Chez Ebbles

Blog Moved

2011-10-06T14:29:00.001-05:00

I've outgrown Blogger, so I've set up a new blog/site on the same host as my old business website.

http://www.ebbles.com/

Update your bookmarks and see you there!

My newest acquisition

2011-09-29T15:08:00.001-05:00

I jumped on a Kindle ebook reader yesterday, after 4 things happened this week: Amazon released a new Kindle lineup starting at $79, my Amazon store card balance recovered from the Photoshop CS5 purchase a few months ago, I came into a ton of free ebooks earlier in the week courtesy of the Baen Free Library that I don't like reading on my laptop, and I had also gotten to thinking that it'd be fun for me to get back into developing interactive fiction with a toy like this.

It arrived a couple of hours ago. Yeah, I opted for one day shipping because patience is not my strongest suit, and I didn't want to wait until Monday or Tuesday to get it. I just ordered a second one about half an hour ago, as a matter of fact. It was the only way I could get the first one back from Mrs E, who spent most of the afternoon running around the duplex playing keep-away and triumphantly shouting that it belonged to her.

Anyway, about the interactive fiction thing: I've always loved choose-your-own-adventure books and text adventure games. They're a fun programming challenge, have a retro charm, and unlike graphically sophisticated media like videogames or movies, the barrier to entry is much lower. All you need (besides the tools) is some imagination and the ability to write engaging prose, and the fact that it leverages skills that I don't routinely use at work makes dabbling in interactive fiction a very enjoyable diversion for me.

The Kindle software development kit isn't out of private beta yet, but that's okay because I'm planning to write a web-based interactive fiction engine in PHP that serves Kindle-friendly webpages as output. It's gonna be fun, especially since I want to use Guncrawl mechanics to handle task and combat resolution under the hood.

Uppity Robots: The Resurrection

2011-09-21T11:58:00.003-05:00

Well, not quite a resurrection, but it sounded cute!

A few weeks ago, the Saga of the Uppity Robots stuff was moved to the Ebbles Labs section of the WWG storefront, and in the process of doing that, my interest in that product line was rekindled a bit, especially while composing the product descriptions.

Bad fiction occasionally has an inspirational effect, and it led to these 2 new models:

Apsara

Haflinger

I wanted both of these models to sort of stay in the same family as the Crotale and the Percheron visually, while looking a bit newer and more "modern", as it were. I also addressed several design aspects of their progenitors that bugged me. Unlike the Crotale, the Apsara actually has room on the underside for proper-sized missile armament. The Haflinger has a more efficient internal layout than the Percheron, with a rear ramp and outboard engine nacelles. It also has a proper set of landing gear that gives it enough ground clearance to hang external pod armaments.

There's also supposed to be a third model in this set, which will be a completely redesigned Marauder in Trilateral Union markings, and I'm likely to include the new Onager with the trailers in the same set just to round things out a bit.

I'm working on these models in my spare time, so I'm not sure when they'll be released. Considering how overdue Chez Ebbles was for an update, I figured it couldn't hurt to post the beginnings of another Workbench series.

Roll Arena released!

2011-09-02T01:10:00.001-05:00

The Roll Arena is now out! You can grab it here: Roll Arena Product Page

September Ebbles Labs releases

2011-09-01T20:40:00.002-05:00

I've added 6 items to the Ebbles Labs section of the WorldWorks catalog.

First up, 3 oldies-but-goodies from 2007, all of which have received a bit of a texture refresh and now offer full machine-cutting compatibility:

Next, we have 3 new bundles for the Saga of the Uppity Robots models. There's nothing really new here and half the planet probably owns these models by now, but I'm mentioning them because I thought you guys might like to see the shiny new promos and little backstory nuggets on the product pages.

Here's an example of one of the new promos:

You can visit the Ebbles Labs section here: Ebbles Labs

Broadening my horizons

2011-08-31T13:10:00.000-05:00

Denny asked me last Thursday if I wanted to work on something with him, and I jumped at the chance for several reasons, the biggest one being the fact that it was a chance to further develop and iron out a new collaborative workflow.

This is the project in question, the Roll Arena, which is a dice-rolling game aid:

Denny had the idea for this set a fair while back, and he'd done some initial prototyping, but he didn't decide to take it across the finish line until recently. I designed a new enclosure for it, and he textured it. It was a fun project!

You can read more about it in the preview thread on the WWG forum.

Podtel 6 and HL 300 released!

2011-08-15T18:47:00.000-05:00

Get 'em here:

Podtel 6
DMC-Northstar HL 300

Miscellaneous updates

2011-08-10T03:03:00.000-05:00

First, I want to apologize for being so scarce. I normally don't have any trouble keeping up with all the various forums and whatnot, but I've been extremely busy as of late. Some highlights:

The Ebbles download area got borked a while back due to some settings changes made by my hosting provider. These changes are normally a good thing, but they ended up affecting a couple of scripts that deliver the downloads. After some lengthy back and forth with technical support, we finally found the cause and have fixed most of the problems. However, there may still be a couple of missing files, and I still need to add the old free downloads to the system and merge the Ecwid store's downloads with the old ones.

Incidentally, I had already set up and planned to surprise all of my old customers with full access to all of my old products, but the technical issues forced me to put the official announcement on hold until they were resolved. I noticed, however, a tendency for many of those customers to obviously discover that they suddenly had a lot of downloads they hadn't actually paid for, then instead of emailing me on the off chance that it might have been a mistake, most of these people just tried to binge-download it all in a single go and run off like common looters. How rude.

On the WWG front, some of you likely know about that little whoopsie where some people are missing downloads. Long story short, the process of migrating data from the old WWG store to the new WWG store relied upon the product SKU to match up products and generate downloads. However, the SKUs for some of the products changed at some point, so these products were erroneously handled as discontinued legacy products. Those show up in your order history, but not in your collections. To make things even more hilarious, we did not realize this had occurred until well after the store had gone live and a lot of new orders had been processed. So, we couldn't just wipe the slate clean and redo the migration, and it meant I had to do the programming equivalent of repairing an engine while it's still running. It took me a while, but I've developed and tested a fix for that issue. As it requires turning the store off for maintenance for a little while, I'm scheduling it to happen during off-peak hours during an upcoming weekend.

I've also been minding the store in Denny's absence. The guy finally caught some vacation time this past weekend through Wednesday, and I hope he made the most of it. I've been keeping an eye on the dev forum, the public forum, the store backend, and making sure the scheduled releases went smoothly. Speaking of which, Matt's done a bang-up job on the new Mayhem Traffic set, so check it out!

I've also been moonlighting in graphic design. Mrs E works for a local school for certified nurse aides, and she's the senior CNA instructor there. She asked me to update their advertising flyer, because the old one was pretty dire. Apparently I've still got the touch for that sort of thing, because they're in love with it and have kicked the mockup I did to the home office in Florida for approval. She also kind of broached the idea of me redoing their website and some other stuff...which ended in me nearly asphyxiating from laughter, then curling up into the fetal position and doing a 4 hour Colonel Kurtz impression under the dining room table.

And just to make sure there's no rest for the wicked, Mrs E's computer has bought a bus ticket to Failville as of a couple days ago. I'm currently copying her files to my old Gateway convertible, which is why I'm still up at 2:53AM CST instead of sleeping. I spent the day cleaning my old stuff off of it, then running a system recovery, uninstalling the factory-supplied shovelware, installing Firefox, Thunderbird, and a bunch of other stuff, and now I'm moving her documents, photos, and assorted files. I figured I'd take the opportunity to update my blog while the file transfer is in process. You know, instead of twiddling my thumbs or counting the popcorn thingies on the ceiling.

I'm gonna go put on a pot of coffee.

Checking into the Podtel

2011-08-06T16:35:00.001-05:00

(Recap: A while back, I challenged myself to create a complete paper building in 24 hours or less, while following some pretty strict rules. I succeeded, it was well-received, and I put it on my release workbench. You can read the original post here.)

I've been spending time getting the Podtel ready for the next release slot in August. In particular, I spent an unusually long time bouncing around box art renders with the rest of the WWG team, and after several rounds of feedback and ideas, this is what we ended up with:

You'll be able to admire the full-size version once it's released. I had a lot of fun just playing around with the base render in Photoshop, adding the various lighting and haze effects, and the guys at WWG are a ton of fun to throw this stuff around with. It's a good environment for me.

I've implemented a lot of the ideas brought up in the original post's comments and in the WWG dev environment. Here are the highlights:

Added 6 variant balconies with trash piles and blood splatters.
Added 24 new side walls and 6 new capsule shells with various combinations of graffiti, damaged glass, and poop-smeared rants against fornicators and sinners.
Added 2 new variant toppers. One has a peaceful mountain vista, the other is deactivated.
Added 2 variant doorways with dodgy escort service ads and pizza/takeout ads, plus screenglass displays in open for business/closed for business flavors.
Added 3 new side-mount advertising panels. One of them has a "Sleep Like A Log" advert running, the other 2 are broken.

Some of my favorite details:

The tarp-covered doorway. That was my first use of the Puppet Warp tool in Photoshop, and that was a "Where have you been all my life?" moment.
The foil-lined sliding door and the foil-lined capsule window. I like to imagine that a conspiracy theorist lives there.
The blood-splattered balcony, the poop-smeared rant, and the tarp wall together make for an awesome "What the hell happened here?" crime scene.
The escort service ads. That was an awkward Google search, I'll tell you that right now. I had to do the layouts and stuff for real, then shrink them and paste them onto the glass.
Oh, and I didn't leave the ladies out of the fun, either--I did a couple chiseled-abs beefcake ads for the fictitious Meat and Gigolocious male escort services.
The pizzeria and Chinese takeout ads were fun. Shame I can't bill fictitious businesses for my graphic design services!

The Podtel is tentatively scheduled for an August 15 release, alongside the HL 300 taxicab. I will also be releasing a few more old Ebbles sets that I had the opportunity to complete a while back--the Itoyo 950, the Handyman 350, and the Robot Repair Team. (Yes, with machine-cutting support!)

Ebbles Labs

2011-07-30T21:11:00.002-05:00

My old catalog is finally starting to come back online. (This post is kind of overdue, actually, but I've been really busy lately!)

WWG have added a section to their catalog juuuuuust for my oldie-but-goodies. You can take a peek here: Ebbles Labs

I started with the UD-41, M722 LEV, and Convoy, as they didn't require any extra work. I also combined the 4x4 GPV, the 6x6 APV, and the weapon ring pack into a new set named Patrol, because convoys need protection.

Just a few of the things I'm working on updating:

Updated LV86 Onager with cargo trailer

Updated LV86 Onager with tank trailer

Updated Field Camp WIP (125% larger, refreshed textures)

In other news, the HL 300 and Podtel will appear on the WWG storefront sometime in August.

And my baby takes her first tottering steps into the wild...

2011-07-21T07:35:00.001-05:00

The new WWG storefront is finally live!

http://www.worldworksgames.com/store/index.php

Denny has posted a thorough overview of the new shiny blinky bits here:

http://www.worldworksgames.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=10010

Oh, and the Brio and Interceptor are now available alongside Streets of Titan as well!

Veloce Brio product page

Interceptor product page

The HL 300 and the Podtel will follow sometime in August.

The 24 Hour Challenge

2011-07-11T02:52:00.002-05:00

I put on a little challenge for myself over the weekend: design a scenery item, from start to finish, in 24 hours or less. The rules:

The model cannot be just a simple box build.
The model must go well with the other projects I've been working on.
The model must cover at least one full 6x6" tile.
In order to successfully beat this challenge, the model must be ready to build before time runs out.

After 23 hours, plus change, this is what I ended up with:

Podtel 6. Helping space hookers spread space herpes since 2136.

