy
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Post by Aestelon on Mar 26, 2009 8:45:27 GMT -9
That really does look awesome! The bent-down wing pods really add an extra sense of dimensionality. And of course the builder could theoretically make variations by having the pods angled down at 45 degrees, or even upward, and I think it'd probably still look as good.
I've looked at your post (using the Quote function) and I can't see anything you did wrong; teh IMG tags were absolutely fine, and the URL was right (tested it with a C/P into the URL bar). I'm guessing your host doesn't like its webspace being used for hot-linked images.
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Post by Aestelon on Mar 26, 2009 2:28:26 GMT -9
Totally. Also, I find a brush is a lot easier to manipulate into the small crevices that almost all figs will have on somewhere. I quickly realised on my first test unit that there were corners that my marker just wasn't getting to. For a while I used a cheap black craft acrylic (that I'd barely found anything else I could use it on, so this seemed a perfect opportunity), but then realised I'd got a bottle of black ink that would blend better, so I switched up to that. It's working a treat.
As an addendum, I use the No.1 brush for the bulk of the edging, but then switch to a finer brush (a 10/0) just to get into the deeper cracks and carefully touch up any white where parts are a little misaligned.
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Post by Aestelon on Mar 25, 2009 15:57:33 GMT -9
I've slightly altered the linework for the tower. Nothing major, I've just rearranged the front and sides of the tower into a single component, added tabs to the back of the upper chute (so it can fixed to the rear wall as well as the sides), and added the slope Floyd suggested to the container wall - you just attach the wall as before, but now you fold that inside and stick the tab down to the base. I haven't test-built this version yet (since there's so little done to it); I'm saving that for after I've textured it, which I'm partway through now. Yeah, I like to live dangerously.
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Post by Aestelon on Mar 25, 2009 15:08:58 GMT -9
Fantastic stuff. Really nice re-invention!
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Post by Aestelon on Mar 25, 2009 7:38:07 GMT -9
I don't have my own website, but maybe I can email them to anyone who is interested. Maybe you could upload them to PaperMakeIt!?
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Post by Aestelon on Mar 25, 2009 3:31:49 GMT -9
Okay, I'll call you Grandpa next time.
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Post by Aestelon on Mar 25, 2009 2:26:49 GMT -9
It certainly looks like they like to use playing cards, but I don't know if that's actually a kind of game mechanic or just "if we need a randomiser, we'd rather use cards than dice". My preview game is on 11th April, so I'll see how much I can tell you then. I imagine the NDA won't extend as far as giving people brief overviews, because hell, free advertising is good, right?
<edit> And why the heck do I keep reading that as "splat boat"? That doesn't even make sense!
Andy
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Post by Aestelon on Mar 24, 2009 19:10:01 GMT -9
That looks fantastic! Have you tried what Floyd suggested, bending the wing pods down? I have a feeling that could work quite well.
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Post by Aestelon on Mar 24, 2009 16:01:35 GMT -9
Ah, that old classic. I saw the sci-fi version of that first over on TG, which was very cool. I must admit, it's tempting, although I'm not sure where I'd get the mirrors from offhand (we don't have Hobby Lobby over here).
And blinding thought on the texturing - I have no idea why I didn't think of using the Sci-Blocks as inspiration! Actually, it's mostly because I only got the Sci-Blocks a couple of days ago and hadn't made the connection yet, but even so... That could well work!
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Post by Aestelon on Mar 24, 2009 14:22:47 GMT -9
It does indeed look cool. I've downloaded all the rules and printed off the core pocket version for perusal, and it looks dead simple. While we're piping up with new RPG systems, I thought I'd mention one that's not actually available yet, No Dice. I can't really tell you much about the game itself, as there's currently no rules available for download (they're going up on June 1st). However, I am lucky enough to be attending one of the pre-launch games next month. We have to sign NDAs, so I probably won't be able to go into too much detail, but I should at least be able to give you a heads-up on what it's like to play, and if it's worth your time.
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Post by Aestelon on Mar 24, 2009 10:42:54 GMT -9
Top banana, son. This board really needs a thumbs-up smiley.
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Post by Aestelon on Mar 24, 2009 10:39:52 GMT -9
Tell you what - here's a copy of the untextured model, as is, to have a play with. I may make a couple of tweaks to improve the build, like adding a couple of tabs to the back of the funnel, and I like your sloped side idea. You can probably work out how to fit it together, it's not too complicated. But as a note, the 'left' and 'right' faces are indicated as you look at the front of the tower. Once I've textured it properly and made sure it builds as I want it, I'll do a proper instruction sheet with it, but if you have any problems, I'll see if I can explain better. Oh, and a little tip. Probably best to fit the tower to the base before attaching the container wall. I didn't for this one, and it doesn't attach properly at one side.
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Post by Aestelon on Mar 24, 2009 10:25:16 GMT -9
Hmm. Also one to consider. I'm not sure it'd be particularly any easier to mod this fig than draw a new one, but I'll see what happens. I'm not that familiar with Slaine, but I've grabbed a few reference pics to spark me ideas.
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Post by Aestelon on Mar 24, 2009 6:19:38 GMT -9
I've seen plenty of cool fantasy-themed dice towers, but never seen a sci-fi/industrial one I was satisfied with, so I decided to have a go myself. It's a pretty simple affair for the most part; there's a shallow funnel in the top to control the drop of the dice, and a steeper, tapered slope to direct the dice out the front into the tray. The barrier round the top helps prevent any stray dice from bouncing away if you drop them a little too far. I pretty much just need to texture it now. Since printing this out, I've added another layer of texture to the outer walls and the tray base, using a toned down 'nops' fill in GIMP. But the sides of the tower are still just too plain, and I'm having a real block trying to think what would look good, but still fairly generic. Any ideas? Andy
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