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Here is a thing I figured out a couple years ago. Go to your local large pet store, and check out the fish tank decorations aisle. You'll thank me later!
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Sep 20, 2013 19:19
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Yes, exactly! e. A lot of it is nice heavy cast resin, pre-painted (but easy to paint over), and to reasonable scale for various model scales. I've seen lots of greco/roman columns, ruined statues, and pirate ships. And the pricing is way less than you pay for resin terrain pieces from companies making wargaming pieces.
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Sep 20, 2013 19:39
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A good vacuum pump should be rated by horsepower. That link from Troll only seems to rate its pump by "cfm" which is Cubic Feet per Minute, which is not a useful measure when you're creating a vacuum. It does claim to be able to make 29 inches of mercury (Hg) or better, but that's a function not only of the pump's power but also how well sealed the chamber is. My wife has a 1/2 horsepower pump sitting around somewhere, along with a section of 12" diameter PVC pipe and some plates that we were going to make a chamber out of, but she never finished the project. While we were researching though we figured out that there's a lot of 1/3 and even 1/4 horsepower pumps out there that are OK for some applications but not really good enough for effectively outgassing a viscous casting material. As for vacuum vs. pressure: vacuum works by causing dissolved gas to escape while pressure causes gas to dissolve. Much like the CO2 in a soda bottle; while under pressure the CO2 is dissolved in the liquid, remove the pressure and it bubbles out. Either option can work depending on the material itself and what you're doing with it. "Resin" encompasses a huge range of different types of casting materials, some of which will work well with vacuum, some with pressure, and some not needing either, again depending on the application. This makes it difficult to give a blanket recommendation. You need to be specific about exactly what casting material you're using. Often the manufacturer can then provide a recommendation as to whether you should vacuum treat or pressure treat during casting. Another key thing is to use a mixing technique that minimizes the amount of air bubbles you incorporate into the material before pouring your cast. Stirring is always better than shaking: mixing with a mixing tool designed to not incorporate air is better than mixing with a stick; etc. So, Berzerkermonkey, can you tell us exactly what resin you're using? Do you use a mold release agent? How are you mixing your resin? Are you using a temperature-sensitive casting process, and if so, what temp are you usually using?
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Oct 11, 2013 22:05
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Mold release agents obviously are mostly there to assist with releasing the part from the mold, but they can also act as surfactants to reduce the tendency of bubbles to cling to the surfaces of the mold. This is of course only important if you're having trouble with bubbles in the first place, which it sounds like you're not. I like the syringe idea, that probably reduces the amount of trapped air you get compared to pouring, too. e. A gallon of that stuff is over $80, wow. I guess you get what you pay for, though, it seems like pretty good poo poo. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 18:24 on Oct 12, 2013 |
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Oct 12, 2013 18:22
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berzerkmonkey posted:I can do one, but I won't be able to get to it until probably next week, if that's ok. I don't know if Leperflesh wants to do one as well and you can pick and choose information? My wife has done a fair amount of casting in various silicone, plaster, metal, and ceramic applications, and a friend of mine does costume prosthetics in several materials (one of them is called dragon skin!) but I personally don't do casting. I wouldn't feel good trying to do a complete writeup on my own. Also I'm about to be away for a week.
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Oct 13, 2013 00:47
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Warhammer Fantasy differentiates types of obstacles and what kinds of units they do or don't impede. For example, a fence does not impede infantry. Cover vs. concealment is another thing that gets split in different game systems. All of the things mentioned so far, would provide concealment (I can't see you) but not cover (if I shoot at you, I might hit the obstacle instead of you). Depending on whether either of the above things matters to you, light cover tends to be rickety/flimsy stuff like picket fences, shrubs and hedgerows, or small piles of junk; or stuff that is somewhere in-between hard cover (concrete berms, battlements, arrow slits) and open ground. There's also stuff that provides minimal cover but is harder to move through, like razor wire, tall fences, streams, swampy ground, etc. It sounds like you're asking for stuff that would work in a rural or suburban setting, and either future or fantasy, and that really narrows things down to natural stuff (trees, bushes, hedges, crops, fog, smoke) and universal human construction (a low brick wall, for example, isn't out of place in either type of setting).
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Dec 5, 2013 00:27
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signalnoise posted:Found a cool thing for people who are willing to outright buy terrain. It's eighteen dollars. For a crater! It's a cool idea but I'd expect anyone with a craft knife and a piece of styrofoam to be able to make that in under an hour. And that includes painting time. And time for the paint to dry.