It's a seedy capsule motel belonging to the Podtel 6 chain. There are 24 efficiency-sized pods, each with its own balcony, stacked in 4 rings of 6 pods. The rings aren't glued on, they slip over the core structure like doughnuts on a stick. I imagine each pod is basically just a single open space containing an airplane-style bathroom, a small closet space, a nasty bed that probably hasn't been changed in weeks, a really tiny table with burn marks on it, a couple of mismatched chairs, and a slightly dented flatscreen on the wall for watching overpriced softcore porn and so forth.

It looks the way it does primarily because I didn't want to do a boring box build, so any practicality or realism issues that I overlooked can be blamed on that. I've included a taxicab in the render for scale, so you can see how big the thing is. I also took a few minutes to accentuate the obnoxious glowing animated advertising screens and blinky lights on the thing in Photoshop.

It's in PDF format and ready to build right now, the instruction graphics have been rendered, and there's at least one "box art" style render for it. I didn't think I was actually gonna beat the clock, but I surprised myself. I also don't think I'm gonna give myself another one of those challenges for a while, because that was kind of intense.

I also haven't decided what exactly to do with this thing yet. I'm gonna have to think about that some, since it wasn't at the forefront of my mind during the challenge.

DMC-Northstar HL 300 completed

2011-07-04T04:44:00.003-05:00

The weekend didn't really turn out the way I thought it would. There was a neighborhood watch meeting/social that Mrs E really wanted me to attend on Saturday, but she forgot about it until 2 hours before it was supposed to start. It took four unplanned hours out of my day, and I just couldn't get back into my coding headspace at all. On the bright side, I did get to meet some nice people and eat some decent grilled burgers, so it wasn't a complete waste of time.

(Coding is very heavily reliant upon short-term memory and concentration, and it's very easy to forget what you were doing if you're suddenly distracted. There are a couple of good blog posts explaining that phenomenon here. In a nutshell, distractions completely wreck my productivity--it's not "just a couple minutes", it's more like 2 minutes of distraction followed by half an hour of trying to get back in the zone.)

I ended up working on the taxicab instead just so the rest of the day wouldn't be a total loss, and by the time my bedtime rolled around, I was so close to done that I decided to spend today finishing it up, along with some bonuses.

I decided I wanted to go for a sort of General Motors thing where the same base platform is re-badged at different trim levels and given different names. There'd be the midrange luxury trim level with chrome accents and nice interiors that private citizens and car services would buy, and then there'd be the nasty and cheap trim level that appeals to tightfisted rental companies and taxi companies. In addition to that, there'd be a police version.

This is the upmarket version, the DMC-Northstar HL 300, with chrome accents and leather/wood interiors:

8 black cars in Apex Car Service livery, plus 8 unmarked color schemes.

This is the stripped-down economy version with all-plastic interior and hose-it-out plastic upholstery, the Stercus:

Medallion cab. There are 8 cabs with different medallion numbers.

Nasty rental version belonging to Limoncek's Rent-A-Car. 8 colors.

BONUS CONTENT BONUS CONTENT BONUS CONTENT

And this is the Stercus with police package installed:

Sci fi scheme matching the Interceptor, 8 numbers

Classic black/white scheme, 8 numbers

Unmarked version that doesn't fool anyone, 4 colors

In addition to all that, there are 3 editable versions included. One for the fancy HL 300, one for the regular Stercus, and one for the Stercus with police package.

Update: Ever have one of those moments where a whole bunch of things just kind of serendipitously flow together and you get to kill a lot of birds with one stone? Yeah, I just had one of those moments.

Mrs E needs a new pair of shoes, I want to test out a new download delivery service named Pulley because the way it works seems ideal for sending out review copies and comps on the new WWG storefront, you guys have been very patiently waiting in the face of months of endless teasing for something new to buy, and I happen to have something that fits the bill much earlier than I originally intended, thanks to The Weekend That Did Not Go As Planned. Nice!

So, without any further ado, I present you with a Pulley-powered buy link for this model:

(Link removed because my Pulley trial expired. Thanks for helping me test it, everyone!)

If you snap it up, let me know how Pulley worked out for you. It's really slick and no-fuss, but I want to see how it works under practical circumstances. It should take you right to PayPal, and once you complete the transaction, you should see an email appear in your PayPal email inbox with a download link in it.

Taxicab WIPs

2011-07-01T13:16:00.003-05:00

We're in the home stretch as far as the new WWG storefront is concerned, so it's going to be crunch time for me between now and launch. Before I fall off the radar, however, I wanted to leave you guys a little update to tide you over while I'm scarce.

My current spare time project is a taxicab. I also plan to do patrol car and regular sedan variants.

I didn't get to spend much time on it because I've been busy with work stuff, so it took a while to get to the point where there was something to show. It still needs door handles and some other details that I haven't gotten around to doing yet.

Ignore the goofy medallion number--I use the characters '9' and 'M' as quickie placeholders because they're the widest number and letter pair, which makes figuring out font sizes and lettering dimensions a snap because any other series of characters will fit within the same space. I'm going to be using Photoshop's data-driven graphics functionality to create several different versions of the same skin with different medallion numbers later on.

Editable models

2011-06-26T04:35:00.002-05:00

I've been getting a *lot* of requests for custom schemes for the Interceptor. Unfortunately for most of the folks requesting extra schemes, I'm not gonna spend the rest of my life doing every single police scheme in the entire world for $2.50. Fortunately for these folks, though, I did make it easier for them to do their own schemes.

Editable PSD for Brio

Editable PSD for Interceptor

It wasn't easy, but I managed to figure out how to do editable versions of the Brio and Interceptor that supported a lowest-common-denominator subset of the Photoshop file format that any paint package capable of reading PSD files should handle fine. That means you can open them in free paint apps like the GIMP, or inexpensive paint apps like Photoshop Elements or Paint Shop Pro.

As long as you don't touch the topmost two layers in the PSDs (page frame and texture), you can color all you want or paste logos and stuff into the layers below them. The results won't be exactly the same as if I did it myself because my normal layer setup is a lot more complex than that, but it'll come reasonably close-ish, and you won't have to extract anything from PDFs or do anything more complicated than flood filling or using brush tools.

2 more Interceptor schemes and new plates

2011-06-19T22:16:00.000-05:00

Matt Lyon suggested a Hong Kong Police Force variant of the Battenburg livery, and I threw in a Swedish variant while I was at it.

Accordingly, I've updated the Department of Motor Vehicles page with new license plate sheets for Sweden and Hong Kong.

Finalizing the Interceptor

2011-06-19T01:05:00.002-05:00

Getting it ready for final review. I took some time to put together a few images for you guys.

Group shot showing the 4 different police versions and the 4 unmarked colors:

Things of note: there are 8 different unit numbers for the classic and sci-fi blue versions, which each have their own PDF. The European PDF includes the UK version plus 5 versions of the blue-over-silver with police markings in different languages.

The third PDF includes the 4 unmarked schemes. I included a dingy white and a hideous beige for unmarked/retired police vehicles, while the silver is an unmarked detective car, and the black is supposed to be useful for FBI and government types. The unmarked versions don't have the same set of lighting hardware as the marked versions--the areas where the light set is normally installed have been covered up with plug-in panels, and a wigwag headlight/running light setup is used instead. The fleet shop can convert Interceptors from one version to another by popping off the plug-in panels and installing the necessary hardware or vice versa. They don't fool anyone any more than an unmarked Crown Victoria does, either.

Here are some shots of the model frame and instructions:

I'm pleased that it stayed within the 1 page/10 parts budget--I was a little worried because of the unusual geometry.

I still have to do a couple more things, but it'll be ready to zip up and turn in for final review at WWG before I go to bed.

Art and programming, part II

2011-06-18T16:50:00.002-05:00

I figured out how to abuse the data-driven graphics feature of Photoshop CS5 even further so I could use it to spool out cars with unique shop numbers and roof numbers. This time, more pictures and less boring text.

First, I set up the texture PSD file of the classic Interceptor scheme as a template. This involves just creating variables and assigning them to layers.

No, there's not much to see here, but enjoy the picture anyway.

The next thing I did was set up a comma delimited text file to use as the data set source, in good old Notepad:

Yes, that's it. Just a list of values.

Once both of those things are set up, a few button clicks in Photoshop will change the text layer strings and save each change out as a separate file:

Bridge? Come on, Adobe, gimme back my native file browser from CS1.

A bit of duplicating and re-merging in Ultimate Papercraft 3D gives me an 8-up layout, and all of the materials have been reassigned to the new texture variants:

A whole fleet of cop cars. All different.

I also spent a few minutes tweaking a copy of the OpenOffice layout template to work with the 8-up version:

I love templates. Why do the boring stuff more than once?

Okay, all of that is just a one-time setup thing. I literally only have to do that once. From this point on, I can simply copy the Ultimate Papercraft 3D and OpenOffice 8-up templates to another folder, and after assigning variables to any other scheme, I can painlessly export a different 8-up without tediously editing a lot of layers and saving things out by hand.

The only real limit on how many variations I can include in a single PDF is completely dependent on the amount of video RAM and system RAM on my machine, and the amount of work needed to set up the unique variations is much less than it used to be when I had to do them all individually by hand. Nice. I definitely could get used to this feature.

Note: Don't worry about how odd the texturing looks. The model is currently wearing a baked global illumination lightmap, which is the source of all the shading, and that lightmap is only used to make the Metasequoia work-in-progress screenshots look a bit nicer. I usually crank the lightmap opacity almost all the way down when exporting paper models for real, so the PDF won't be anywhere nearly that harshly shaded.

When art and programming collide

2011-06-17T20:37:00.001-05:00

You know what I do on my days off? I work some more. Okay, no, not literally, but I do kind of tend to play around with work-related stuff.

I just discovered something awesome about Photoshop CS5 a couple hours ago when snuffling around in the help files like a truffle pig: data driven graphics. At first, I was a bit puzzled because that really doesn't sound like a very artsy kind of thing, but it piqued my inner programmer's curiosity. Turns out that you can basically turn a PSD file into a template, load variables from a text file, and use those variables to do things like change text layers, replace pixels, and hide/show layers.

Of course, I had to give it a try, and after some brief thought, I hit upon the idea of using this functionality to rapidly generate a large number of unique license plates for the Brio, Interceptor, and other vehicles. So, I saved out copies of the Interceptor textures, then cropped them down to just the license plate frames, deleted all superfluous layers, and turned them into license plate templates.

I set them up so I could change the country code and plate text layers on the UK and European plates, and the North American test plates had 4 configurable layers (month of registration, last 2 digits of registration year, serial, and locality). No real reason, I just wanted to see if I could do it.

With the artistic half completed, it was time for the programming bit. I didn't want to waste my time manually entering license plate data over and over when I could just randomly generate a large amount of data and dump it to a text file that could be loaded in Photoshop. So, I whipped up a rough PHP script and fired up my local install of EasyPHP.

License plates tend to follow a pretty specific format, so it's not like you can just generate random strings and be done with it. I wrote the script to take a formatting template as input, so I could specify a formatting template like "111-aaa" (3 random numbers, hyphen, 3 random letters), "AA11 AAAA" (2 random alphanumeric characters, 2 random numbers, space, 4 random alphanumeric characters), and so forth. That was fun to do.

I realized shortly after a few rounds of testing that I could literally do any license plate in the world in mass quantities with relatively little work, and it would pretty much only require a different template and formatting string. So, pretty soon, I'm going to be setting up my very own Department of Motor Vehicles next door to Uppity Robots and Ebbles Variations, where you guys can download sheets of unique stick-on license plates for that little bit of extra flavor.

Speaking of which, just for grits and shiggles: here's a sheet of 570 (yes, that's not a typo) unique North American-style license plates that I did as a test: licenseplates_test.zip

That's just a few minutes of hands-on work! All I did was press a few keys, click a few buttons and all of the grunt work was done by Photoshop, Bridge, and OpenOffice.

I'm gonna be modifying the script a bit to randomize the registration date and locality variables for that little extra touch of uniqueness, and also refactoring the data set generation script so I can quickly modify new copies of it to generate plates for a specific country.

