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Post by alloydog on Jun 27, 2015 6:01:06 GMT -9
I use GIMP. It is possible to vectorise stuff. There was a lot of trial and error on the learning curve. I didn't think GIMP could do vectors. I'll have to look into that. Thanks for the pointer! I just compared my figure to a professionally made one and one think I didn't really notice before, was that the proportions are like a lot of solid wargame figures: wider than real: Mine look rather "Supermodel-ish" as in under-nourished... I'll try bulking it out a bit.
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Post by alloydog on Jun 27, 2015 2:35:48 GMT -9
I've started to attempt "My First Figure"... I've tried using Inkscape, but just can't seem to get the hang of it. I'm very familiar with LibreOffice Draw as I use it for technical drawings at work (and export then to PDF), so I'm using that. However, although the figure looks good huge, once it's scaled down to 28 mm, it looks horrible. I know you can't overload it with detail, and that's where a lot of artistic talent comes in: creating apparent detail with few lines. Looking at the figures I have got from the likes of Dave Okum and OneMonk, even printed up as 28 mm, the figures are very clear and detailed. Mine, so far, looks like a fuzzy lump Here it is as a scalable vector/PDF: And a bog-standard pixel image: I even dropped a lot of detail from my original attempt because that looked even worse! So, is LibreOffice the worse application to use? Anything better? A few months back, my daughter wanted to use something called paintal psi ( or something like it), but I couldn't get it to work on Linux with WINE. Since it is a vector drawing application, I installed Inkscape for her. 15 minutes later, it was "Daddy, what do you think of this?" My reaction was like "Wow!, that's awesome. I hate you!" I've been struggling with Inkscpae on and off for ages. She can churn out really wild stuff with it.
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Post by alloydog on Jun 15, 2015 19:49:36 GMT -9
Just out of interest, how well do the paper dice roll? Being paper, wouldn't they be a bit light?
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Post by alloydog on Jun 14, 2015 5:44:24 GMT -9
The whole town set-up looks really great. I just snatched one of your pictures and ran it through the "Old photo" filter in GIMP:
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Post by alloydog on May 29, 2015 22:41:06 GMT -9
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Post by alloydog on May 27, 2015 6:10:37 GMT -9
I use these 20mm card holders from blankdice.co.uk/ I use a bunch of different colored ones so it's easier to keep track of which goblin got axed. They're small and fit in my binder and are 12ยข each. I didn't vote as there wasn't a "none of the above" or "other" option. I use permanent card bases, but I would prefer to use those card holders. I had seen them on another website, but forgot where and forgot what they were called, so couldn't find them Now I know! Thanks cowboycentaur
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Post by alloydog on May 14, 2015 23:18:35 GMT -9
That's awesome! Now, you are going to do a short stop-motion animation of the mechas walking about with the little trucks buzzing around their feet, aren't you? I mean, it'd be sooo wasted just as still photos, right?
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Post by alloydog on May 14, 2015 8:00:59 GMT -9
One room is 2/3rds finished: I say 2/3rds, because I want to have a sloping panel at the top, as I have in the corridor sections, but I really messed up the angle of intersection at the angled corners (two planes 135 degrees with a section inclined at 45 degrees... Euclidean geometry time ) The squaddies needn't worry about the Slasher as it's pretty 'armless! OK, it's only half finished because I started doing them 2,5D and it takes sooo long. I think to start with, I'll finish off the batch as straight 2D.
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Post by alloydog on May 12, 2015 5:56:39 GMT -9
Very heavy books So far most pieces have only been about A4 size. The wood was glued onto a chopped up cereal box then folded over to double the thickness and give the wood effect on both sides. The brickwork paper was glued onto corrugated card - though I have the corrugations running 45 degrees to make it stronger. Also, in those cases I used white PVA glue as that was all there was to hand.
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Post by alloydog on May 12, 2015 2:00:19 GMT -9
I'm also looking for warband-based game rules, for Mordheim and Necromunda style games... For games where you have blocks of figures, try Chronicles of BloodAgain, quick and easy to get a game going and simple enough for the kids. Here's a squad of Orcs pushing back an Elf raiding party (All figures Okum Arts): (Bit blurry, sorry...)
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Post by alloydog on May 11, 2015 23:33:07 GMT -9
aleks ... disregarding WH40K ... why you don't try any solo-rules ? :-) I use Don Glewwe's Beer and Pretzels Space Marines. Very simple mechanics, though being solo, the "enemy" tends to be mindless attackers. I have tried writing up a table of alternative actions for "intelligent" foes where the you still decide what they do, but you then roll to see if they do what you want or the actions are modified by current events.
