|
Post by bravesirkevin on Sept 16, 2018 7:31:04 GMT -9
Perhaps you don't realize it because you have been gone from the scene for so long, but the truth of the matter is that paper minis are actually going through something of a golden age right now. Today it is possible to find pretty much any miniature for pretty much any genre, finished to an incredibly professional standard by skilled artists who have put a lot of effort into ensuring that the finished piece will print out perfectly and look great on any table. You can find things in a wide range of styles from very cartoony, to highly realistic.
What has changed is that a lot of really talented professional artists have started doing paper minis, and professional artists use professional tools to make professional products. If the professional products are not up to your standards, there are still a lot of amateur artists that do create free paper minis as PNGs and JPGs in the monthly hoard section that you can grab and modify to your heart's content, but bear in mind that all artists, professional or amateur, are doing the things their way because that's what they want to do, and your telling them how much you hate their way is really not doing much to persuade any of them to cater to your particularly idiosyncratic needs.
|
|
|
Post by bravesirkevin on Sept 14, 2018 2:43:41 GMT -9
Yeah, the main reason that everything is PDF now is that PDF has specific advantages that JPGs and BMPs do not have. The most important of those is that they ensure that things print out consistently and at the correct scale no matter what set-up the end user has. The other is that the format allows for a degree of customisability.
As folks have said, the fact that everything is in PDF now shouldn't get in the way of you tweaking things for your own personal collection. Most graphic editing software will allow you to open a flattened version of the PDF so that you can paint over it, or you can take snapshots as mproteau suggested.
|
|
|
Post by bravesirkevin on Sept 6, 2018 8:18:20 GMT -9
If that avatar is typical of tjuringatoons's work, I think he will have some outstanding work to show It is, and he does!
|
|
|
Post by bravesirkevin on Sept 6, 2018 6:44:05 GMT -9
Welcome aboard, tjuringatoons! Feel free to show off your work... folks round here will love it!
|
|
|
Post by bravesirkevin on Sept 4, 2018 11:28:44 GMT -9
Haha! You've already got the all the Tombstones, man! Not sure that other Undertaker can bring anything to the party!
|
|
|
Post by bravesirkevin on Sept 3, 2018 8:32:45 GMT -9
We've just put together a new PWYW bundle of minis! In this set you'll find a variety of characters who appear on the Dum Dum Die actual-play podcast, but they'll make make a great addition to your own RPG campaigns! The set contains figures for: • Oriole, Half-Elf Sorceress • Xantillarion, Half-Elf Rogue • Bigun, Love-sick Orc Warrior • The Goddess of Fate • Darby, Half-orc Wizard • Raendryn, Dwarf Paladin • The Mistress, Half-Elf Sorceress Get your copy at RPGNow!We're extremely grateful to those of you who support us... It enables us to devote more time to these allowing us to put out better sets and release more stuff more often! The set also includes an artbook which has beautiful high-res art for each character and sketchbook images which give a little insight into the design process. -------------------------------- Dum Dum Die, is an all-female DnD actual play, that's full of fun and very entertaining! Take a listen to their exciting adventures over here: soundcloud.com/dumdumdie-podcast.
|
|
|
Post by bravesirkevin on Sept 2, 2018 17:51:52 GMT -9
Yeah, that's good news! I really love your stuff, especially the townsfolk. Any plans for more props like the dungeon furniture pack or the lair? New PWTW paper minis set coming in the next few hours, a small collection of heroes and villains from the Dum Dum Die actual play podcast. Halfling townsfolk set coming in the next couple days, with Elven townsfolk to follow very soon after. Will likely resume the weekly free minis starting either this coming Sunday, or the next. As for dungeon stuff, there are a few bits and pieces that I've already designed and a few that I still really want to design. Real problem with the dungeon stuff is that it takes so much longer to produce than the paper minis because I have to test build everything and then refine it, and then I have to make the instructions and that is a massive task in itself. Even the cemetery, which is fairly simple required new instructions, and it took a solid week of work to get those done! The stonehenge megalith's instructions took me almost a month! In short, there will definitely be more stuff, but I can't say for certain how soon I'll be releasing those.
|
|
|
Post by bravesirkevin on Aug 28, 2018 21:11:07 GMT -9
I assume he's asking about editing the image in Photoshop, and based on the context, I'm guessing he likes the pic but doesn't like parts of it, like the clutter on the table and the fact that the street tiles are all over the place. If that's the case, then letter of the law is that you can't add enhancements, but one can modify the lighting and one can crop, so one could trim it down to get rid of the stuff in the background, or just darken it down so that it's lost in shadow, though I think it looks great as it is though, and would make a perfectly fine entry!