Yeah, this is all a bit silly, but it was fun to do, and I don't often get to exercise both of my core skills at the same time like this.

UPDATE: Here it is! Department of Motor Vehicles

Yet more work on the Interceptor

2011-06-17T13:56:00.001-05:00

Update time.

After some discussion with other WWG designers, the classic scheme got a few minor changes and the addition of a police shield behind the door for a splash of color:

It's just a small, indistinct, and generic 7 pointed star with the suggestion of a city seal in the middle, but it adds quite a bit to the overall effect.

The UK version of the Interceptor has had additional work done to it as well. I changed the base color from silver to white, and split up the retroreflective decaling at panel lines and around openings so that it would look more like decals applied to a stock paint finish rather than paint.

The reason for changing the base color back from silver to white was to further differentiate it from the European scheme, which I based upon the blue-over-silver police vehicles in Germany, Poland, and elsewhere:

Also, I threw in a couple of little extra touches. The UK and European versions have a different license plate setup from the blue and classic versions. I even used the correct fonts and stuck with a familiar appearance for the plate backgrounds.

(Ignore the ABC123-ish plate numbers, those are just placeholders for effect.)

Yeah, I know, they're flying cars, they probably should have barcodes or some other spacey looking crap on the back, but I like to ground crazy stuff like flying cars in reality, at least a little bit, by adding some familiar and contemporary touches. It's an extension of my belief that if you want people to recognize some sort of fancy SF contraption as a coffeepot equivalent, it should look a bit like a coffeepot so people get the point straightaway instead of having to waste time with boring and unnatural exposition from characters.

Besides, I don't think number plates are going to go out of style because the old "Did anybody get the plate of the truck that hit me?" thing doesn't really work if pedestrians have to chase after vehicles on foot with barcode scanners or some silly shit like that. I figure the cars have ID transponders in them that police cars and flight control systems can interrogate, and the plates are just a visual convenience or fallback measure. Sometimes the simplest things work best, and that's why they stick around even though you can replace them with something that would make Rube Goldberg golf clap.

More work on the Interceptor

2011-06-15T17:05:00.000-05:00

I got some more work done on the police Interceptor. Additional detailing and a start on some other variant color schemes. (Click on the images to see full size versions.)

Default blue/white color scheme:

Classic black/white police scheme, still a work in progress:

UK version with retroreflective Battenburg livery over silver base coat:

I'm also in the early stages of scratching out an European scheme, which will be blue over silver.

A few days' worth of breaktime doodling

2011-06-10T21:58:00.001-05:00

Something I've been picking away at during my breaks over the past few days.

I was going for something that was inspired by the Blade Runner spinner, the floating police cars from The Fifth Element, the Carbon Motors E7 police car, a dash of Blue Thunder, and an extra serving of Syd Mead on the side.

A black/white color scheme immediately leapt to mind, naturally, but that sort of bored me a little because...come on, that's too easy. A bit of research and some trawling through photos of police schemes from around the world later, I decided I wanted to do a retroreflective Battenburg scheme. The colors were easy once I settled on the scheme: a blue base color because of the aforementioned Blade Runner/Fifth Element/Blue Thunder influences, and white is a good trim color for this shade of blue. You can't see it from this angle, but there are also yellow/red hazard panels on the back slope.

I wanted the lines to be as clean and sleek as possible, so all of the lights are low profile. That's where the Carbon E7 police car influenced the design--there are lights at each corner of the vehicle, on the top and bottom. That way, they're equally visible from above, from below, to the sides, from the front, and from the back, which you'd kind of want with a flying police car.

Still not done, mind you, but I figured you guys would like to see it anyway.

Off to the races!

2011-06-06T18:25:00.000-05:00

It's official. The Brio has been wrapped up and is in final review over at WWG.

Check out the teaser thread on the WorldWorks Games forum for some more tasty promos.

My first WWG product. It sounds kinda cheesy, but it's like a big moment for me.

Wash Me

2011-06-05T17:25:00.000-05:00

Grunging things up a bit, as that's another WWG signature element that Denny requested I play with.

I wanted to split the difference between the Ebbles and WWG levels of grunge. I thought my first attempt was fine until I parked a Brio in a backdrop created from elements of an upcoming Titan set--to my surprise, the vehicle looked much too clean and a bit out of place, so I went back and dialed up the grunge until it started to harmonize with the environment.

Before

After

It looks like an old beater that a college kid bought for 500 credits, which works just fine for me because I like the future to look a little bit lived-in.

Pain in the glass

2011-06-05T06:41:00.001-05:00

Practicing the newfangled WWG way of doing glass. (Clicking takes you to larger images.)

Not sure what I think of it. I mean, it looks a bit more like real glass now, but it's...different from the cheesy old hand painted non-metallic-metal effect that was part of my artistic style, and that's gonna take some getting used to. Oh, well. You know what they say: when in Rome, do as the Romans do.

Of automotive colors, job transitions, and so forth

2011-06-04T14:25:00.000-05:00

Continuing the Veloce Brio work-in-progress...

I mentioned in a previous post that I had some rules for this model that I wasn't allowed to deviate from for the sake of verisimilitude, and the biggest one was to try and think like an automotive stylist rather than somebody who designs military/industrial equipment. The second half of that is in choosing colors.

Over the years, I've had a selection of "safe" colors that I used across most of my models. Instead of using those, I decided I needed to change things up and do a manufacturer-specific palette for each vehicle. For the Brio, there are 12 colors--6 of them are bright colors, and 6 of them are more toned-down colors. I even gave the colors cutesy manufacturer catalog names.

The bright colors:

Nebula Blue

Quasar Green

Pulsar Pink

Plasma Purple

Flare Red

Solar Yellow

And the standard colors:

Midnight

Gold

Storm Gray

Olive

Silver

Ice

And there you have it, the manufacturer-specific palette for the Brio. For each vehicle in this series, I'll be doing the same thing, and each palette will be different. That way, when you have a whole bunch of vehicles done and you put them on the tabletop, there will be a pleasingly realistic color variance across all the different makes and models. Not all vehicles will have 12 schemes--each vehicle is going to get whatever selection of colors makes the most sense for it.

I'm also in the process of working out a few details with Denny on the subject of releasing this model. I have to stress something right now--this wasn't originally intended to be an actual release, but it kind of suddenly turned into a full product before I knew it. I pinged him the other night to explain things and asked him what he thought of releasing this model, and he liked the idea.

He had a few suggestions that I'm still working through, and then there's the matter of transitioning from the old Ebbles branding to the new.

Yes, I even have a picture for that. Well, two.

Model Frame

Instruction Page

I've incorporated the official WWG page key and whatnot into my frame templates, which you can see above. I think that wraps up the transition to my new job.

Now, the reason I emphasized the fact that this was essentially an accidental product is because in the future, when I know something is actually intended to be a WWG product, there's a good chance that I'm going to be posting the Workbench articles for that product on the WWG forum instead of here.

Digging stuff out of the Vault

2011-06-02T16:46:00.003-05:00

In the comments of the previous post, I was asked what I would do differently today with the 5-year-old unreleased models that I showed. I had already considered that question a couple of days ago, in fact!

The first thing that came to mind was to try and think like an automotive stylist rather than someone who normally sticks with very functional-looking and industrial models. That's harder than it sounds, and I have a newfound respect for the people who design and style cars for a living.

I decided to tackle the Veloce Brio first because it seems like everybody else has already had a poke at it, and I wanted a turn at bat. I already knew, because I designed the geometry years ago, what the Brio was supposed to look like in general terms, which was a cross between an Isetta 600 bubble car, a Volkswagen beetle, and a Smart car. I also started out with a set of rules that I wasn't allowed to deviate from:

No superfluous greeblies. Everything on it has to be there for a reason, like on a real vehicle.
Put more emphasis on style than function. (You can't sell cars that look like the designer has an erotic fetish for Soviet farm equipment.)
Detailing needs to follow real world examples. That means no layered armor panels, rivets, bolts, or ugly access panels.
The Coffeepot Rule has to be obeyed. (If you want the audience to recognize something as a coffeepot, it has to look kind of like a coffeepot in order to sell the illusion.)

This was harder than I expected it to be. I ended up ditching the Smart car elements in favor of something that was a little bit more aggressive, like a Honda Fit. I had a hard time resisting the urge to go overboard with layered armor panels and Gratuitous Greeblies, and trying to think more in terms of style than function didn't come easily to me either.

Enough babbling. I present, for your derision, the results (clicking takes you to the full size images):

You can see the most of the Isetta 600 bubble car influence here--the whole front is a canopy that swings upwards, and there are 2 gull-wing doors behind it. The aggressive-looking headlights and grille are the Honda Fit influences I mentioned--the original round Smart car headlamps didn't really flow as well, so they got ditched pretty early on.

In the back view, you can see the Beetle influence in the engine cover and overall shape.

I'm not likely to put Pininfarina out of a job anytime soon, but you know what they say. Practice makes perfect.

Update (Fri June 3 2011)

I took TOPO's advice in the comments section and added more glass to the doors to see how it would look. I like it better now--the glasswork seems to flow better from front to back.

Another peek into the vault of unreleased models

2011-05-31T04:02:00.001-05:00

As requested in the comments section of the previous post, here are the rest of the civilian vehicles that didn't see release. Some of them are unfinished. The tractor-trailer, for example, hadn't been retopologized to get rid of unnecessary extra faces and vertices.

I think what I was trying to go for back then was to have one of as many different types of vehicles as possible, and I settled on 9 fairly common types. Compact car, sedan, sports car, jeep, pickup, taxi, limo, minivan, and tractor-trailer. If the project had gone ahead, I would've done a box/panel van, a bus, and some other items.

I think I mentioned before that for every one model that actually sees release, there are 2-3 that end up in the trash for various reasons. I don't usually keep those models around, but these somehow ended up being archived along with the military models in the last post.

Damn you, Adobe!

2011-05-30T12:54:00.002-05:00

Photoshop CS1 on a 64-bit Windows 7 machine: Buggy, crashy, aggravating.

Photoshop CS5 x64 on a 64-bit Windows 7 machine: Runs like a dream.

Argh. Looks like they're still gonna get my money in the end.

On the bright side, I don't need to cough up a whole thousand anymore. Having worked extensively with the CS5 tryout for the past several days, I've found that the 3D and animation tools in CS5 Extended pretty much don't get used at all, because they're really rudimentary and lacking compared to what can be done in a standalone 3D app, so there's no sense in paying the extra premium for a half-assed set of features that I'm not gonna use. That means I can get by with just regular old Photoshop CS5.

What brought all that on? Oh, just this.

These models have all been re-developed in Ultimate Papercraft 3D, now include machine-cutting files, and have also received a bit of a texture refresh. Nothing major, I just updated the layer styles and colors to use the 2010 styles and swatches.

Currently working on:

Yes, that's a Marine haze gray scheme--I found a couple of hidden layer groups with Marine decals, so I enabled them and updated the colors for the fun of it.

I love my new machine. I have antialiasing, anisotropic filtering, and a bunch of other things enabled on the GeForce GT540M for Metasequoia's graphics profile. That means bigger and prettier screenshots with fewer jaggies and nasties.

Speaking of which, I also found a treasure trove of abandoned models that never made it to release because of technical limitations back in 2007. Even though my dearly departed desktop workstation was capable of handling textures larger than 1024x1024px, I was still using Pepakura Designer to unfold my models, which did NOT support larger textures. So, larger models required workarounds or design compromises, which frequently didn't really work out and resulted in models being abandoned and forgotten. Here are some of those lost models, which were supposed to go with the Hummingbird and the battlesuited Marines in 2007:

You can kind of see how they're related to the Hummingbird visually, as they all have prominent countergrav pods on the sides, which all resemble each other a bit as a visually unifying hook.