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Dec 10, 2013 18:56
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I glue pink foam together using a hot glue gun. It bonds quickly and is solid and workable within 30 minutes or so. The heat kind of melts the foam just a little bit so that it doesn't create a gap between the pieces, but it doesn't actually chemically melt the foam so there's no fumes.
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Jan 4, 2014 23:59
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LumberingTroll posted:I've looked and in my area finding large bark like that is impossible... Home Depot. Or really any garden store is going to have some kind of big bag o' bark, for use in landscaping and mulching around plants in a garden.
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Jan 23, 2014 23:27
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berzerkmonkey posted:I have three words for you guys who want to make a lightweight table: hollow core door. Interior doors come in lots of dimensions, starting at 2 feet (but you can get much wider), and rarely as long as 8 feet (80" is much more standard). I used one as a desk for a very long time: I just propped it across two two-drawer filing cabinets, and I used the doorknob hole as a convenient place to run computer wires and lamp wires down through. This is a really good idea, though, and I even have a spare one (I had to hack apart the lock area to remove a broken lock so that I could replace the door so that I could get in to my office closet).
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Jan 30, 2014 21:37
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You can cut pink foam reasonably well with a box cutter (the kind with the snap-off blades). Extend the blade way out and it works. However, you need to periodically clean the blade. It won't look dirty, but it picks up some kind of residue that makes it bind against the foam. So you need to wipe the blade down with a solvent. That said, a hot knife or foam cutter is still very handy to have especially for the large cuts. So if I'm like, making a big hill, I'll cut the general hill shape out with a hot knife, and then use a box cutter blade to trip down and do the finer sculpting work.
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Feb 7, 2014 23:25
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TheBlobThing posted:I'm toying with the idea of gluing a grass mat to a light weight wooden board, so the mat doesn't skip around so easily. Which glue would you guys recommend? Not sure if I'm going to use my cloth GW grass mat or if I'll buy another, but is the type of glue I should use dependant on the type of material the mat is made of? I would use an aerosol spray-on glue. 3M makes something like that. It does dependo n what the mat is made of: I'd avoid wool felt, for example, because I'm not sure if the lanolin in wool might prevent it from sticking. I think you should maybe consider a flexible back instead, though. If it moves around too much, just adding a little weight would help, and you could still roll it up for storage.
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May 21, 2014 19:07
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Your "Pledge $100 or More" Full Custom tier is confusing because the title is "$100 or More" but the description says "up to $100". And then it says add-ons permitted. I suggest changing the language to say something like "Select $100 worth of items for a $100 pledge, and you get free shipping. Add-ons of any amount are permitted at this level with free shipping." or something like that. I'm wondering if you could have made the roman numeral numbered objective markers double-sided, or if that would add too much to the cost? If they were double-sided they could number up to 12 (or 14), or maybe have letters on the back or something. I like the gravestone pieces but it seems like a missed opportunity to make them the same round 50mm size that would let them plug in to your hills. The very last photo under "care and feeding" even implies visually that they'd fit, unless you look closely and realize you've just set them on top of blank inserts. I think you need to show photos of your water features without the water in them, early on. I got pretty quick that the items are sold unpainted (but I was expecting that), but at first I was thinking you'd somehow used just paint to get that water effect. I think it's really likely right now that you'll have a few customers who are surprised and disappointed that the lakes don't come with water in them. Actually if you sold a little bottle of water effects that contained exactly the right amount to fill one lake, that might be a cool add-on. I suppose it'd be a lot of extra work to do that. Maybe consider it as a stretch goal. The "Area Terrain" graphic has "flat inserts - $6 per 5" but in the next two items, rocky outcrops and giant crystal inserts, it doesn't say how many you get for the price. I assume it's five since that's how many you show, but I would go ahead and say that explicitly. You might specify exact number of pieces for the wall sets too. Now for some minor copyedits: quote:And nothing feels better than noticing that your opponent just moved their Warjack in front of a pond, allowing your own Warjack to charge it, knock the enemy Warjack back into the pond, snuffing out its furnace. Grammar. quote:You are free to paint your terrain as needed to sit your battlefield. quote:The tree stump inserts fit a wide variety of model trees, and allows you to create your own forests. quote:The reinforced stone walls include added bands of riveted metal. quote:The small pond and the large pond feature earthen banks with scattered rocks. It includes a deep recess that can be filled with water effects. Should be 'they include deep recesses.' quote:These gravestones are in varying states of disrepair, and contain the occasional steampunk flair and the a few homages to early 20th century horror writers. quote:If Mass Effect has taught me anything, it has taught me that when you enter a room full of scattered crates and boxes, a fight is brewing. quote:Gaming Aids quote:I prefer Envirotex Lite, which is available at many hobby and craft stores (such as Michael’s) in the US . There are a few extra spaces between sentences here and there, so if your word processor or text editor is capable of it, try to search for two consecutive space characters. MS Word will highlight these for you, as will OpenOffice Writer. Textpad lets you search for double spaces if you're working in raw .txt format. Overall your kickstarter page looks great. Your spelling is perfect, and your language use and grammar are generally very good. Most kickstarter pages I look at have errors, often a lot of terrible errors, so it's refreshing to see a page that obviously had a lot of care put into it. I just blew $500 on vet bills and I'm refinancing my house, but I'm still tempted to shower you with money, so that shows you've put together a compelling argument for your products. Good luck!