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Post by alloydog on May 11, 2015 22:47:16 GMT -9
Actually I have no time and no people to play with... I'm living in a really small town where wargames culture is very low. I'm waiting for my sons to grow a little, I started some Heroquest play with them, but they prefer playing with LEGO. I think I could say I'm preparing for the future. FOR THE EMPEROR!!!! Same story here. My son (9ยฝ) is is sort of interested: He likes playing with the figures and stuff and makes stories with them, but the moment you mention rules and pull out the dice, he drifts off. My daughter's (13 23/ 24) idea of role playing is chat threads on her phone with her mates being "depressed Korean boy-band musicians struggle with gender identities". Also because of work and so on, there's not much free time anyway. Small town? I live in a place with just under 5000 people, no wargame culture that I know of and I don't really the local lingo very weel either As far as the LEGO is concerned, check out H. G. Wells' Little Wars. It's all about setting your figures out and chucking things at them to knock them over. Appeals to most boys from age 6 months up and because it's a literary classic, it's OK for a grown-up as well, who is only doing it for educational purposes My wargames are usually solo affairs lasting half-hour or so. But I enjoy making the stuff just as much as playing with them, so I don't mind to much. URAAA!!! FOR THE UNION!!!
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Post by alloydog on May 11, 2015 19:54:11 GMT -9
As well as printed stuff, do any of the denizens here use other material for knocking up scenery? I know most of the other folk are pretty talented with the art-work, but do you put brush/mouse/tablet aside and use other things like wallpaper? Often, when going through hardware stores, I make a bee-line for the wallpaper section, you know, looking for "samples for the backroom/utility room/kids' bedrooms". The Mrs usually finds somewhere to hide and not make it obvious she's with me, but hey, you find some real good stuff. In some cases, I have used wood patterned paper on thick card and sliced it up into planks. The used those to make beams for buildings and things like walls and fences: Another paper had a pattern that was just perfect for "large bricks" at 25 mm and up: For this one, I used the "brick" textured paper for the walls, the wood for the floor and door and a stone textured one for the wall caps. The stone textured one I have used elsewhere by cutting into 25 mm squares and making a flag-stones for flooring and 25 by 10 mm for the wall stones. Just wondering what others do.
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Post by alloydog on May 11, 2015 1:30:01 GMT -9
I would say go for it! But take the same approach you would as if you were putting together a GW model army** and by that I mean, start small and add bit by bit. I've done some fantasy wargaming with Dave Okum's figures and they looked great. My mistake at the start was to try and put together lots of figures and scenery before playing. Sure-fire way of not getting anything finished. After trawling wargaming websites, I noticed that in reality unlike what you see in printed magazines, most wargame tables are pretty sparse - some secenery here and there, but mostly blank tables. I started with a couple of small, well, you couldn't even call them "armies", more like sqauds of Orcs and Elves. Though because the plan /was/ to build up to a bigish army, I based the figures five to a base. Starting small means you can take som etime getting some figures, vehicle or two and some scenery looking good and you can start playing almost straight away. I've basically shelves/boxed my plastic figures and am starting over with paper/card Sci-Fi figures: My initial games are bug bashes in narrow corridors - it's playable with less than 10 "good guy" figures and dead beasties get reused. The scenery is also limited to a floor plan and a wall **With paper figures, it is still best to take things slowly and make your figures look good. With GW stuff, you have to take things slowly beacuse selling the kids into slavery and putting the Mrs on the game to pay for a dozen Terminator armoured marines and drop pod takes a while aswell. Plus you need to paint them.
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Post by alloydog on May 5, 2015 19:13:01 GMT -9
the black and white looks good, too. I thought so too. It started when I printed some of the Gun Crawl figures in black and white as a test of the size. Instead of binning them, I washed over them with water colour paints. They came out not too bad. I then figured that, as in most movies, dark monotone corridors were the best for that spooky bug-hunt type scenario, I'd see what the scenery looked like in B&W. Though they were done on a laser-jet and came out very dark. Still, playing solo or with my little boy, neither of us mind to much about the print tone, not when you have GW Space Marines and Gun Crawl paper figures verses Giant plastic spiders, Gormiti and Go Go Crazy Bones...
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Post by alloydog on May 5, 2015 9:38:48 GMT -9
I've just added some basic wall panel sections. The first lot are for the edges of the rooms & corridors, so they only need to be one-sided. The others are for walls placed on the floor tiles to act as dividers. I also added a photo of a corridor section I made with Gun Crawl scenery to should how I do the walls. satans-kittens.net/gamingstuff.html
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Post by alloydog on May 1, 2015 23:18:46 GMT -9
Not sure if this is the right forum for stuff you make yourself, but here's some floor tiles I knocked up: satans-kittens.net/gamingstuff.htmlI started using LibreOffice Draw, but when you start copy/pasting more that a couple of tiles, the whole PC drags to halt... I created the basic tiles in Draw, but then used GIMP for most of the other work. At 96dpi, the tiles print out at about 25 mm square on A4, but ignoring paper margins.
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Post by alloydog on Oct 15, 2010 3:08:19 GMT -9
It can be pretty hit and miss with printers. I found laserjets give better coverage, but can be quite shiny. Also, the choice of ink can make a difference. I have a HP Photosmart C4380. I was using slightly cheaper Jettec ink cartridges with it, but after repeated problems with cartridge recognition, I switched back to OEM HP ones. The Jettec cartridges seemed to print darker than the HP.
Then, I also found the application you use to print the file can also have an effect! I use Linux on my PC. The default PDF application is called Evince. I found printing with this, the PDFs come out lighter than when opened and printed with Adobe reader.
So for me, the best combination seems to be original HP and Adobe for PDFs and GIMP for other image files.
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