Since I wasn't able to do all of those models at the time, a couple of more manageable models also got axed because there just wasn't a line left after cutting all the other models out of it:

Now, all of those models also had civilian counterparts. Those civilian counterparts predated the military models by a couple of years, and were supposed to be my half of a collaborative project with Denny Unger before it got scrapped. There are already entirely too many images in this post, so I'm just gonna pick one of them, the Veloce Brio:

Denny textured a slightly older variant of that to look like a yellow space Volkswagen as a test. No photos of the prototype survived, but it was a really cute little thing, and at one point, Matt Lyon demanded that we slap an Autobot insignia on it. The project was shelved in favor of Wormhole shortly after that first test model.

Normally, that'd have been all she wrote, but Denny fished it off his hard drive recently and passed it along to Paul Senior, who re-skinned it, and now it's part of Paul's upcoming Streets of Titan release:

It was really nice to see the Veloce Brio again after all those years.

Not all of our collaborative works were abject failures, though--I also did the geometry for the original Lair of the Dragon God 2.5D dragon as a commission job for Denny. He added the frills, horns, and some additional detailing, and knocked the ball out of the park with the texturing. Things sort of came full circle again earlier this year--when the Dragon God set was converted to TerrainLinX format, yours truly was also responsible for the additional dragon color variations. My favorites are the green/yellow and black/red ones.

Office Re-Organization

2011-05-25T00:26:00.004-05:00

We finally got a start on the second phase of re-organizing my office yesterday. We hauled several hundred pounds of unused shipping boxes and materials to the recyclers, and I recovered just under half of the floor space in my office, and we also donated the huge laser printer to the Salvation Army. I also moved the furniture around a bit so I could make more efficient use of the freed-up floor space, and re-adjusted the shelves on my workstation desk so I could move the laptop back to a more comfortable position.

Today, I spent some time de-cluttering the various tables and putting everything into its new home. As part of that process, I had to pack up all of the business paperwork, printed sales records, the Supply Depot shipping scale, and a bunch of other things. I didn't think that a sense of awful finality would hit me as hard as it did, and in some strange way, I felt a bit like I was finally laying an old friend to rest after a long terminal illness. I'd pick up some item, and it would remind me of something, and I'd either chuckle or feel a little bit sad. I guess it's something I was able to push aside in the interest of moving on and taking decisive action, so I never really gave myself the time or the luxury of thinking too hard about it until now.

I also transitioned a lot of stuff over to the new notebook and set up the other hardware to work with it, and I'm composing this post on the new machine. The keyboard is gonna take some getting used to--the spacing and positioning is different enough from my old Gateway convertible that I have to pay extra attention to spelling.

I also found some more stuff that needs to go to a good home. First come, first serve.

2 packs of Copplestone plague zombies, 5 figures each. Metal, unpainted. The original buyer flaked out and never got back to me. Asking $10 plus shipping for each pack.
1 pack of Copplestone zombie troopers, 5 figures. Metal, unpainted. The original buyer flaked out and never got back to me. Asking $10 plus shipping for this pack.
My whole Games Workshop bitz box. I just finished culling out all the useless stuff. All plastic parts, either still on the sprue or desprued and bagged. It's mostly Imperial Guard figure parts. Also included are most of the Stupid Bitz Tricks and Colonial Marine conversions shown elsewhere on the blog, in varying stages of completion, plus a few baggies of Space Marine and Tyranid bitz. 14" x 10" x 4" box. Asking $25 plus shipping for the whole box.

I finally have my papercraft and photo tables back. I also have room for a Detolf display case next to my work desk, and the whole top shelf for models. I should be able to hit the ground running whenever I get back into making new models.

News at 11: The World Is Still Here

2011-05-22T00:17:00.000-05:00

3 items of interest today:

1. Harold Camping is full of bologna, as I predicted.

2. It's been 6 weeks and 1 day since I quit smoking. Yay, me.

3. I'm looking for a Mac. I need a work hoopty for a cross-platform desktop application project in the near future, so I don't need anything fancy or top of the line. At the moment, I have my eye on a Mac Mini. Comments, suggestions, and so forth from resident Mac users are welcome.

Mr. Counterfeiter, part trois

2011-05-20T06:30:00.000-05:00

Amazon gave me a full refund for that bootleg copy of Photoshop CS5 Extended that I returned. So, that part of it is over, at least. Adobe support, on the other hand, was not as pleasant to deal with. I'm glad Amazon made things right instead of leaving me to deal with Adobe.

I don't think I'll be buying any more Adobe products. No, don't get me wrong--I'm not mad at them for not being helpful or anything like that, it's more a matter of seeing how they routinely deal with support issues. My experience with them was an eye-opening taster of what I could look forward to if I had a problem with their products at some point in the future, and I didn't really like what I saw.

If I'm going to shell out $1000 on a program, I'd kind of like to not have to spend hours on the phone repeatedly and patiently explaining to some thick-accented dude named Rajneesh what my boggle is, or waiting 5 days between web support case updates. No thanks, my time is money too, and if I'm going to pay that much money for software, I'm gonna expect timely and efficient support if I happen to need it. Naive and wishy-washy? Maybe, but you have to draw the line somewhere.

So, I've installed my trusty old copy of Photoshop CS on the new notebook. I've used it for 5 years without any complaints, and I can certainly use it for a while longer.

Blogger outage

2011-05-13T18:49:00.002-05:00

I wasn't able to post for a while because of technical issues that Blogger was having. More information here: Blogger Buzz status update

As a consequence of those issues, they took 30 hours of content offline in the process of rolling back to an earlier stable version, so some of my recent posts and their comments disappeared. Those issues seem to have been resolved now. I nearly went into withdrawal.

Edit: No, they're not resolved yet. Comments are still missing, and the timestamps were off. Guess they're still working on things.

Mr. Counterfeiter, part deux

2011-05-12T08:32:00.000-05:00

Mrs E's taking the RMA box to the UPS joint after work today, and the Amazon seller in question (RetroSoftware) got back to me a few minutes ago. My hunch about it being an innocent mistake on their part is reinforced even further by their response. They were incredibly nice about it all.

They're aware of the Chinese/Singaporean bootlegs on the market, and they actually do have a routine for spot checking and discarding bogus inventory. Unfortunately, the batch of CS5 Extended they got from one of their reputable suppliers came during a location move and accidentally made it onto the shelves. They've pulled all of their remaining inventory of CS5 Extended off Amazon for double-checking.

They've offered to source the real thing and honor the original $699 deal, even if it means a loss for them. I appreciate the offer, but I won't be taking them up on it. My inner businessman thinks they've lost enough money already, and my inner customer is pretty much in the "once bitten, twice shy" camp. I'm going to send them a nice thank-you note in response and consider all this a lesson learned.

Well played, Mr. Counterfeiter!

2011-05-11T15:30:00.000-05:00

Surprise of the day: Turns out that I don't actually own Photoshop CS5 Extended, after all. What I bought was a very slickly packaged counterfeit with an invalid serial number. I'm talking the whole nine yards--box, inserts, shrink-wrap, stickers, everything. Normally, those people just flog the bootlegs at an obviously too-good-to-be-true price without going to all that bother, but this was packaged professionally and priced high enough to fool me. I'm normally good at spotting fishy deals from a mile off, but this one just reeled me in hook, line, and sinker.

First, it was sold on Amazon, which is a place that I trust and have had a comfortable relationship with for years. Second, it was advertised as the full boxed deal, with none of the alarm-bells language that peg it as a fishy deal. Third, it was priced at $699.00, which is $300 less than full retail, but much higher than those fishy deals normally go for. Fourth, it wasn't just sold by a marketplace reseller, this was one of those Fulfilled By Amazon products where Amazon itself handles warehousing and shipping. You wouldn't think a bootlegger would go that far. Fifth, the seller had a good reputation and lots of positive feedback. Finally, my new notebook didn't arrive until almost a week after the software did, so the unopened box was sitting on my desk the whole time and completely passed muster with me visually.

Well played, Mr. Counterfeiter. You got me good, you sly dog.

So, anyway, I found this out when installing it on my new notebook. There's a step in the installer where you enter the serial number, and that's when I found out the serial was no good. I got in touch with Adobe because I figured it had to be a glitch in their activation system and that this was all just one big misunderstanding that they could fix with the press of a button, and after that, we could all look up at the ceiling and laugh as the credits start rolling.

Uh, yeah, no. That would be way too easy.

Adobe's got this sort of semi-understandable "Oh, I'm sorry to hear that. We apologize for the inconvenience. Sucks to be you. Next time, buy from us. For now, we suggest you contact the seller for a valid serial number." sort of attitude towards the whole thing, but they did open a support case and requested that I send in some documentation.

I did that, not because I expected them to make it right, but because I'm hoping that it'll add one more piece of straw to the camel's back--eventually, Adobe is gonna snap and go all Raving Rabbid on somebody's ass for pirating their stuff. Heck, three people in New York got 5 years in the slammer for flogging bootleg Adobe software a while back, so apparently Costco quantities of bitching does have an effect. Alone, we are ineffectual whispers in the desolate wasteland, but united, we are a mighty hive whose earth-shaking bellows of righteous rage make Adobe's eardrums meet in the middle of its collective head! Rah-rah-rah, up with the proletariat, fishcakes, blah blah, yadda yadda, et cetera.

I called the Amazon seller (RetroSoftware) twice today, and got the runaround both times, so I decided to just use their website customer support contact form to inform them that the software they sold me was bogus. I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt--they liquidate old boxed software, and it's very probable that they're a 100% legit operation that just happened to get some bad inventory. The comparatively high price of $699 speaks to it being an innocent mistake on their part--most bootleggers tend to go for volume with scams, so they don't charge anywhere near MSRP. Near as I can figure, RetroSoftware probably acquired the bootleg stuff through normal liquidation channels and simply assumed it was real. (The packaging fooled me too, so I can't say they should've known better!)

I talked to Amazon customer support a little while ago, and they were really helpful and understanding. They've given me a return merchandise authorization form and a shipping label, and they'll issue me a refund once they receive and process the return. We'll see how that goes. It's all boxed up and waiting for a trip to the UPS store tomorrow.

I'll post an update as things develop.

I'm a bit dizzy...

2011-05-11T05:18:00.003-05:00

My new notebook arrived yesterday, but I didn't really have a lot of time to play with it. It arrived pretty late in the day, I had work to do after it showed up, updating new machines usually takes hours, and I had to get to bed early.

It's a midrange Dell XPS 15 with a second-generation Intel Core i5 processor, 4GB of RAM, and a nVidia GeForce GT540M GPU with 2 whole gigs of video memory all to itself.

To stay under budget, I only maxed out the components that I couldn't upgrade myself later on (the GPU and video RAM). It ships with 4GB of RAM, I plan to upgrade that to 8GB when we're a bit more financially healthy. The processor is also upgradable, and the cheapest Core i5 option was still a huge improvement over what I had in my old workstation, so I didn't max that out either.

Anyway, I've been loading my work software on it for the past hour or two, and I couldn't resist the temptation to see how it handled. On my old notebook, rendering stuff took a pretty long time. Only one tile (a 128x128 square portion of the rendered image) is processed at a time. The new notebook renders four tiles simultaneously (2 cores x 2 execution threads each), and it powered through a 2400x1800 box art render in 1 minute and 19 seconds. It's just nuts, and it left me feeling a little light-headed and dizzy.

It also handles much larger textures during realtime rendering--4096x4096px using the default Intel HD Graphics 3000, and up to 16384x16384px if the GeForce GT540M is used instead. That's really good, because it means I can work on large paper models at full print resolution. Really large ones.

What little I've seen so far impresses me. Compared to my old desktop workstation, the new notebook is a monster.

Dear Automotive Industry: raspberry

2011-05-07T22:17:00.001-05:00

Highlights of my day: $24,000 truck failing to start. Rolled out of bed without coffee, straight into hours of driving from auto parts store to auto parts store. Several misidentified causes. 50-cent piece of broken plastic. Regrettable meal from McDonald's. It's 9:32PM at this minute, and my morning coffee is finally brewing right now.

