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Work-in-progress

Everything before it’s done.

Orks – Gorkamorkanaut

Posted on October 5, 2017

I went from 0 painting projects to 5 on my desk, within the span of a week. I played a game of 40k, which inspired me to work on some killa kans I found in my bitz box. I also assembled 10 grots to fill the 3-Troop minimum I needed for the army.

But then I realized I should finish what I started — the gorkamorknaut has been looming in my ork case for a year and a half. After last we saw this model, I painted it a watered down silver, blue and orange and then had a game with it and realized it was shit, and looked like shit and left it alone for a long time. With 8th ed out, Orks are in a great place and this guy is looking awesome and feeling awesome and deserves some more love. Here’s a photo of where I left it.

I sent that photo to Clayton, who suggested I pull out my airbrush and do it in similar colours to the rest of my ork army, which meant a lot less silver. And since I moved, airbrushing is a lot easier — I have a deck I can do it on, instead of needing to pull everything down into the apartment parking lot and being super awkward and cold. I promptly masked a bunch of stuff, pulled out my blues and went to town!

After I was done, I was feeling pretty good about the whole process. Airbrushing isn’t as difficult as I think it is! I can do this!

…why the fuck is this piece highlighted upside down?!?!! 🙁 🙁 🙁 With the masking tape on, I had mistaken bottom for top and this is where I got. I pulled all the airbrush stuff out again after work and tried to fix it. Unfortunately, because it was a little cold and because I only had the one piece to paint, the paint wasn’t drying as quickly as my patience needed it to, and so I ended up with this strange speckled pattern from paint being blown around. I thought it looked kind of cool…and then I tried to put another layer over it which gave the arm almost a complete sharp edge where I’d previously had a speckled gradient. God damnit. I put the piece down, hoping it wasn’t as bad as it looked, and put my stuff away and went to bed.

Woke up early this morning, looked at the arm and no, it looked like shit. Baby was still sleeping, which was odd, but fortunate so I pulled all the airbrush stuff out again and repainted the arm a third time. I started to worry that it was getting to thick in layers, but I think I’d rather to thick than shittily highlighted!

Here’s a photo of all of the pieces all done, with the masking tape still on the arm, and it is properly highlighted.

I did a quick sepia wash on the klaw arm and edge highlighted the head to see how I liked it, then put it all together to check it out. Looking good!

Funny story about the kustom force field — somewhere inside the naut is a magnet that the KFF sticks to. I can’t find or figure out where I glued that magnet so that the KFF would stand on the outside! (just realized my old photos from a year ago show where it goes :P)

Looking forward to finishing this guy! (but a couple other projects have priority, for reasons you’ll see)

Work-in-progress

Building Designs

Posted on August 9, 2017

Pictured from bottom-left, zagging up to top-right, are the 4 prototypes I printed of the building. This is design, ladies and gentleman — the slow and inexorable force of fucking up constantly until you get something that doesn’t suck as much as it used to.

Remember from last time a few constraints — 5x5x2, one piece of letter sized paper, opens at top, holds models, stackable.

Design #1 was an inch to short, and the roof pieces were an inch to short on both sides. This was just a CAD measurement error on my part – whoops! On the plus side, building this was instructional since I got to hold and handle the model and see what it’s physical properties were — would it hold models? If not, how would I make it do so?

#2 fixed the basic mistakes from #1, and added a tab onto the end of the roof pieces. You can’t see the tab, but it’s very functional. Because of geometry, the tab prevents the roof from collapsing when you put weight on it. This design still sags in when you put something heavy on it.

#3 added “gutters” inside, and additional tabs to each roof piece so it has 3 floating tabs and 1 glued tab. The gutters were there to prevent the roof from sagging, but ultimately had to be removed. They were a real pain in the ass to assemble each time, which makes it a non-starter.

At this point, I decided to drop the “one piece of paper” constraint. The roof has to be 2 pieces of paper because of this constraint, but if I can use two then I have a lot more options. #4 has the roof as a single piece, which greatly increases it’s strength and ability to not sag or slide when you put models on it. It doubles the cost of printing (printing costs by the sheet, not by the printed ink), but is easy to assemble, strong and looks good when assembled (unlike #3 which is a disaster when assembled). I still want to pull out that metal Gladiator Titan and see what happens, but I think #4 may be my winner.

