Archive Page 7

Terraforce Troopers (Onemonk Bash) – Paper Miniatures

Published March 18, 2011 Papercraft 4 Comments
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I’ve been hard at work on various projects since I stopped playing nexustk (MMORPG). This post relates to extensively modding the existing Terraforce troopers that Onemonk put out a while ago. I wanted to mod them for three reasons. Firstly I wanted to scale them down a little so they were more inline with 28/30mm miniatures. Secondly I wanted more pose options for the HE laser rifle. Lastly I wanted to turn them blue to fit in with how I visualized my armies colour scheme. As I was making all these changes I decided to add a few other colour scheme’s as well just in case.

I carried out all the mod work using GIMP. First step was to import the base set and scale them to more 28/30mm size as it turned out this was spot on 90% for these miniatures. This bought them more into line with 28/30 mm size and Sanity Studio’s scale. For those unaware Sanity Studio’s bought out Onemonk’s back catalog of mini’s and have been putting out some very nice fantasy miniatures, They produce about 1 new set every month but the quality of the artwork on each mini is outstanding (no they don’t pay me for saying this  🙂 ).

Once the troopers were in the correct scale my next job was to provide various colour options. Solid colours were easy but putting together the camo variates took significantly longer although once I had the process sorted out it become quicker. With feedback from the guys and gals across at the cardboard warriors forum I settled on 14 colour options:

I also created two skin colour overlays so that you end up with three skin tone options: Light, Mid, Dark. With all the colour options done I then created the HE Laser Rifle overlay. I had to do some significant fiddling to make the HE laser rifle nicely overlay the stock Laser Carbine, but it worked out well in the end and I think it was worth the work.  Next I laid all the different layers out and combined them into a layered PDF.  Lastly I created the 4 craftrobo GSD files I needed to account for all the weapon options and tested that each cut file was accurate. So this means that you can select uniform colour, skin colour and two weapon choices from the one pdf.

As the sets are going pay again in the near future, I can’t just make these mod’s freely available. I really don’t want to eat into the already small margins on paper miniatures that the commercial guys do plus it would be a breach of copyright and personal integrity.  As a side point if we lose the commercial paper mini makers we’ll lose a whole pile of future releases :). However all is not lost what I have been able to do is supply them to Sanity Studio’s and when the One monk website is updated my mod troopers will be a free download attached to the stock pay set when you buy it.  I’m very happy to be able to share my work with other people otherwise the above would be for my personal use only :).  I do plan on modding all the troop types into the above colour scheme’s, next ones on my list are the special weapons troopers.

I’ll post an update when the above become available so keep an eye on my blog or the One monk main site.

Update: These are now available from Onemonk

Cardboard Warriors Forum – Paper Miniature Hoard 90

Published March 14, 2011 Papercraft Leave a Comment
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I’ve finished laying out forum hoard 90, turned out to be very small. I scaled my two guys to Sanity Studio’s scale which is slightly smaller than standard One Monk size.

Pick the files up here:

Cardboard Warriors Forum

Have fun with them and drop by the other artists forum boards  to give them a little bit of feedback as well if you like what they have been doing.

Drawing – An Update

Published February 24, 2011 Drawing 1 Comment
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It’s been 4 months since I released any kind of paper miniature, of course christmas, mmorpg’s and work haven’t helped the situation any. I was also feeling quiet a bit burned out and a little bummed out. I suspect this was how the MMORPG managed to grab me and suck me back in like some form of evil sucubbus. I did over Xmas and through some of Jan manage to get some drawing done. I’ve latched onto Ben Caldwells line of books, the two I’ve managed to find are Action Cartooning and Fantasy Cartooning. I’m firmly wedged into the fantasy mindset at the moment so I’m finding the Fantasy Cartooning a better guide/read.

First up I tried drawing some heads as they tend to be one of the things I find harder to draw. Here’s a small selection of the heads I drew, these ones I outlined with a thick black marker, but I drew them on plain notepad paper:

I was pretty happy with how the above came out so I tried my hand at goblin/monkey. In the book he’s a monkey but I changed him around a little so he gained more of a goblin look. I didn’t bother to outline him just the rough pencil drawing:

I was pretty happy with how they were turning out so I decided to try my hand at drawing a couple of NPC hero’s that I could submit to January’s Cardboard warriors forum hoard.

First up I tried a peasant hero, he hopefully has that slightly young but heroic look to him, I contemplated making him barefoot but stuck with boots in the end. The below shows him traced and ready for colouring in Inkscape:

Next up I tried a more grizzled veteran/Sargent, I wanted this guy to look tougher and older someone who’s seen to many battles and someone would think twice before crossing swords…well axes with him:

Next stage was to draw the reverse sides of the above two and give them some colour. I decided to give the grizzled veteran a scar across one eye, but the remaining colouring was pretty standard and I managed to pull it all off in Inkscape although with some difficulty:

 

I’m very happy with how they look coloured even if they are fairly simple equipment wise. I gave the peasant hero the heraldric device for one of my kingdoms on Etena, but I’ll probably re-draw the unicorn into a more cartoon form.  The above two will be available in January’s forum hoard and then once thats released I’ll do a special page of gift mimics and the above two for my paper miniature page here sometime in the near future.