Okay, long form. Sara, my stepdaughter and landlord, set up this neighborhood event today where everybody living on our street comes together to clean out the alley behind our houses. Brush removal, garbage pick-up, tree clipping, and stuff of that nature. 22 people showed up, and they did a great job cleaning up the alley. Of course, being the night owl, I was out cold all day. Mrs E was doing dump runs in her truck (a 2007 Nissan Frontier pickup), and she stalled it on the last trip. It failed to start. Fortunately, this was like right down the street, so she didn't have to walk more than 50 feet to the house.

She rolls me out of bed and asks me where the jumper cables are. I tell her they went with her old truck when she gave it to my other stepdaughter Gloria. She tells me her Frontier is dead out front. I crawl out of bed, brush my teeth, get dressed, and I see Sara in the living room, who tells me Mrs E is out front getting her truck jumped. Mrs E and the neighbor got her truck running again, so I put my shoes on and we left to get a new battery. Guess what? Battery's fine. The lube monkey at Wal-Mart (we went there because that's where we bought the battery) was really insistent that the culprit was the front blower relay, because it was hot and clicked when starting the engine. He also tested the battery, and swore up one wall and down the other, and on his sainted grandmother's grave, that the battery was still good.

That didn't really make any sense to us, but the guy works on cars for a living, so whatever. He knows what he's talking about, right? We went to 3 different auto places, and only one of them had the right kind of replacement relay. So, I pull the old one, install the new one, and what do you know, the truck starts right up. Of course, I don't trust my automotive repair skills one iota because my daddy was the grease monkey in the family, and he steadfastly refused to show me the ropes out of some misguided fear that teaching me how to fix cars would doom me to following in his footsteps. As a consequence of my dad's irrational fears, yours truly is not mechanically inclined when it comes to cars, which tends to result in me standing next to a busted vehicle with the hood open muttering "Thanks a lot, Dad" and paying somebody else a king's ransom to fix whatever broke.

So I tell Mrs E to turn it off and try again. My self-distrust is justified! The thing doesn't start. I pull the new relay and put the old one back on. It starts! I tell her to try again. No dice, it doesn't start that time. Okay, obviously, it's not the relay at this point. And I've just about exhausted my automotive abilities, so I suggest we have the store test the battery, just to confirm the Wal-Mart results. Good battery. I'm flabbergasted. We have the starter and alternator tested. Guess what? Nothing wrong with either one of them. I need a photo of Saul Tigh going "What the hell?" for moments like this.

Turns out that the culprit is a little 50-cent piece of plastic. It's a grommet, actually. A frigging grommet on the clutch pedal that lets the clutch pedal ignition lock close the starting circuit when you push down the clutch all the way. The old one broke in half, so it was basically a 50-50 chance of the truck starting or not. That's it, a broken 50 cent piece of plastic stops a $24,000 truck from working.

R.C., an employee of the AutoZone store at 9509 Manchaca, is awesome. He's the one who found the problem and fixed it. Turns out the grommet is a dealer-only part (Really, Nissan? Really?) which Mrs E has to visit the dealer to get on Monday. He whipped up a MacGyver fix to hold the truck over until then. People like him go a long way towards restoring my faith in the human race and the retail sector.

And on that note, I'm going to go have my first cup of coffee.

Bonus!

2011-05-07T03:36:00.003-05:00

I just discovered, completely by accident, that I had a $28.00 gift certificate to DAZ's store. I don't visit their website/storefront very often because I'm not interested in 98% of their catalog, which consists of 3D people models and props for their flagship software, DAZ Studio. I was looking for updates to Carrara 8 (the software I use to render most of my promo shots and instructions), and logged into my account to check my downloads, and there it was, a gift certificate for 28 bucks.

I didn't think there was going to be anything I would actually want to buy with that unexpected windfall, but I was pleasantly surprised to find 2 packages of HDR images, for image-based lighting in Carrara, at $9.95 each. Some of 'em are kinda neat:

This one seems good for a post-apocalyptic mood.

This one sort of reminds me of shooting day for night in movies.

I normally hide the HDR backdrops with a solid color or a composited background image, but I left them visible in the images above so you could see how the colors and brightness of a particular HDR image contributes to the lighting on the model itself.

Edit: Oh, I forgot--I mentioned in a comment on another post that I wanted to reproduce a certain photo of a Mi-24 Hind gunship. I first saw this photo in, I think, an issue of Soldier of Fortune when I was a kid, and I was quite taken with the photo. I found it on Google Image Search:

And this is my take on it with the Despoiler:

Photo gallery added

2011-05-06T16:36:00.000-05:00

The Lounge has a new section for image posts here: Build Photos

You can upload directly from your computer, no need to worry about hosting or anything like that. Make sure you hit this example post first, for some important pointers: Example Image Post

Photoshop CS5 Extended first impressions

2011-05-06T00:53:00.002-05:00

Photoshop CS5 Extended and the external hard drive arrived yesterday!

Still waiting for the new computer, but curiosity got the best of me. I installed the CS5 Extended tryout on my old notebook because I didn't want to waste a product activation on the old hardware. I had a bit of a play around with the new 3D features--as expected, the poor dear doesn't have the graphics horsepower to make full use of these new features, but it wasn't completely unusable.

That image above is 100% Photoshop--I didn't even fire up Carrara or anything like that. I imported the Despoiler as a 3D layer, set it up to use image-based lighting, and then grabbed some cheesy overcast sky background off the Internet and dropped that into a layer below it. I'm actually surprised it turned out okay. I still prefer Carrara 8's renderer for box art and promos, but Photoshop's renderer is easily good enough for instructions and Workbench snapshots.

I did another quickie test to see if PSD files with embedded 3D content would still load in OpenOffice.org:

And they do! That'll simplify instructions quite a bit. It'll be nice not to have to fire up Carrara just to do instructions.

Speaking of that big project...

2011-05-03T19:02:00.000-05:00

Back in February, I announced that I'd taken on a programming contract for all of March. It takes a lot to get me to agree to do contract work, but this particular contract was an easier sell for me than any of the other requests I've received over the years.

It was an opportunity to work with my friend Denny Unger on the new website/storefront for WorldWorks Games. We've worked together in the past on other, smaller projects, and he's a lot of fun to work with. It wasn't exactly a "You had me at hello" thing at first, I admit, but the offer of up-front payment and the fact that Denny's easy to work with sweetened the deal enough to break the ice.

So, we've been working together since March on WWG's new home on the Internet. Denny handled the graphic design and artwork, and my job was to turn his static compositions/mockups into living, breathing webpages. Here's a little teaser that should bring a smile to your face:

Yes, that's a product page for one of my models.

As for the rest of the project, I can't really discuss any technical details or anything of the sort yet. That will all come in due time, when WWG begins to post teasers and announcements of their own. What I can tell you, however, is that this is a pretty huge project, and I'm doing the whole codebase from the ground up.

There's also a second half to this big project: adding my old stuff to the WWG storefront. A bit over half of my catalog didn't make the cut because it was just too old and stale. Specifically, anything from before 2007 is gone forever. Out of the remaining stuff, about half needs some touch-up work, a bit of a makeover, or reformatting for machine-cutter compatibility. As an example of minor touch-up work, stuff like the Sandmaster V will be getting new store graphics, like the promotional render shown below:

In the case of makeovers and reformats, stuff like the Itoyo 950 are getting new store graphics, a bit of a texture refresh, and reformatting to support machine-cutters:

As one final bit of teasing, I want to show off the catalog thumbnail format that Denny and I put together for my stuff:

Finally, it's upgrade time!

2011-05-02T18:20:00.001-05:00

I normally schedule major upgrades for my hardware and software every 5 years, and I was overdue for a major upgrade for months. Just didn't have the money or opportunity to make it happen earlier in the year. The fact that my desktop workstation, which normally handles everything that my convertible notebook didn't have the graphics horsepower to handle, died a few months ago added a bit of uneasy panic to the equation.

I wasn't able to work on any models that had textures larger than 1024x1024px as a result of that hardware failure, and my large paper model output dropped sharply as the amount of time needed to work on models increased. That was a crippling blow to my already weak sales, which really didn't help matters any when tax time rolled around. It was also another reason I took a programming contract for all of March--there just wasn't any feasible way for me to crank out enough small paper models to make the bills.

I had resigned myself to not being able to upgrade my toolset for the foreseeable future, and I sort of came to terms with that after closing down all direct sales. Of course, fate has a funny way of going about things. I finally had an opportunity to upgrade my hardware and software the other day. There was a catch, however--the timing really wasn't good, because of our financial situation, and it was a very limited window of opportunity that I couldn't pass up.

I had a chance to get the full boxed DVD version of Photoshop CS5 Extended at a really steep discount from a software liquidator. My current convertible isn't up to running CS5 Extended (it can just about keep up with plain old Photoshop CS!), so in order to make the most of that acquisition, I would have had to replace my computer. And wouldn't you know it, there was a promotion for the kind of laptop I wanted from the hardware supplier that I had a line of credit with. Oh, I was torn. I went out to talk to a singularly unhelpful Mrs E, who was of the same indecisive mind that I was. Sometimes being on the same wavelength 90% of the time isn't necessarily a good thing!

In the end, I pulled the trigger. If I had let that opportunity slide, I'd never be able to get back on my feet with my existing, aging toolset. On the other hand, going for the opportunity would make an already tenuous financial situation go from bad to worse. Yet, on the third hand, not doing this now could easily mean waiting months or years for a similar opportunity to arise. So, I just took a big leap of faith and did it.

As of this moment, I'm the proud, excited, terrified, and even more broke owner of Photoshop CS5 Extended, a new 1TB external hard drive, and a much more modern laptop with more graphical horsepower than my old desktop workstation and convertible notebook combined. The laptop will ship sometime in the middle of the month after it's been assembled and tested. Photoshop and the external hard drive are supposed to arrive sometime this week. It was a good bargain, but one that I really wish had come during better financial times.

For you, this means I can actually work on the huge, bill-paying paper models once again, after the big coding project is wrapped up.

The Lounge is now open

2011-04-26T05:09:00.003-05:00

I added an embedded Nabble forum for those occasional moments when blog comments don't cut the mustard. Got questions that aren't relevant to one of my blog posts? Just wanna chat about something random? Got stuff you wanna share? Grab the hot beverage of your choice and pull up a stool in the Lounge!

No registration needed or anything like that--it's optional, and you can just go straight to the posting bit without any account hassles.

Found 2 more models!

2011-04-25T17:21:00.002-05:00

Added RCAF SAR Percheron and UN white UD-41 to the Ebbles Variations page.

Variations now up!

2011-04-25T16:16:00.000-05:00

The most popular of the August/September 2010 color scheme variations have been posted to the new Ebbles Variations download page.

Highlights:

Luna Base variations of the Crotale, Percheron, and UD-41 dropship
Colonial Marines variations of the Crotale and Percheron
Royal Aerospace Force variations of the Crotale, Percheron, and UD-41 dropship

The prototype black and desert pink M722s are not present because those color schemes will be rolled back into the original download after WWG starts selling my old catalog items. (The Uppity Robots vehicles came in the same 4 original colors as the M722 plus desert pink and prototype black, so it's a consistency thing.)

We need to get out more...

2011-04-24T23:24:00.002-05:00

Would you believe that my wife and I completely forgot that today was Easter Sunday?

We were watching The Amazing Race when Mrs E suggested we get a pizza from Papa Murphy's, the neighborhood take-and-bake chain. It sounded pretty good to me--the prices are good, the ingredients are fresh, and they prepare the thing right there in front of you like a Subway. Except with pizza instead of sandwiches. Anyway, she goes out to score the pizza, and 20 minutes after she left, I get a text message from her saying it's Easter Sunday and Papa Murphy's is closed.