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Jul 14, 2014 18:50
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If you have more questions feel free to PM or email me (my username at gmail). Your contributions to the Oath thread alone mean you deserve all the free copyediting you want.
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Jul 14, 2014 23:11
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Fix posted:I'm worried that the mere act of priming it will render it unglueable. Mollify me, please. Nothing is unglueable, if you have the right glue... and there is a glue for everything. If you need to use wood glue or something, you can always take sandpaper to the edges that will be glued before you glue them.
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Aug 9, 2014 09:04
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I successfully glued pink foam to MDF using a hot glue gun. It is very firm and shows no sign of separation after a year. Re: Gorilla Glue: that is a brand, as well as a specific glue. Gorilla sells several different formulations. When discussing it it's good to say what glue you're talking about. The assumption is that you're talking about their basic "Gorilla Glue" (which is confusing) but I've seen cases where someone is actually talking about their cyanoacrylate or wood glue products. Basic Gorilla Glue is an expanding glue, so it is best used where you are trying to fill or bridge a gap, bond two porous surfaces together, or bond objects that need to flex a little bit. It is not intended to be workable after drying: for that you typically want some kind of epoxy, or a glue specifically designed to be workable.
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Sep 10, 2014 22:13
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Leperflesh posted:I successfully glued pink foam to MDF using a hot glue gun. It is very firm and shows no sign of separation after a year. I was working with smaller pieces, making hills and buildings out of pink foam. You definitely want to work very quickly, with a good hot glue gun that can pump out a lot of volume, because you need to jam the two sides together firmly before the glue cools much. I'm sure there are stronger bonds and stuff that you can take more time with, but you can't beat hot glue for price, and it's a useful thing for other general home stuff so we have it around anyway and I always prefer that over a specialized one-use product.
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Sep 12, 2014 00:27
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http://laughingsquid.com/hyper-detailed-miniature-dioramas-of-street-scenes/
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Oct 7, 2014 19:28
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Also currently one British Pound is worth about $1.59 so you can assume a one pound store is selling stuff that is 59% better.
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Nov 9, 2014 07:42
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Dogs are not actually colorblind. Their eyes are dichromatic, so they don't see the same spectrum as humans (our eyes are trichromatic), but they can discern between yellows, blues, and violets. Green/orange/red/yellow probably look similar (different shades of the same hue).
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Nov 13, 2014 00:25
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http://www.thejealouscurator.com/blog/2014/12/19/amy-bennett/ Miniature dioramas set up and then meticulously painted. The painting is amazing but I think the diorama work is pretty drat good too.
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Dec 31, 2014 21:40
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A Mean Cow posted:That video has lava and fire as well as shirtlessness and mulletry, I approve. there is no lava in that video. Molten metal, coke, and slag, yes.
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Jan 19, 2015 20:26
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If you want to kill whatever is living in your dirt or sand, and also convert decomposables to nondecomposables, just bake your stuff in the oven at a high temp for an hour. Also, at 28mm, course sand (like playground sand) looks like huge gravel. If you want basing/terrain material that will actually look like to-scale sand or dirt, you need a very fine sand. Maybe look for a bag of "Quikrete 1961-52 Commercial Grade Fine Sand 50 Pound", which Google tells me costs $8. Obviously plus a whole bunch for shipping if you have it shipped, but this is stuff used in bulk for construction so anywhere that sells construction supplies is likely to carry it or something similar. If you don't care about how course it is, this is fine and extremely cheap. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 21:56 on Feb 2, 2015 |
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Feb 2, 2015 21:54
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Just smear your base with white glue and then lean over and rub your head really hard and let the dandruff settle on the surface.
