Browsing Tag

aflogistics

Paper – AFLogistics Building First and Second Floors

Posted on September 8, 2017

It’s been a long while since I wrote. I may have written about the baby, and the baby takes up a lot of time. One of the things I like about this new paper building hobby is that I can do it in whatever chunks of time I have available to me. Baby is asleep for 15 minutes? Add another layer of texture. Baby is eating with mom? Take some photos.

It’s slow going, but I’m happy to announce that I have 2 new products available for purchase!

The first floor has a door, while the second floor has no door and has tabs that fit into the first floor to keep it relatively stable.

I initially started designing these to play Gates of Antares with, but GW has since announced the impending release of a new Necromunda so now I’m thinking about gantries and ladders and walkways, because that’s what makes Necromunda awesome!

I now have 3 products available for sale on Geeksong Paper!

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. 🙂