Uh-oh. So's the grocery store. And just about every other place that appealed. Our cupboards are empty because we were too busy to go grocery shopping earlier in the weekend. We're both starving by this point in time, and we made the semi-desperate decision to hit the local Denny's for supper, since they were one of the few places that were open.

It was a surprising experience. Now, this is Denny's, and my expectations for restaurants like that are pretty low. I'm talking "Please, Lord, I hope we don't get food poisoning" low. I ordered their double cheeseburger because I didn't believe their menu photo for one minute--I thought it would be a sad little biscuit-sized travesty with 2 vaguely beefy-tasting slices of processed meat product, placed forlornly in a depressing nest of limp, flaccid, and soggy fries. Instead, I actually got a I-shit-thee-not massive double cheeseburger that looked like it needed to be renamed Humongorr the Burgernormous. I had to sort of nibble at it rather than being able to bite into it, even after mashing it down to something that wouldn't require me to dislocate my jaw to eat.

It wasn't bad. About a six on a scale of 1-10, with 1 being "microwave burger from vending machine" and 10 being Mighty Fine Burgers. Next time, I get the regular sized burger, because damn. Fries were surprisingly OK as well.

Mrs E picked out the Tsing Tsing Chicken as the appetizer, and she had some sort of BLT sandwich with a really unfortunate name that made me think of whoopee cushions. The Tsing Tsing Chicken is, as the name implies, supposed to be some sort of Chinese-style sweet-and-spicy chicken. I wasn't expecting much from it either, but I was pleasantly surprised. It actually tasted way better than the typical "meaty lumps in red sauce", "meaty lumps in brown sauce", or "meaty lumps in slightly redder sauce with sesame seeds" kind of stuff you get at the local Chinese buffets. I was stunned when the waitress asked us if we wanted ranch dressing with it. Ranch dressing? With Chinese-ish kreplach? The horror.

We were planning to try the bacon maple sundae (they're running this Baconalia thing for 10 weeks where they add 7 bacon-themed dishes to the menu), but we were much too stuffed to even entertain the thought. Yes, it's exactly what it sounds like: vanilla ice cream, maple syrup, topped with crumbled bacon. We're gonna try that next time.

I'm about three minutes from a meat coma, so I'm gonna pack it in for the night.

More paper models added!

2011-04-24T14:35:00.001-05:00

Updated the Saga Of The Uppity Robots page with 4 more models: the 4x4 GPV and 6x6 APV in both Colonial Verdant camouflage and Occupational Authority Police blue schemes.

Woo! One week plus one day...

2011-04-22T23:30:00.000-05:00

I quit smoking 8 days ago.

I didn't suddenly wake up one morning and decide to quit or anything that dramatic. It just sort of happened. I came down with a cold last week, and I usually don't smoke much when I'm sick, if at all. I mean, I just don't feel the urge when I'm sick. I've been like that for years.

The one big difference this time was that instead of somehow finding myself taking the habit back up after getting better, I decided to see how long I could stay quit for. You know, take it one day at a time, no pressure. It's harder than it sounds, because a large part of smoking, besides the addiction, is simple habit. You're used to taking smoke breaks, or you have a routine where you're just used to having a cigarette in your hand while doing something or the other. That's usually what caused me to take it up again the last several times, force of habit.

You have to really go the extra mile to break habits. Not just the habit of smoking itself, but also the other habits and routines that you associate strongly with smoking. In the past, I wimped out and resumed smoking because I couldn't handle the disruption to my comfortable routine. I always had an excuse--I needed to get work done on a critical project, I'm surrounded by smokers and temptation, or whatever. This time, I decided to grow a pair and tackle the whole problem like I was serious. Why? That shit's expensive, for one thing. A pack of fags doesn't cost a couple bucks anymore--I think they're up to like seven bucks a pack right now. Second, it's inconvenient, especially if you're like me and you prefer to smoke outside. I had a prime window of opportunity to quit for good, so I hatched a plan.

First, I made the most of the fact that I don't get urges when I'm sick. That's important, because it helps reduce the power that the addiction holds over you. If you tough it out past the hump, past the part where you'd normally be climbing the walls and biting other people's heads off because you need a nicotine fix, you're halfway home. From there, it's a matter of managing habits.

Second, I tried to break habits and shuffle around my routine. I avoided being around other smokers for a few days, I found something else to do at the moments where I normally would step outside for a cigarette, and I got used to not taking smoke breaks while working. Wasn't easy, but a few other major life changes made it easier. Suddenly, it's evening of day 8 and I realize I haven't even thought about smoking.

How do I feel? Weird. I mean, it's easy to think you're a manly paragon of health when you haven't had a proper frame of reference for what "healthy" really means for years. You kind of forget what feeling healthy is really like, and you don't really notice the effects that smoking has on you. You think about the lung cancer, emphysema, or whatever, but you don't notice the other effects creeping up on you. You don't really notice that you get winded more easily. You don't notice the lower energy levels. You might not even notice your performance in the sack gradually decreasing over the years.

The one word that comes to mind right now is "oxygenated."

That's how I feel. Oxygenated. It's weird. I have more energy, I feel more alert. I don't need anywhere nearly as much coffee to get through the day as I used to. I even feel a little bit smarter. I'm not going to comment on the sexual health aspects because you didn't come here to read about my wang.

Suffice it to say that I feel better than I ever have, and I think I've really kicked it this time. It'll always be a one-day-at-a-time sort of deal, yes, but I feel great about it.

First batch of paper models up!

2011-04-22T22:38:00.001-05:00

I've added most of the Saga Of The Uppity Robots models to Dropbox and shared them here: Saga Of The Uppity Robots

Big changes upcoming!

2011-04-22T20:38:00.003-05:00

The 2 biggest changes:

I'm closing down Ebbles Miniatures and moving on to other things.
I'm consolidating my hobby interests and web presences together here.

The Ebbles Miniatures storefront will be closed permanently as of May 1, 2011. I've started moving some of my favorite paper models over here and sharing them with everybody. You can find them on the navigation bar below the header, starting with the Saga Of The Uppity Robots lineup.

I will no longer be selling anything directly to the public. Instead, I'll be focusing on freelance programming, 3D modeling, and papercraft design work for other companies.

Metallic Horticulture!

2010-08-16T03:38:00.003-05:00

Trees have been driving me crazy lately. The store-bought or Internet-order choices you have tend to follow these themes, pretty much:

Arsey looking plastic trees that look like foamy green poofs impaled on brown sticks
Expensive arsey looking plastic trees that look like foamy conical green poofs impaled on brown sticks
Really expensive arsey looking plastic trees that look like squiggly shaped green poofs impaled on brown sticks
Arsey looking DIY tree kits that are basically identical to #1-#3, except YOU put them together yourself, and the instructions give you the distinct impression that 6 hours from opening the package, you'll end up curled under your desk in a fetal position looking like the illegitimate lovechild of Oscar the Grouch and a porcupine
Oh, and all of the above are in the wrong scale
Overpriced injection molded trees from Games Workshop that look like evil refugees from a Disney cartoon or the baby-eating tree in Poltergeist
Really nice looking and frighteningly expensive trees that look like they will break or fall apart the second Greasy McCheetofingers looks at them funny

So, since all of the store-bought options are pretty much ruled out, that leaves doing them myself. There are several methods, but I chose the twisted-wire method because I have everything needed except the foliage. In that method, you twist soft wire (copper wire or florist's wire) into something approximating a tree, you spackle or putty over the armature, and then you glue clumps of foliage onto it.

This is the second wire armature I've done:

It looks semi-reasonably tree-ish to me. It's also fun and dirt cheap to do, so I'm going to do several more wire tree armatures for practice. Once I hit on a flow that I like, I'm gonna experiment with various non-messy methods of bulking out the armature and giving it a nice bark texture.

Flying Lead Squad Pictures, Round One!

2010-08-13T08:21:00.004-05:00

I'm done with my 2 squads for Flying Lead. I broke out my latex Zuzzy mat for the photos, and now my office smells like an explosion in a condom factory. You'd think after a couple of years, the smell would go away. Oh, well--here are the photos.

Space Marines in Legio Martial campaign colors


The Most Unimaginatively Painted Genestealers Ever, qty 12

I used Vallejo satin varnish on all of the figures. It gives power armor a nice moderate shine, and does the same job for crunchy bug exoskeletons. Oh, and remember when I said I was out of Vallejo matt varnish? Turns out the bottle was just hiding from me, and it's actually Vallejo glaze medium that I'm out of. At least I have the matt varnish for clothing, so I can do my Imperial Guardsmen or Scouts the next time I get the urge to paint.

The paint jobs on both are on the sucky-but-serviceable side, which bugs me, but I can console myself with the thought that badly painted still beats unpainted any day of the week. I'll have to get more practice in and shake off the rust.

My next project: do lots of cover and LOS breaking items so the Genestealers have a fair chance against all that firepower.

Ever have one of those days?

2010-08-12T06:38:00.002-05:00

I've been taking advantage of work downtime to keep up with my painting. I finished the other 3 Terminators I mentioned in a previous post, and am also 90% finished with a brood of 12 Genestealers.

The Genestealers are a source of aggravation at the moment. Nothing, and I mean nothing, seemed to go right with them. I must be even rustier than I thought. :P

The idea I had for them was to do them in black. So, I basecoated them in Vallejo Game Color Black, drybrushed and highlighted them in a 2:1 mix of Black and Vallejo Game Color Cold Grey, painted the claws and teeth in a 4:1 mix of Vallejo Game Color Gunmetal Metal and Black, and here's where things started to go wrong. I forgot how strong the Citadel Badab Black wash was--once it dried, I discovered to my horror that all 12 Genestealers basically looked exactly like they did after they were first basecoated.

Yes, feel free to laugh. I'll wait.

...

Back already? Okay. Note to self: next time, test things out before committing to 12 figures.

You can still sort of see the highlights if you look really close, but they don't stand out enough in tablevision. I'm not going to worry about it for now--I have some gaming time planned this weekend, so I'll fix them sometime after that.

The next thing that went wrong was the basing. I couldn't for the life of me keep the PVA and sand off the feet of the Genestealers, so there's kind of this sloppy "foot sinking in mud" effect going on that's absolutely driving me bananuts.

The last 10%: drybrush the bases with 1:1 VGC Earth and VGC Bone White, clean up base edges with VGC Charred Brown, apply protective Future hardcoat, then after that dries, glop on some satin varnish. I'm hoping to finish that in the next couple of hours.

Finally painted something again...

2010-08-08T17:25:00.001-05:00

My Space Marine Dreadnought and Terminator captain converted from plastic bits. Unfortunately, I ran out of Vallejo Matt Varnish at some point during the last couple of years, and somehow never got around to ordering more from The Warstore. So they're still in their protective Future glosscoat for now. :P

Venerated Legionary Brutus, Centurion Lucius Crassus

The important thing, though, is that I actually painted something!

I wasn't feeling particularly adventurous, so the paint jobs are simple and basic, no fancy techniques used whatsoever. I liked the idea of having a bright ceremonial dress and a subdued campaign dress, so I painted them in the subdued campaign scheme of Vallejo Game Color Yellow Olive with the bling in the delightfully redundantly named Vallejo Game Color Gunmetal Metal. Centurion Crassus's left arm heraldry plate retains the deep red ceremonial armor color, which I used Vallejo Game Color Gory Red for. In the ceremonial scheme, the bling is gold and the cloth bits would be linen white.

If I were still playing Warhammer 40,000, I'd probably never have gotten around to painting anything because the sheer quantities of stuff you have to paint makes me want 3 aspirins and a lay-down. Guncrawl isn't enough to motivate me either because I wrote the thing, so playing it still feels like I'm working...and when I take a day off, the last thing I want is to be anywhere near work stuff. So, my stuff just kind of sat in the closet doing nothing for a pretty long while.