This process was something I learned after building the shipping containers. Designing your design process! You have to define the physical object first. With the shipping containers, I thought I’d settled the object, so I starting making textures. Then, when playing with the object I found that my object was to big to fit on a piece of letter sized paper! So I had to go back and re-do a lot of the textures, wasting a lot of time.

Work-in-progress

Paper – AFLogistics Building

Posted on August 4, 2017

AFLogistics is a mining corporation that owns the mining rights on many worlds. Their designs are utilitarian – they must be designed to stack, and fit into ships cargo holds as efficiently as possible. Cubes and rectangular pyramids are thus their bread and butter. Which is why I’m focusing on simple designs, even though this building is in my “inspiration” list. 🙂

Here’s a draft from last night:

Design Constraints

I put some models on my cutting mat and decided that a 5″x5″ building would be a good start. Much smaller and it isn’t that impressive. (must)
I want it to be 2″ tall, just above the height of a Gates of Antares model in armour. (must)
The roof must support models. It should even support heavy ones. I keep thinking about a Gladiator Titan.
The design must be foldable.
It must be able to be stacked so that people can make multiple levels.
It should fit on Letter (8.5″ x 11″) sized paper so it’s more mass market.
It should be a single piece of paper.
It should open at the top.

A Brief Aside About Priorities

I’ve organized my constraints by “should” and “must” to help keep me focused. If whatever design I come up with doesn’t fit the “musts”, then it has to be discarded. If it doesn’t suit a “should”, then I have to think carefully about whether that design could be changed to suit, or whether I want to discard that constraint.

You have to be realistic about assigning priorities. Obviously, you could put “must” on everything, but then you haven’t actually prioritized anything, you’ve just made a list.

Back to Constraints

For the shipping container design, #4 was a little flexible so I made two different designs. I couldn’t find a design that was strong and foldable, so I made my customer decide which to use. This isn’t a great solution, but it did allow me to put a product out. Something I started worrying about was “endless design”, where you just keep revising until you lose all your energy.

Constraints #6 and #7 are opposing. I’ve made a few designs that would do one or the other. The one pictured above is the start of a design that might suit both, but I think probably won’t stand up to #3. So then do I drop one of 6 or 7 (can’t drop 3), or modify the design somehow to allow 3 to be met? We’ll see shortly, because I’m going to draw this in a CAD program, print it and build it to see what happens.

Featured Images Work-in-progress

New Ventures – Printable, foldable terrain

Posted on August 3, 2017

My daughter was born! For this, I took 3.5 weeks off work to feed and otherwise support my wife while she fed and otherwise supported the baby. (also, feeding the baby :)) I had a thought a few weeks ago to look into designing printable, foldable paper terrain. My goal was to be able to populate a table of science fiction wargaming from a flat folder. I set about drawing and printing! I’ve attached a ton of photos at the bottom of this post. 🙂

Today I’m writing because my first, boring, but awesome, piece is available for purchase! I’ve called myself Geeksong Paper, and my store is available here: http://paper.geeksong.com. For the low-low price of $1USD ($1.30CAD), you can own (license? digital shit is weird) 2 PDFs I’ve designed for shipping containers. One of the PDFs is designed to be folded and unfolded super easily. The other is designed to be really strong and sturdy. You have them both. Maybe you want stronger terrain? Maybe, like me, you want to take up less space in your expensive city-bound apartment? The choice is yours!

Here’s that link again:

http://paper.geeksong.com

And the shipping container in action, with some sweet Concord models and an awesome F.A.T. mat! (both used with permission, the mat is exclusive property of TABLEWAR)

I’ve got a ton of other ideas in my mind I want to draw and build. I’ll be going back to work next week, which sucks. But in about 4-5 months I’m getting laid off, which also sucks, but also means I’ll have more time to draw!

And last, here’s a bunch of photos and talking about the process of building:

I started with simple pop-up building techniques, like childrens pop-up books type things. I had a base and a folding cube. The base allowed me to build with something heavy on the bottom of the model, so that it would pull it apart when opened. The downside is that every model had to have a base, which meant I couldn’t stack. Above is a photo of one design that tried to have the base smaller than was necessary to protect the model while transporting it. I removed the base pretty shortly after this.