|
|
|
Post by bravesirkevin on Aug 22, 2018 14:22:55 GMT -9
Thanks, guys! A very nice figure. I've been going through a bit of withdrawal lately, missing your artwork Sorry to keep you waiting! I'll make it up to you though... got tons of stuff coming in the near future! Here's a couple pics of the Undertaker in his natural environment, aka the Kev's Lounge Cemetery!
|
|
|
Post by bravesirkevin on Aug 22, 2018 4:58:47 GMT -9
Here's my Undertaker. Hope you all dig him! More pics of him in action to come later, will most those as a reply.
|
|
|
Post by bravesirkevin on Aug 20, 2018 10:40:02 GMT -9
Fair point! I'll work on improving the descriptions and add some pics there! With regards to the bases, you can see the 75x25mm bases in the first image holding the headstones. the 50mm versions are the same, but are only wide enough to fit 2 headstones instead of 3.
|
|
|
Post by bravesirkevin on Aug 20, 2018 6:55:35 GMT -9
He's being modest. Mr LootTheRoom hangs out with all the big names in paper minis and at this point is probably an expert on all the techniques that go into the creation of paper models and minis. He's quite the expert map maker too, doing some fantastic work on that front!
|
|
|
Post by bravesirkevin on Aug 19, 2018 18:11:31 GMT -9
This set has been a very long time coming, and I'm proud to announce that I've finally released it! Whether you're playing a horror campaign, a steampunk adventure, a modern superhero story or just good ol' fantasy, you're going to find yourself in graveyard at some point! In this set: • A crying angel gravestone • 4 ornate gravestone designs • 10 simple gravestones in a variety of shapes and sizes • 75 x 25 slotted Kev's Lounge style bases • 50 x 25 slotted Kev's Lounge style bases • A large gnarly old tree • A 6"x9" grass tile with various grid options • Detailed, fully illustrated instructions The headstones and tree are all customisable, and work similarly to Kev's Lounge paper minis allowing you to set them up quickly for your game, and when you're done you can easily disassemble them and fold them flat for compact storage. The set is available now at Papercraft Dungeon and RPGNow! Go grab yourself a copy and add a touch of the macabre to your next adventure session!
|
|
|
Post by bravesirkevin on Feb 19, 2018 6:48:57 GMT -9
Folks are always asking for more townsfolk minis, and demi-human civilians are a particularly popular request... Today's brand new release should make those folks happy! The Market in Dwarf Town contains a nice variety of Dwarven traders, workers and craftsmen. We have two versions of the set available: The Basic Edition is cheap and cheerful with only a single colour option for each character, while the Deluxe Edition has a ton of customisation options allowing for several thousand unique possible colour combinations for each figure! The figures from the basic set.Dwarf craftsmen paper minis from the Market in Dwarf Town (Deluxe Edition) set. Just a tiny glimpse at the massive variety offered by the customisation options in the PDF.More paper minis from the Market in Dwarf Town (Deluxe Edition) set. Porters to haul all your stuff, and friendly barmaids to provide you with a celebratory ale! Dwarf shopkeeper paper minis from the Market in Dwarf Town (Deluxe Edition) set. With the customisation options in the PDF there are thousands of unique combinations for these figures making it easy to populate your dwarf town with loads of interesting generic towns people.Get your copy of The Market in Dwarf Town - Basic Edition at Papercraft Dungeon or RPGNow. Or treat yourself and pick up the The Market in Dwarf Town - Deluxe Edition at Papercraft Dungeon or RPGNow!
|
|
|
Post by bravesirkevin on Oct 24, 2017 8:50:00 GMT -9
The line gets blurred when I browse through things on Amazon and get all the things I looked at presented to me in my Instagram feed. I can see where they are coming from, but that is just too blunt. What I cannot understand is that when I buy, say, an office chair, I keep seeing office chair ads everywhere - I mean, I already bought one, sure I need another, right? I think that lacks style for lack of a better word, and I cannot imagine it working too often. But then again, apparently it does... Again, if you do it to work with and for your audience - the pixeling I mean, tracking page visits etc. - then I am okay with it. Being able to target poeple who bought from you before, and those who visited you but did not buy, etc., is a powerful tool. But so many people over- and misuse it these days... I'd be inclined to cite that as evidence that they are not collecting perfect information. Google knows that you searched for office chairs, Facebook knows that you visited pages that had office chairs for sale while logged in to your Facebook account, but neither of them know that you bought the chair. I'd go further and say that it's likely that neither of them even know that it was your intention to buy a chair, they just noted that you had taken a recent interest in chairs and that had slightly increased the weight of that keyword on their digital profile of you, making it more likely that ads related to that keyword would be served to you by their algorithms. Not to say that the whole thing isn't creepy.... it really is a bit worrying that these powerful organisations have very detailed databases packed with information about who we are and what we're interested in.