I discovered Flying Lead by Ganesha Games last week, and it awakened my inner gamer big time. I really like the system--it's the first one in a very long time that actually excites me enough to grab some figures and start playing. It's also what drove me to start painting my figures again, because you DON'T need a lot of stuff to play, just a squad for each side. Matter of fact, you don't even need that much, you can play with fewer figures if that's all you have on hand. That's a much more attainable threshold for me than having to buy and paint 40-50 figures per army, not to mention a heck of a lot more affordable.

I'm gonna paint 3 more Terminators with storm bolters and powerfists to round out my little Flying Lead squad. After that comes the even easier stuff--mostly Tyranids of various flavors.

-Mel

UPDATE: I still have nearly full bottles of Vallejo Satin Varnish and Gloss Varnish. The Satin Varnish worked great for knocking down the Future hardcoat's gloss to a nearly matte finish, and doesn't overly dull the metallic bits like the Flat does.

Tau Battlesuit Conversions

2009-12-09T05:16:00.007-06:00

Some of my favorite conversions are really simple ones that barely even qualify as conversions, but they're still a little different from the Official Way Of Doing Things.

Last year, I bought a Rapid Insertion Force boxed set that came with 9 Crisis suits, 18 gun drones, and 6 XV25 stealthsuits. A lot of the Crisis suits had some pretty bad molding issues like sinkholes and gaps between parts. Several of them I managed to address by filling them in with Squadron modeling putty or ProCreate sculpting putty and then smoothing/sanding them down, but a few of the molding issues just weren't as straightforward to fix. I could have returned the boxed set or exchanged it, but I was in the mood for a challenge.

In the case of the jump packs, there was a fitting issue where the pack halves were significantly offset. The solution to that was to make sure both of the shoulder hardpoints were occupied, so I chose a missile pod and the shield generator pieces to occupy those slots. The shield generator is just cosmetic, it isn't literally meant to be an usable wargear item. It just looks cool, like some sort of advanced sensor system.

I also cut off the antenna on one of the leftover pieces and glued it to the top center of the pack to represent unit leaders. You can see that mod on the suit at the lower right in the above image. They're equipped with plasma rifles, missile pods, and flamers because they were intended to be used in my "Tauship Troopers" scenario, and I wanted a loadout reminiscent of the powered suits in the Heinlein novel. The bugs are supposed to be represented by various Tyranids, and I put the project on hold because I was having difficulty finding an affordable way to create a lot of Tyranid Warriors without ranged weapons. I would have had to buy the old Gaunt box set, use the Hormagaunt arms, which would have left me with a lot of useless Hormagaunt/Termagant bodies, and since I don't like Termagants, I didn't want a whole bunch of useless bodies sitting around in my bitz box doing nothing. I'm getting off tangent here, so we'll get back to that in a minute.

The other not-quite-a-conversion thing I like to do is mount the weapons upside down so that their ammo/power supply is facing down, which looks better to me. The unit shown below illustrates that with their fusion blasters.

The unit above is supposed to be a vehicle wrecking special team, but I'm seriously considering popping off the fusion blasters and giving them the same plasma rifle/flamer loadout as the other 6 suits. Either that or buying 3 more suits...I haven't decided yet.

Okay, back to the Tauship Troopers thing. What got me to dust off this project once again is the fact that Games Workshop is going to release separate box sets for Hormagaunts/Termagants in January. Not only that, but they're releasing plastic Raveners, Gargoyles, and a Trygon too! The Raveners are even better than Warriors because they're not carrying meatguns, and I can finally buy Hormagaunts without wasting money on Termagants that I don't want. I need to figure out something for the Gargoyles, though, since they apparently come with meatguns and no melee weapon options. I might end up just filling in the arm holes or giving them spinefists.

Painting The Lazy Way 2: Zuzzy Terra-Flex Mat

2009-02-16T21:38:00.006-06:00

Introduction

Several months ago, I purchased a 3x3-foot Ruined Lands terrain mat from Zuzzy Miniatures. I also posted an out-of-the-box review, but didn't get around to actually painting the mat until yesterday. So, this post is a continuation of the review as well as an opportunity to add another painting article to Chez Ebbles.

Photos

First, a couple of photos. (Click 'em to see the full size versions.)

I only used four colors, and the mat's surface detail does most of the work.

Paints Used

Vallejo Game Color Charred Brown
Vallejo Game Color Earth
Vallejo Game Color Black
Vallejo Game Color Cold Grey

Painting Overview

The entire mat was painted with a 1:1 mix of Charred Brown and water, using a large flat paintbrush. I used a whole bottle of Charred Brown in a disposable cup.
Next, the mat was drybrushed gently with a 1:1 mix of Earth and water.
Another drybrushing pass, with a bit more pressure, on random areas of the mat.
A final heavy drybrushing pass on random areas of the mat, with special attention paid to the rocks and areas of dried/cracked soil.
The burnt tree limbs and areas of charred undergrowth were painted with thinned-down Black.
The burnt tree limbs and areas of charred undergrowth were drybrushed with a 1:1 mix of Black and Cold Grey.

The most important thing to remember: thin your paint! The 1:1 paint-to-water mix goes a much longer way than unthinned paint, and because acrylic paint is transparent to varying degrees, colors blend better when really thinned out. So, that first layer of Charred Brown and water serves to tint the dark gray latex of the mat to a deep, rich soily-brown color, and the first drybrushing pass brings out the surface relief nicely. The subsequent drybrushing passes serve to give the surface a nice, uneven variation in soil color.

The mat took me about 7-8 hours to do, but it was a fairly easy and undemanding task. I used one entire bottle of Charred Brown, less than a third of a bottle of Earth, and about the same amount of Black and Cold Grey as if I were painting a couple of 28mm figures.

Conclusion

Unpainted, the Zuzzy mat looks nice enough. Painted, even by a lazy painter like me, a Zuzzy mat completely blows every other gaming landscape solution out of the water. I can't go back to fighting battles on Planet Green Cloth now, so you could say that I've been absolutely spoiled by the Zuzzy mat. Painting one is an easy task, but requires a fair amount of time, so a large Zuzzy mat would be a fun group project, even for unskilled painters. Draft some family members or invite some gaming buddies over, give each of 'em a nice big tank brush, assign them an individual area of responsibility, and you'll have a finished mat in no time flat.

Colonial Marine Conversions #5: PIG

2008-12-17T20:59:00.011-06:00

Introduction

Initially, I was going to build the missile teams as-is. When I got around to working on them, I was a little ambivalent because with all the other conversions done so far, the standard IG missile launcher just isn't zorty enough, and not converting them in some fashion would feel like a cop-out. So, I put the missile teams on the back burner until last night.

I was watching Aliens again, and there's a scene where Hudson is being obnoxious, and the phrase "phased plasma gun" piqued my interest. I immediately went to consult Professor Google on the subject, and after several different search queries, I finally chanced upon some online excerpts and scanned images from the Colonial Marines Technical Manual for something called a M78 PIG. This Plasma Infantry Gun, it turns out, looks exactly like a conventional shoulder-fired missile launcher with a separate power pack. Now that's something we can do with the leftover bits in the Cadian boxed sets!

Anatomy of a PIG

According to what I've read, the PIG is basically the BFG 9000 of the Aliens setting. When this particular pig oinks, something explodes spectacularly. So, it's definitely something we want to add to our little arsenal for antimateriel punch.

I didn't want to just run a cable from the normal missile launcher to some converted power pack because, well, it'd look like a normal missile launcher attached to a power pack. This is fine for cinema, but not for miniature wargaming. People acquainted with Warhammer 40,000 generally already know what an Imperial Guard missile launcher looks like, and if we left the missile launcher as-is, people would automatically think "missile launcher" when they look at it. So, we want to change the way it looks a bit.

I decided I wanted to make it look a little bit more like a gun than a missile launcher, while still retaining the overall form factor of a tube-shaped shoulder-fired weapon. Looking through the leftover bitz, I found that the autocannon and lascannon remnants would do a nice job of changing the silhouette of the weapon, and the leftover voxcaster halves from the Sentry Gun conversions would make great power packs with a little work.

Required Parts

The photo below illustrates the parts needed for this conversion. When only a small portion of a part is required, the important piece is highlighted in red. (Save the leftover pieces! They'll come in handy later.)

Configuration

The photos below show how all the parts listed above go together to assemble a PIG.

Plasma Gun Assembly

Slice off the front section of the missile launcher right in front of where it meets the sight. The "ring" that the sight is attached to and the handgrip assembly both form a nice guiding line all around the tube to use as a cutting guide.
Slice off the rear section of the missile launcher, from the very back of the shoulder rest.
Carefully slice the longest barrel section off the autocannon barrel segment, leaving only the "ring" and two short tubes. Be careful doing this, as you need both pieces in usable condition.
Clean up and trim the 2-tube segment of the autocannon barrel so that each tube is about 3mm long. Glue that to the front of the missile launcher body.
Slice off the tube-like cap on the front of the missile launcher blast shield. Make sure the back of the cap is nice and even.
Glue the blast shield cap to the front of the autocannon barrel segment attached to the missile launcher body.
Slice the muzzle off the lascannon barrel. Remove the angled segment so that the muzzle is flat on both ends.
Glue the lascannon muzzle segment to the back of the missile launcher body, with the grooves facing up.
Glue the finished PIG to the normal missile launcher arm and set it aside to dry.

Power Pack Assembly

Remove the remaining aerials from the voxcaster pack, and slice off the speaker assembly on its right side. This will leave a roughly 45 degree bevel along the upper right side of the pack, so clean and shave that area until it looks natural. Essentially, you want to make sure the bevel is nice and even along the whole edge. This forms the upper half of the power pack.
Slice off the little box on the left side of the voxcaster pack, and shave the side down flat.
Align the longer autocannon barrel segment with the bottom of the voxcaster pack, then trim and shave it so that it is the same width as the voxcaster pack. This will form the bottom half of the power pack.
Glue the trimmed barrel segment to the bottom of the voxcaster pack, and test the power pack's fit on a loose Cadian torso to make sure it seats properly.

Power Cable Assembly (Optional)

Take 2 lengths of soft metal craft wire, one of a thinner diameter than the other. Hold them together side by side, then twist the thinner wire tightly around the thicker wire. Continue twisting until you have approximately 26mm of ribbed cable. (Note: this process is very quick if you have a pin vise handy. Simply insert both wires into the chuck, tighten it, then twist the pin vise while holding the thin wire perpendicular to the thick wire.)
Snip the cable out, leaving approximately 3mm of the core wire protruding from each end.
Using a drill bit of equivalent thickness to the core wire, drill one hole in the back of the PIG's shoulder rest and another hole on the bottom right of the power pack.

Figure Assembly

Assemble the figure's base, legs, and torso only.
You will need to shave off the boxlike protrusion on the back of the figure's helmet.
Glue the power pack to the figure's back, then glue the head into place.
Glue the right arm to the figure. Note that the right arm may need to be gooshed around just a little bit, as the missile launcher wasn't designed to be used with a backpack.
Glue the left arm to the figure, making sure you add a little dab of glue to the underside of the left hand's fingers. (This will be attached to the sighting unit.)
After the glue has set, bend and twist the power cable so that it fits on the PIG and its power pack nicely.
Apply a dab of superglue gel (cyanoacrylate adhesive) to each hole, then insert the power cable permanently.

Consult the photos below for clarification on where to drill the holes for the power cable, and how to install it so that it sags nicely:

You're done! Repeat this one more time, and you'll have a pair of PIGs.

Colonial Marine Conversions #4: Autoloading Mortar

2008-12-16T02:59:00.007-06:00

Introduction

This conversion actually has nothing to do with Aliens, but it uses several leftover bits from the Aliens-themed conversions, and follows the "waste as little as possible" philosophy. We're going to use up most of the leftover autocannon bits to make a pair of autoloading mortars.