They remind me a little of Disney cartoon characters but I like the look. I’m going to try drawing some more over the next few months and maybe a few monsters. Thoughts and comments on the style are more than welcome.

Cardboard Warriors Forum – Paper Miniature Hoard 89

Published February 23, 2011 Papercraft Leave a Comment
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Took me a bit of time to get this one together and I had some issues with getting some of the miniatures scaled correctly. However it’s finally finished the Cardboard Warriors Forum Hoard 89, the theme was Robots and Androids. Once again this is not my work but the work of all the people across at the Cardboard Warriors Forum

Links to the files:

Zip File

or from this Forum Topic:

Forum Hoard Topic

 

The Curse of MMORPG’s

Published February 22, 2011 Computer Gaming 2 Comments
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How does that line go “Hi my names Sirrob01 and I’m an MMORPG addict”, addict might be a bit of strong word maybe compulsive player might be a better phrase. Either way I’ve found myself sucked into the depths of online games for the past two months and wasted way to much time there hence the lack of projects. Which one you might ask well it’s an old game first released in korea way back in 1996 and then in the US in about 1998, I started playing late in 1999 it’s called Nexus the kingdom of the winds.

I wont go into some long rant about how it’s the greatest or worst game of all time, but after a decade of playing it and trying a lot of other MMORPG’s it managed to drag me back in something no other MMORPG has managed to do. It has very simple 2d graphics and a basic kill grind xp model except no level cap you just keep buying more stats…forever. However the amount and variety of content now available in the game is  huge and I haven’t seen two people dressed the same in the 2 months I’ve been back, of course the player base has slipped back to around 300-400 players at peak so it has a very small community feel to the game.

Okay on the off chance someone wants to try it, it is free to play to level 50 but the game doesn’t really start to 99 and the new player area your trapped in until you either register or reach lvl 25 really bites, it’s a nice area but no-one ever vists the area so it’s a barren waste land…okay on with some pictures:

The game has a very loose basis in Korean mythology and due to the small user base big events etc can be few and far between but they normally manage something for xmas/easter/valantines/halloween + 2-3 other events through the course of the year. Anyways  the upside to this post is I’ve started to cut right back on time spent on the game and have got right back into some paper miniatures.  However if anyone wants to go and have a look around the game it can be a fun diversion for an afternoon or 10000 :).

My WordPress Blog and Finishing projects

Published January 5, 2011 Wordpress 4 Comments
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First up I hope everyone had a great Christmas and Happy New Year or if you don’t happen to celebrate those Holidays just generally had a good break.

It’s been a year since I started my wordpress blog, I can’t believe how fast the time has gone and what an up and down year it’s been personally. I have been very happy with how the blog has worked it, it has really motivated me to finish a lot of projects that I suspect in the past I wouldn’t have finished. I still get distracted and go of track but at least I can see what I did finish.

It has been a big year for drawing and paper miniatures for me, I feel my drawing has come along way from the very first paper miniature I assembled way back in 2009 and not just from a drawing view but also colouring and layout. I only managed to finish one 3d model this year and I still find those very time consuming to design and  finish, I’m going to try and do 2-3 in 2011, we’ll see how that go’s :).

I did not post every project I did or completed on my blog some just seemed to small to worry about or I couldn’t really talk about them for longer than 1 line and a picture, so I left them out.

The grand total for completed projects this year on my blog is about 37 additional to this I had about 10 smaller things that never made it to post stage.

If anyone else is thinking of using a blog to document there projects and their completion I  recommend a wordpress blog it’s not perfect but it’ll cover you for 90% of what you want to do. My personal wishlist for additions to  wordpress would be:

  • Add wiki functionality even if it’s paid
  • Allow more different file types even if it’s paid ie block the ones you don’t want don’t block everything and allow a few. My biggest issue is with GSD files.
  • Integrate some sort of project % bar tool, other blogs have it but I had to hack my own together and it’s very ugly behind the scenes.

That’s about it for what I wish my blog could do.

I never for a  moment thought other people would visit my blog and read what I’d been doing and download the stuff I make avaliable but for those curious I’ve gone from 37 visitors in Jan 2010 to 2300 visitors in Dec 2010, oddly it wasn’t a steady increase of visitors over time it sort of jumped around June.

So to all the people now visiting my blog a big hello and I apologise for the bad spelling and punctuation, I am working on improving those :).

If your still on holiday continue to have a good one and for those of us back at work, there are only 51 weeks left of this year so time to get rolling with the projects.

I hope to have some new paper miniatrues rolled out this month although there a little different style wise to anything I’ve done previously, back to the projects for me :).