|
|
|
Post by bravesirkevin on Oct 18, 2017 16:56:46 GMT -9
If you're not paying to watch, read, or listen to something, you're not the customer...you're the product. The advertisers who buy the ads are the customers. This is how broadcast TV and radio have worked for most of a century. In fact, the cover price on newspapers and magazines usually doesn't cover the cost of printing, let alone the expense of producing editorial content. Again, the subscriber's is the product being monetized; the client is the advertiser. That's a very cynical, but not necessarily wrong, way of looking at it. In traditional media, the publisher does treat the reader/viewer as their customer and the ad agency that sells their ad space treats the advertisers as their customers, and it's all a tangled codependent mess. Modern digital media are even messier... There's an infinitely more massive disconnect between the advertisers, the service providers and the consumers, but they're all still completely dependent on each other and that makes things really parasitic.
|
|
|
Post by bravesirkevin on Oct 18, 2017 10:03:50 GMT -9
I technically never left the site... still have all the old images hosted there, and there's still forum posts all over the place that still have the broken hotlinks, but I'm no longer a Photobucket user as I've found alternative solutions for the images I post now. Wonder if I'm counted in that 3 million, and how many of those 3 million are people who did the same as I did.
|
|
|
Post by bravesirkevin on Oct 17, 2017 1:29:17 GMT -9
Why do I keep the adblocker running? Because there are pages that go overboard, and I want to have the option of removing ads. There are some sites that offer services that I pay for, and they still have large numbers of ads. I get it, but there is a line, a balance. This is the irony of it... There are so many people using adblocker that sites relying on ad impressions to make income are forced to get as many impressions as they can off of the tiny sliver of visitors who don't have adblock. Basically those poor souls are forced to see all the ads that the the adblock crowd doesn't... and that drives that crowd away from the site or encourages them to start using an adblocker, which means that the company has to go even further overboard and adding even more ads.
|
|
|
Post by bravesirkevin on Oct 16, 2017 2:14:47 GMT -9
My opinion on this matter is that advertisers pay for things so that consumers don't have to. While there are kind souls out there who will do stuff purely altruistically, it still costs a lot of time and money to produce, host and distribute content and people who offer those services do need to get revenue from somewhere in order to keep things going... it's not greed. It's necessity.
The problem arose because advertisers needed to get some sort of return out of all the money they were spending and so ads got more obnoxious and intrusive. Adblockers showed up as response to that, but that changed the rules of the game. Advertisers started finding ways to bypass the blocker, and that made the Adblockers even more brutal in blocking functionality, which made ads get more aggressive, etc.
Then the thousands of online businesses who had come to rely on advertising started to really suffer because they were caught between the terrible option of having a million obnoxious ads or having no revenue. Even the million obnoxious ads were not enough to make things work and so they started finding other ways to make money. Some involved offering premium ad-free options. Others involved forcing people to pay for previously free services. Some turned to adware that forced their users to see way more ads than they were supposed to, and occasionally bots to click ads on the user's behalf. Now we're at a point where sites are hijacking user's hardware to mine cryptocurrency while they browse.
It really is just a modern world example of the age old Tragedy of the Commons. We can't just have stuff for free without some sort of twisted disaster like this happening. For my own part, I don't block ads, but I will block bad advertisers. I will watch YouTube ads without skipping unless they're particularly obnoxious.
|
|
|
Post by bravesirkevin on Sept 20, 2017 6:46:00 GMT -9
As a designer, I find it's not really worth worrying too much about the basing style as people are going to use whichever one they're already using anyway... As long as you actually supply a simple method for basing to cater to the novices it's all good.