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Feb 2, 2015 22:07
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Has anyone tried a spray-on glue, like 3M's? They have a wide range of options.
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Apr 20, 2015 18:46
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moths posted:Does anybody know where I can get the Reaper Bones Kaladrax Reborn base? It is not currently sold separately, so you'd probably have to find someone who doesn't want their base for some reason. You might ask in the Reaper thread.
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Apr 28, 2015 00:38
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That's not very honest, actually. It's an admission that they're massively behind (which everyone already knew), and a statement that they're not going to catch up. They're just going to admit that massive waits for products are how they operate. It's completely unacceptable. If you have more orders than you can deliver, you stop loving taking orders. If your business is so successful that orders are exceeding your ability to produce, you scale up. You're charging enough over your costs to do that, right? No? Oh, then you need to raise your prices. You need to find financing in order to scale, often, but with a balance sheet showing your booming sales and backlog, how hard can that be? It's blatantly amateurish and completely unacceptable behavior for a company to accept an ever-growing backlog of orders, and simply shrug and say "well, we can't really meet these, eventually we hope to". And then also apparently take a super-lovely attitude about refunds: "oh, we intend to refund you, when we can, but not right away, it takes time, I guess you can sue us if you want." The only way it takes time is if you're funding refunds with money from new orders because you already spent the money you collected before you made someone's order, e.g., you are charging too little or your costs are overrunning or something. Who the gently caress is going to sue you over a $100 order? You basically know that nobody can. Even a shop that ordered a hundred mats from you probably hasn't got the time or money to hire a lawyer to come after you for the money you've stolen. Ugh. gently caress those guys.
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May 1, 2015 19:15
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Yeah, that's a real backhanded paragraph. Throwing in the whole spamming email inbox thing. Hey, guess what fuckwits, if you rip off your customers and don't respond to complaints and don't make timely refunds, they're going to be very angry and they're going to tell you about it, and that's not "spam."
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May 1, 2015 19:21
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berzerkmonkey posted:This is a good line too (emphasis mine) : The best part is that he's phrased it as a snarky "oh sob sob we committed a criiime" thing, like, mocking his customers, but in actual fact - at least by US law - Zuzzy has been committing actual crimes: quote:Federal law (the Mail or Telephone Order Merchandise Rule) requires retailers that process orders by mail, telephone, or the Internet to deliver items within 30 days. If you have not received your order within that time frame, you have the right to a full refund of the purchase price. Likewise, retailers are required by law to explain your right to a full refund for undelivered goods. Failure to deliver within 30 days, and also failure to refund (in a timely manner), is against the law. Here's guidance from the FTC, directly to businesses: quote:What is the Mail, Internet, or Telephone Order Rule? quote:How Quickly You Must Make a Refund Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 21:31 on May 1, 2015 |
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May 1, 2015 21:22
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A Mean Cow posted:I had scrapped a few kickstarter plans in the past due to lack of sample material and no time to work on it, but now I do have samples of stuff, and it looks pretty good! Really love the music choice for this video, LOL. Sleeping Beauty. The text crawl seemed really jerky for some reason, though.