Cardboard Warriors Forum – Paper Miniature Hoards 87 & 88

Published December 23, 2010 Papercraft Leave a Comment
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Jim across at the cardboard warriors forum is taking a short break, while he’s away I volunteered to compile and post the forum hoards. I’ve now compiled two hoards on behalf of the contributors on the board. It should be noted these are not my work, well I did submit the parcel mimics in the Nov hoard:

The Forum hoards are a great way to get started in paper miniature creation so feel free to head over to cardboard warriors forum and submit something :).

The above miniatures as well as a bundle of others can be downloaded from this thread.

I hope everyone has a Merry Christmas and Great New Year and I look forward to producing some more paper miniatures in the new year and stay safe if your traveling.

T-shirt – Hmm What to call this

Published December 18, 2010 Uncategorized Leave a Comment
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I’m not sure if this really counts as a project, as I didn’t do much except fork money over :). I designed a T-shirt using Cafepress and one of my Chibi Koala drawings. I used the shaman as he is one of my favorites of them all (Pink glow caused by original backdrop):

Back (click image to remove jpg blur)

Front (click image to remove jpg blur)

I had to do a special very high resolution export of the shaman from Inkscape and added a thinner black boarder. As it turns out the high contrast that I use in my paper miniatures also looks good on a t-shirt. About the only thing I wish I could change would be to double the size of the rear image but its at cafe press maximum already. The shirt was pretty reasonably priced even with shipping it came out at $37 and there is something really nice about having your own drawings on a t-shirt.

I’ll probably do a few more for myself next year with different designs.  If anyone else is interested just leave a comment as I can always open Cafe press shop thing with various images on items.

Drawing – Practice

Published December 8, 2010 Drawing Leave a Comment

It’s been a while since my last post. I have not been too slack, I’m slowly working on my new mayhem layout in TLX from WWG but I seriously underestimated the amount of work required to build a 4×5 table of parts, which means it’s hard to stay motivated. This post is to show some of my doodles that I’ve been doing to practice drawing, I’d hardly call myself a pro drawer (or even gifted amature) but what I do seems to create reasonable mini’s if I post process them in inkscape a lot. You can see how my Dragon started and then turned out here.

Lately I’ve been very taken with Chuck Whelons style/work, but I’ve also developed a fascination with the artwork from the game Torchlight. The two styles are about as far about as you can get. It’d be nice if you could just download a style of drawing into your head like they do for martial arts on the matrix, but alas I’ll just have to practice.

Here are some of my doodles none of these took me longer than 1-2 minutes to do so there not exactly the 3 day master piece. I figure any practice is better than no practice so I fit in drawing when and where I can. I seem to have less problems drawing solid geometric shapes and architectural type stuff, organics still cause me heaps of problems and heads/faces/hair are a nightmare. On with the embarrassing pictures:

You might wonder why I post these horrifically badly drawn doodles up, I’m hoping over time to see an improvement in my drawing and by cataloguing a bunch of doodles every now and then I get a sort of snap shot in time.

I would encourage anyone who can draw reasonably and has an interest in paper mini’s to give it a shot at making some, after all if you can draw imagine the nice mini’s you could produce.

I’ll continue with my TLX WWG building.

Dave Graffam Patrol Boat– Papercraft Build

Published November 17, 2010 Builds , Papercraft Leave a Comment
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Dave Graffam has just released a Patrol boat model, basically a small skiff. I needed a break from my terrain building so I put one together. Dave releases all his models as layered PDF’s so you can get quiet a few different looking boats out of the one product. Dave does however include some print and go models ie no layers to tick on and off you just print and build. Unfortunately no GSD’s but there is something soothing about hand cutting a model now and again, I’m always surprised at how enjoyable I find hand cutting stuff.

The Patrol boat is a fairly simple model, there are a couple of free hand curves but nothing to worry about. I was able to cut out all the parts and edge them in about an hour and I had it fully assembled an hour after that. Assuming I can count the model consists of 16 parts, here are mine all cut out and ready to assemble:

I went with a blue theme so that it matched with my Pirate Bear Cog. Once you get all the parts cut out it’s a simple matter of gluing them together, make sure you follow Dave’s instructions as there are a couple of spots were if you glue things out of order you will be reprinting parts 🙂 . Here is my finished patrol boat:

You may have noticed the little piece of string and magnet at the bow of my boat in the above picture. I made one little change and that was to add a small piece of metal to the base of the boat and place a magnet in the mast. This allows me to remove the mast for storage making the boat much easier to store:

It’s a great little boat and I plan on making 2 or 3 more. The only minor issue I have with the design is that the front sail is mounted offset, however I plan on adding a few little tabs to the sail on my next one and gluing these inside the mast through some slots I’ll cut , similar to how the rudder is mounted.

It’s a great little boat and well worth the $3.95 price tag Dave has on it.

I better get back to building the WWG terrain I’m doing.

Project Status


WWII Project First Release

80%


B-tech Buildings Five

20%


Design Victorian era City

15%


Something Different

5%


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