Next was a few weeks of math and frustration. I was trying to build a internal cross-brace that would pull the short side edges inward more so they would be flat when opened.

My desk at one point. It got much much worse before it got better. So much paper! We just yesterday came back from Ikea with a float shelf that is now mounted above my desk. With an impending walking-child (right now she’s just a lying-down-child) I needed to get fun and playful things off my desk.

The last cross-brace design. There are 4 different braces inside here, and every single one of them is useless. Because, what I realized much to late, they are necessarily designed to be exactly the same length at all times. Which means there is no pull mechanism, the sides just move in the same way as they would without it. This mechanism could be used to support (hence “brace”…), but it can’t be used to pull. I moved on.

I tried a design that had the roof as a separate piece. I liked this one because it was very flat and smooth. The short sides were smooth, the roof was smooth and the building folded along its natural folds. The downside of this one was that you wouldn’t be able to put heavier models on top, because the roof was just pressure-fit inside. I briefly toyed with creating a groove system for the roof to fit into, but this is about when I decided I’d rather get something finished, than play with designs forever.

Which is when I set up the store and put my designs into a selling-ready mode! Which took a long while as well. Not only did I need to print each design many times at home to make sure it was perfect, I also had to get it printed at a Staples to work out any bugs in that process as well. I wrote and photographed and even video’d instructions on how to to assemble it. And that’s not even including the time to set up the shop, get it looking the way I wanted, and working out all the bugs in the payment process.

My next project is to make a simple building in a similar design as the shipping container. I’ll make another post for that. 🙂

Musings & Meta Tournaments Work-in-progress

Blog Comments and Batter Drones

Posted on July 5, 2017

I noticed the other day that comments on old posts were closed, which is not a situation I want to be in — I’d like people to be able to comment on anything, at any time in the past! I just found the setting that was messing with that and turned it off, so hopefully its fixed now!

I needed more batter drones for big games of Antares. One of our guys bought an army online that had some drones done up like this —

It’s the metal spotter drones (of which I have a million extras) and the phalanges from the subverter matrix. Cut off the drone wings, glue on the phalanges, and be very, very patient.

The price of Wet Coast GT this weekend went down by half, because the TO decided to make it a one-day event. Unfortunately, with summer finally here in Vancouver, the event isn’t getting as much love as it should. So if you’re in the area and want to play a big megabattle, and get some swag, come on up to Vancouver (or down to us, or sideways)!

I’m still really hoping I get to go. My brand new daughter is still in the hospital, and isn’t allowed to leave until she shows she can survive outside of a medical environment. She just has to figure out “eating” and she gets to come home (she’s premature). If she does that before this weekend, it’s all hands on deck at home as we struggle to figure out what life looks like in this new world order!

If I do get to WCGT, I’m planning to bring my good camera and I’ll see about getting some quality photos up here next week. I think I also need to replace my phone camera lens, if possible – it’s become very hazy.

Work-in-progress

Antares – X-Howitzer and Airbrushing

Posted on May 27, 2017

A friend was doing some airbrushing of 40k tanks recently and after he showed me his work I was inspired to think about airbrushing again. It was 4 years ago the last time I wrote about airbrushing, and these articles remind me a bit of how I was feeling — rather like I should sell the damn thing. I had no skill with it and keep messing up. My friend said his was a breeze – start ‘er up, do your thing and BOOM, nice looking shading. I bought some new things to help — a new Golden High Flow Acrylic in fluorescent blue, and a Wicked Colour airbrush colour in light blue. In the earlier of those two articles, I appear to have also bought new toys to help, and they appear not to have helped.

What did help a lot this time…is having a deck. I pulled all my stuff onto my deck, plugged it in and relaxed. Previously my outdoor space was shared space — a parking lot or shared rooftop — and I had no ability to just sit and play, I had to constantly be worried about whether someone would come along and ask what I was doing there, painting the parking lot floor.

I had planned on doing the lighter colour, then ringing it with the darker colour. Which, it turns out, is not the correct way to do this. 😛 So this first photo is that. I had the PSI set to 15 and held the brush relatively close, to get more intense colour with a thinner line.

I went back afterwards and re-did the lighter colour and ended up here. This I did at about 30 PSI and further away, which diffused the paint.