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Jul 28, 2015 22:47
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dexefiend posted:
Just a suggestion but if you're up for a little more effort, I think stoney fields of rocks look much more realistic when there's some variation in the colors of the rocks. Even when all of the rocks in a location come from the same parent rock, most rocks still have some variation in color from one area to the next. And loose rock fields are often formed from multiple parent rock sources. So if you went through and did a stain or wash of, say, one big rock or two to five smaller rocks per base, switching between one or two different stains, I think you'd wind up with a more natural look. You could even do your drybrush with the same color and it'd still show some subtle variation. For example:  At first glance, all the rocks in this image seem to be "the same color" but if you look closely, there's a big one in the foreground (bottom left) that is a bit lighter in color... and if you start looking at the rocks in the middle ground, there are differences in shade and hue between them too. Here's another example:  A lighter base tone, and again most of the rocks here are from the same source, but there's variations in hue and shade. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 22:36 on Aug 5, 2015 |
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Aug 5, 2015 22:31
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http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2015/09/miniature-calendar/
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Sep 18, 2015 23:56
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I'm not sure if this is the right thread, but we're discussing papercraft so it seems timely: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wt99b5ccwqk Made entirely out of manila folders (so, basically, medium weight card) and glue. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 20:28 on Dec 12, 2015 |
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Dec 12, 2015 20:25
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This doesn't matter in terms of design, and actually it makes a ton of sense to have the door slide upwards and out so users can just have an open doorframe if they want... ...but doors that slide upward like that are really goddamn stupid design from a "making a building" standpoint. Garage doors are segmented and roll onto the ceiling. Imagine if you had to design the second story with a slot for the doors to slide up into! And there has to be a second story or something, and you can't put doors like that on the "top floor" unless there's more room above it for the doors to go... Meanwhile you've got that wall, right there. A pocket door into the wall is just better industrial design. OK so anyway, I think they look pretty cool but I think a door might want a window in it. You need that so that you can peer through the bulkhead's window so that:
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Mar 15, 2016 06:52
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NTRabbit posted:Is it possible to make it look like polished obsidian, or is that equally boring? There's a couple reasons you won't ever find big buildings made from obsidian: it's more or less impossible to quarry in large blocks, and, it's not suitable as a structural stone. That said, maybe in the 41st millenium, they figured out how to do it? So go for it if you think it'd look cool. Actually more broadly for the terrain thread, though: I've always thought most hobbyists assume stone is grey without ever having actually looked at much stone. I took a bunch of geology courses in college and one thing that struck me is that stone comes in basically every color, and most of it really isn't grey once you look at it. And yet every single stone wall, stony outcrop, and stone building terrain seems to be within the same color range from "dark grey" to "medium grey." Boring! Stone usually isn't even a uniform color when it comes from the same quarry. When you paint up your stone-based terrain objects I encourage you to do some googling for real stone walls, buildings, etc. and pay close attention to the actual colors you see. Maybe even use an eyedropper tool in a graphics editor like Paint or whatever. You might be surprised. This wall is mostly not grey:  And these are all quite typical stone colors too:    http://www.torrisonstone.com/portfolio/walls/ Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 17:56 on Jul 7, 2016 |
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Jul 7, 2016 17:53
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BULBASAUR posted:Am... am I the only one who can't see a single image? I tried to open the links after quoting your posts, but imgur throws an error. They're loading fine for me. Make sure you're not browsing SA in https: mode and forcing images to try to load that way.
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Nov 15, 2016 22:23
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The etymology of the word solder shows that pronouncing the l is either a modern affectation after the French origin, or (archaic) correct Latin.quote:Modern form in English is a re-Latinization from early 15c. The loss of Latin -l- in that position on the way to Old French is regular, as poudre from pulverem, cou from collum, chaud from calidus. The -l- typically is sounded in British English but not in American, according to OED, but Fowler wrote that solder without the "l" was "The only pronunciation I have ever heard, except from the half-educated to whom spelling is a final court of appeal ..." and was baffled by the OED's statement that it was American. Related: Soldered; soldering. The noun is first attested late 14c. Regardless, pronunciation "rules" are merely codifications of common usage. Enough people pronounce the ell that it is now "correct" because that's actually how language works. e. For reference, Fowler was a British authority on the English language. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 00:44 on Feb 15, 2017 |
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Feb 15, 2017 00:41
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No way should you use expensive miniature paint at any step of a process that involves making 100 of those things, dude! Switch entirely to cheapo hobby lobby paint, and get some minwax stain for your staining, and you'll save yourself a lot of money. That said, it looks pretty excellent. I'd say make sure you have the occasional two or three stones of the same color together, or the different colored stones will look too uniformly distributed. Lastly, if you want to go one extra mile, I'd suggest you fill in the gaps on the "floor" stones a little bit vs. the "wall" stones. They'd fill with dirt, dust, etc. from being used pretty quickly, so if you want your dungeon to look like it's old & used, the floors should be well-trod. Maybe your first step before starting to paint would be to smear a coat of spackle or putty or whatever across the stones and then wipe with a damp cloth to reveal the stones themselves but still leave the cracks mostly filled?
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Mar 7, 2017 19:36
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http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2017/03/miniature-urban-buildings-by-joshua-smith/   
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Apr 11, 2017 00:14
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OK so turns out the dude Joshua Smith who I posted earlier who made that awesome building is showing it at Art Market 2017 in San Francisco and it's for sale: https://www.artsy.net/artwork/joshu...rancisco%202017 Just $21k and it could be yours! Let me know if I should go grab it for anyone
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Apr 20, 2017 00:04
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