|
|
|
Post by bravesirkevin on Sept 1, 2017 23:47:09 GMT -9
So these things are amazing scorers: linkThey come as a 3 pack and double ended with a total of 6 different tip sizes, and there's even grips! I have been experimenting with several different tools, and these outperform them all so far Those are actually amazing for scoring. I find the work best when scoring on the side that will be the inside of the fold. If you're wondering what their actual purpose is, they're for embossing. You get these plastic stencils that you lay under the page and then you vigorously rub the back of the page with the tool to cause the paper to be embossed into the shape of the stencil. Spent a lot of time contemplating how this could be used to add textures and raised detail to the paper models I've created, but I can't think of a good way to design the stencils... Perhaps it could be easily achieved using a Silhouette to cut out the stencils required from a suitably stiff material.
|
|
|
Post by bravesirkevin on Aug 29, 2017 20:41:56 GMT -9
By the way, I am now in love with Papercraft Dungeon's basing system! I just wish there was a big enough base for the one in the back... Glad you're liking them! I actually have some 3x1 bases that I haven't released yet. (They're part of a project that's been on hold while I sort out the website). Also had some thoughts on doing 3x3 bases by sticking the 3x1 base onto a 3x3 disk mounted on thick card, which is something I will definitely investigate soon as I have some gigantic monsters planned for release in the near future.
|
|
|
Post by bravesirkevin on Aug 12, 2017 12:32:05 GMT -9
|
|
|
Post by bravesirkevin on Aug 12, 2017 12:14:36 GMT -9
|
|
|
Post by bravesirkevin on Aug 12, 2017 10:56:01 GMT -9
If there are any bases that you're specifically looking for and can't wait for the store to come back up, please let me know and I'll put them in a dropbox folder for you.
|
|
|
Post by bravesirkevin on Aug 12, 2017 10:31:59 GMT -9
Suppose I should give a quick update on what's going on with the site:
We needed to upgrade because Paypal changed their policies and the software we were using was no longer compliant. Unfortunately, we had a long series of misadventures while doing the upgrade, including the fact that the hosting services we were using at the time was not interested in hosting e-commerce anymore because of the requirements of the current generation of software and so we were forced to change hosts... We've now got a site up there, but we haven't moved any of the data across yet as we've been busy converting it over. Been a slow process because there are some minor incompatibilities between the old software and the new that caused some major bugs. As I'm typing this, we've basically completed the migration of the data to our test server and have resolved pretty much every bug that we could find so far, and so we're actually getting ready to move it all over to the main server so we can take the site live again. That should happen within the next 24 hours, if all goes smoothly with the data transfer.
|
|
|
Post by bravesirkevin on Jul 25, 2017 21:46:05 GMT -9
Glue sticks work just fine... the problem is that the glue will eventually decay and no longer bond the pieces together and that happens relatively quickly with glue sticks. It's not uncommon for things glued with a stick to start falling apart within as little as 2 years, requiring you to glue them back together again. I find rubber cement actually has the most longevity and have some paper projects built with it that are still in good shape after almost a decade.
With regards to laser prints, it really is just a matter of them not dealing with friction too well. If the piece requires lots of fiddling during the building process, then it's inevitable that you're going to rub the toner off the paper, though avoiding coated papers and giving it a few coats of varnish before cutting and assembling to seal it all down will overcome that problem very nicely, provided that you're using a glue that will actually stick to the varnish. Of course, with flat paper minis there isn't going to be that much friction and you don't need to glue on the varnished side so for that kinda job a laser printer and glue stick will do just fine!
|
|
|
Post by bravesirkevin on Jul 24, 2017 6:59:46 GMT -9
Most of the significant Westerns made in the last century weren't American productions at all. Italy was quite prominent in the scene, hence the term Spaghetti Western, but I get the impression that a lot of other European countries jumped on that train too. To those not in the know, it might seem like the movies were American because they'd have Clint Eastwood or Charles Bronson or some other famous US actor up front, but in truth, the entire crew and almost every other actor was European, and they'd all do their lines in whatever their native language was. It didn't matter because they weren't recording audio anyway, and the dialogue would all be done later, redubbing in multiple languages depending on where it was going to be released. American Actors would do their own voices for the US release, of course.
The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, for example, was filmed in Rome and Spain, and only the three main characters were American.
|
|
|
Post by bravesirkevin on Jul 20, 2017 4:14:43 GMT -9
It's actually quite a fascinating story! Eager to see episode 3 now!
|
|
|
Post by bravesirkevin on Jul 18, 2017 6:45:32 GMT -9
Luckily, all my images were still on my hard drive, so no downloads were required, but it's still a massive mission to re-upload the stuff elsewhere and go fix links all over the place.
|
|