My next plan is to follow my C3 steps, and wash into the recesses some watered down blue wash, then nuln oil the shadows. Then clear up mistakes with Ulthuan Grey and whatever the GW white is called these days. I think this guy will be done pretty soon!

There is an airbrushing course happening in Vancouver on June 17th. Unfortunately, I’m busy that day with another hobby — I’m in a circus show. 😛

Work-in-progress

Blood Bowl – Skaven Rat Ogre and Thrower

Posted on April 14, 2017

This was a super productive night! I made dinner (plus lunches for a few days), watched a movie with my wife, did some work on my top-secret coding project and got a bunch of shading done on these guys!

Once again I tried one of the Secret Weapon washes, and once again I was disappointed. I was only planning to use a little, but the dropped bottle had clogged and ended up spewing Red Black all over my palette. At which point I figured I’d use it, since it was there. But it again left a glossy sheen over my model. >.< Luckily it was an early step after basecoating, so there will be lots more pigments to go over it.

Really happy with the big guy! It’s a really nice model, with nice big muscles to shade and good composition for my colour choices. He’s going to look super awesome on the table! I want to drop some green onto his base to keep it in line with the rest of the team, but the more I paint it the more I think it just looks great as-is.

My defensive thrower is looking less awesome, but still pretty good. I think he needs a nice black rim on his base…

Work-in-progress

Antares – Concord Plasma Cannon Team

Posted on April 9, 2017

I totally forgot I asked Mike to buy these for me, and picked up the D2 drones a while back because they were actually available whereas this guy was not at the time. I wanted some heavy firepower, as my opponents were starting to bring res 12 models to the table, and the plasma support team is a relatively inexpensive way to bring that down to res 6.

But now that I have the bikes, I have a different plan. An “eggs, meet basket” plan. I’ll take the bike squad, and buy a compactor drone and stuff the plasma cannon into it. I’m planning for Wet Coast, right, so flexibility is good. The bikes are a super mobile unit for taking objectives, and when they get to their destination they’ll be a giant piece of artillery too.

Could also be a terrible idea, a 200 point unit that loses their super gun on a lucky shot. >.>

Work-in-progress

Blood Bowl – Skaven Rat Ogre and Thrower

Posted on April 5, 2017

I finally made enough in-game money to buy my rat ogre!!!!

This is a big deal. I’ve had about 16 games this season, and I’ve been saving up to buy him since the first one.

I bought one a large number of games ago, but he died 3 turns into his career. Like dead, apothecary, re-roll to dead. I’ve been living from paycheque to paycheque since that day, having many dead rats and needing to buy basic linerats to keep the team going. I’ve rolled twice on Expensive Mistakes and lost 50k to it. I almost played a game where I got 800k in inducements. >.<

But finally, my last game I got my break. I rolled a 3 for cash, won the game and had +2 FAME. I took the chance and re-rolled the treasury and it came up 6!

So now I have to paint the guy. And also this thrower, who is also a big deal.

One guide I read recommended an offensive and a defensive thrower. The off. thrower has all the good throwing skills – accurate, extra hand, +ag, etc. The def. thrower you give him block first skill. You put him on the table because you want a model with Pass and Sure Hands so you can get all the defensive touchdowns.

I almost forgot to put paint on the thrower, but managed to get some colours on him from the remnants of the base coat I used on the rat ogre. These are the last models in the team that don’t have any paint on them, (although not the last models to be finished — lots in a “half done” stage) so it’ll be nice to have a “fully painted” team. Hopefully I can keep this painting up into the next month to finish the team off. 😛

Work-in-progress

Antares – Concord Bikes

Posted on April 1, 2017

Wet Coast GT is being planned, and Clark is planning to run Gates of Antares at it and I’m doing helper-monkey things and planning to play in it. I finally broke down and decided that if I was going to try to win a game (I did win one, a few weeks back) I needed bikes. Speed is going to be the name of the game, and bikes are the best speed Concord has.

Similar to the D2 drones I started (and didn’t finish), I drilled into the existing flying-stand holes in these models to allow the flying stand peg to sit deeper into the model. The guy in the back has an unnaturally long stand, but I’m confident the other two won’t fall over when you look at them.

These are nicer models than I gave them credit for in the photos. I thought they looked dumb and disproportionate, but I’m pretty happy with them on my desk. Except the heads, which are the softest cast I’ve seen out of Warlord. >.>

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