Anatomy of a Thumper

The mortar we're going to make is called a "Thumper" because that's the name that immediately popped into my head when I saw the finished product. Because the rear half of an Imperial Guard autocannon (left over from the last few conversions) looks too cool to waste, I decided to see what I could turn it into. Initially, I was simply going to do a snub-nosed autocannon, but because I don't have anything to mount a snub-nosed autocannon on, that wasn't an useful option. When I looked at the heavy weapon sprues again, I noticed the mortar parts and everything clicked.

Tube mortars seem so ghetto compared to the conversion work we've already done so far, so an autoloading mortar is exactly the kind of thing that goes well with the nature of the other conversions, and it's also a nice companion to the sentry gun and missile launchers.

The two smartgun conversions use up one and a half of the heavy weapon bipods--one bipod yields two barrels and two waldo attachment points, so the only thing that comes off the second bipod is the cradle that you glue the targeter to. That leaves two usable sets of bipod legs, albeit without the cradle/yoke doohickey on top. Those cut-down bipod legs happen to be exactly the right height for this application. The grenade launcher barrels left over from the sentry gun conversion are also used in this conversion.

Required Parts

The photo below illustrates the parts needed for this conversion. When only a small portion of a part is required, the important piece is highlighted in red. (Save the leftover pieces! They'll come in handy later.)

Configuration

The photos below show how all the parts listed above go together to assemble a Thumper.

Assembly

Slice the baseplate off the mortar half where the ball socket meets the tube. Follow the angle of the ball-and-socket connection when cutting, as you will need that angle to properly seat the new mortar.
Slice off the little nub near the business end of the mortar. Make sure it's nice and even at the back.
The upper back of the autocannon body has a box-shaped overhang--cut that off so that the back of the autocannon is completely flat.
Slice off the little pin on the yoke that normally fits into the hole on the tripod.
Glue the ammo drum to the autocannon body.
Glue the grenade launcher barrel to the front of the autocannon body.
After the glue sets on the parts you just attached in Steps 4-5, glue the mortar baseplate to the back of the autocannon. You want to position the baseplate so that the bottom rear of the autocannon body is sitting directly on the front "petal" of the baseplate, about half a millimeter in.
After the glue on the baseplate sets, glue the whole thing to a 25mm slottabase, positioning the baseplate so that it hangs over the edge of the slottabase by a millimeter or so.
Immediately apply some glue to the feet of the bipod and position it so that the bottom rear of the yoke is resting on the "pins" of the bipod legs, and the top of the bipod is aligned neatly with the yoke.
Run a bead of glue across the joint where the top of the bipod and the yoke meet.
Glue the mortar bipod nub to the top of the bipod, upside down, so that the 45 degree slope on the nub is as close to the autocannon yoke as possible.

You're done! Repeat this one more time, and you'll have a pair of Thumpers.

In the next article, we'll build a pair of piggy-wiggies.

Colonial Marine Conversions #3: Flame Unit

2008-12-15T20:54:00.008-06:00

Introduction

Another staple of the Aliens film is the flame unit, which is a rifle-sized weapon with an attached fuel canister, so we gotta have at least a couple. This conversion is a slightly modified version of the flamer in Stupid Bitz Tricks #5. At that time, the flamer I found in my bitz box had already been converted to use the muzzle from a Cadian flamer.

This time, we're keeping the original Space Marine flamer's muzzle. We're doing this conversion now because it uses another leftover bit from the Sentry Gun conversion.

Anatomy of a Flame Unit

The Cadian box comes with a delightfully retro-looking flamer that has large backpack fuel tanks and a massive wand, which isn't quite going to fit in with the rest of the Aliensy stuff we're doing. So, we're going for something closer to the movie weapon in look and feel, and we'll be doing this by shortening and trimming down a standard Space Marine flamer. The Space Marine flamer already has a reasonably close form factor, that being a rifle-sized weapon with an attached fuel canister.

Required Parts

The photo below illustrates the parts needed for this conversion. When only a small portion of a part is required, the important piece is highlighted in red. (Save the leftover pieces! They'll come in handy later.)

Configuration

The photos below show how all the parts listed above go together to assemble a flame unit.

Assembly

Slice the muzzle off the flamer.
Slice off the remaining barrel stubs on the flamer so that the muzzle will fit flush with the front handguard.
Slice off the "hook" on top of the flamer.
Slice off the entire grip assembly on the flamer, using the front of the flamer's trigger guard as the guide.
Glue the flamer body to the front of the grenade launcher grip on the right arm.
Glue the flamer muzzle to the front of the flamer body.
Carefully slice the open left hand off at the wrist, and do the same for the closed fist on the Cadian flamer left arm.
Glue the open left hand to the wrist of the Cadian flamer left arm.
You may have to goosh the arms around a little bit to get a nice angle on the flame unit, and you might also need to tweak the left hand a little so the flame unit sits in it nicely. When you glue the arms into place, consult the photo below to see how the arms should be positioned.

You're done! Repeat this one more time, and you'll have a pair of flame units.

In the next article, we'll make a pair of autoloading mortars.

Colonial Marine Conversions #2: Smart Gun

2008-12-11T22:03:00.017-06:00

Introduction

Another Aliens-themed item is the smart gun, which can be made easily from a couple of heavy weapon bits and a set of flamer arms. This conversion also requires one bit left over from the Sentry Gun conversion.

Incidentally, the original version of this weapon used an Imperial Guard vehicle heavy stubber, but that part makes for an expensive conversion, so I went back to the drawing board to find a way to get the same sort of weapon from cheaper and more common bits.

Anatomy of a Smart Gun

The basic idea behind the smart gun is that it's a large and somewhat cumbersome machine gun that automatically tracks targets by means of sensors and an actuated harness system, while the actual firing is done by the operator. The significant characteristics of this weapon are, therefore, its size, the auto-tracking capability, a high rate of fire, and the fact that it's fed by a drum magazine. We are going to incorporate those themes so that while the converted smart gun does not look exactly like the one in the movie, it will still have the correct look and feel.

Required Parts

The photo below illustrates the parts needed for this conversion. When only a small portion of a part is required, the important piece is highlighted in red. (Save the leftover pieces! They'll come in handy later.)

Configuration

The photos below show how all the parts listed above go together to assemble a smart gun.

Assembly

Shave off the details on the right side of the flamer, making sure the surface is as flat as possible. (The eagle, rivets, and tubing)
Slice the flamer up so that only the parts highlighted in red remain.
Glue the flamer grip section upside down to the front of the flamer.
Shave the back of the flamer muzzle so that it is completely flat.
Glue the flamer muzzle upside down to the front of the flamer.
Slice up the bipod so that only the parts highlighted in red remain.
The smartgun barrel is formed by the bipod leg--slice off the bipod foot and the leg swivel, and the barrel is the leftover section.
Shave the front and back of the barrel as flat as possible, then glue it to the front of the flamer muzzle.
Clean up the leg swivel so that there are no remaining traces of the leg that you sliced off in Step 6. Glue that to the bottom of the flamer, directly in front of the handgrip. This adds more visual weight to the back of the smart gun, and suggests a waldo attachment point.
Glue the bipod cradle to the right side of the flamer.
Glue the heavy weapon targeter to the "knob" on the bipod cradle.
Slice out the ribbed autocannon barrel segment. This will be the ammunition drum--make sure the front and back are nice and flat, then glue it to the lower right side of the flamer where it meets the bipod cradle. There is a peg on the bipod cradle that will serve as a convenient guide that fits between the 2 ribs on the drum.
When you glue the smart gun arms into place, consult the photo below as to where the left hand should be positioned.

You're done! Repeat this one more time, and you'll have a pair of smart guns.

Important note: One heavy weapon bipod yields two smart gun barrels and two waldo attachment points. So, if you do both smart gunners, you'll actually be using one and a half bipods, not two whole bipods. Use both legs and the bipod cradle of the first bipod, then remove only the bipod cradle from the second bipod. This way, you'll have two intact bipod leg assemblies to use in the upcoming autoloading mortar conversion.

In the next article, we're going to make a couple of flame units.

Colonial Marine Conversions #1: Sentry Gun

2008-12-11T20:45:00.015-06:00

Introduction

The first conversion we're going to start with is the sentry gun, because we'll need some of the leftover bits for later conversions.

Anatomy of a Sentry Gun

In order for a weapon system to convey its autonomous nature, it needs to look the part. So, the sentry gun conversion has 3 major components: the weapon itself, the transceiver module, and the sensor module. The transceiver module is essentially just a box with an antenna on it, and it suggests to the casual observer that the thing is remotely operated. The sensor module contains the imaging, targeting, and fire control systems, and further builds upon the autonomous impression given by the transceiver module. To make it look somewhat portable, there are two carrying handles on top of the sentry gun.

Required Parts

The photo below illustrates the parts needed for this conversion, nearly all of which come from the heavy weapon squad box. When only a small portion of a part is required, the important piece is highlighted in red. (Save the leftover pieces! They'll come in handy later.)

Configuration

The photos below show how all the parts listed above go together to assemble a sentry gun.

Component 1: Weapon Body

Lascannon: Slice the lascannon barrel and rail off completely, so that only the lascannon body segment highlighted in red remains. Shave the left side of the lascannon segment flat (just the rivets and a couple of details on the "armor" section)
Heavy Bolter: Slice off everything behind the feed/ejection ports, so that only the heavy bolter segment highlighted in red remains.
Test fit the heavy bolter and lascannon pieces. You may need to bevel the bottom rail on the bottom rear of the heavy bolter to a 45 degree angle to ensure a flush fit. If the test fit looks good, glue them together. Fill any gaps with Squadron putty if needed.
Slice the muzzle brake from the autocannon's barrel. Glue it to the heavy bolter's barrel.
Carefully cut the drum off the grenade launcher arm. Do this by first removing the barrel, then by slicing off everything behind the drum. Make sure you don't damage the grip section or the hand--you will need the arm later!
Shave down the top of the drum so that it is flat. Test fit the drum to the feed port on the right side of the heavy bolter segment. It should fit in snugly--if not, shave the front and rear of the drum a little more until it seats nicely into the feed port. Once the fit is just right, glue the drum into place.

Component 2: Transceiver Module

Cut the bottom half and the antenna off the voxcaster backpack.
Test fit the voxcaster bottom half to the right rear side of the weapon. You will need to shave off 2 button-like details from the lascannon segment to ensure a good fit.
Once satisfied with the fit, glue the voxcaster bottom half to the right side of the lascannon segment.
Glue the antenna to the top rear of the voxcaster half to finish off the transceiver module.

Component 3: Sensor Module

Glue the lascannon power pack to the left side of the lascannon segment. The power pack is large enough to cover the entire left side of the armor "cowl", with a slight overhang to the rear.
Cut the binoculars into front and rear halves at the spot where they taper from the middle.
Glue the front binocular half to the lascannon power pack to finish off the sensor module.

Finishing Touches

Glue the tripod to the bottom of the sentry gun assembly.
Cut the carrying handle off the autocannon drum half. Do this carefully so you can ensure a nice level fit in the next step without shortening it too much.
Make sure the flat pieces at the front and back of the handle are level. If not, shave or file down the longer of the two flat pieces until the handle will sit level on a flat surface.
Glue the carrying handle to the top right side of the sentry gun, across from and lined up with the other carrying handle attached to the sensor module.
Glue the sentry gun to a 40mm base.

You're done! Repeat this 2 more times, and you'll have a full set of 3 sentry guns.

In the next article, we'll build some smart guns.

Colonial Marine Conversions: Introduction

2008-12-11T18:06:00.019-06:00

Introduction

In this series of posts, I'm going to show you how to convert a bunch of plastic figures into ersatz Colonial Marines like those in "Aliens". We're not going to literally make identical likenesses to the characters in Aliens, but we are going to borrow several visual themes from the movie that will make these plastic figures look and feel like Colonial Marines. These conversions started out as one-off prototypes from the Stupid Bitz Tricks series, but were refined and/or revised so that they would be as easy as possible to make with the fewest necessary purchases.

Tools

To start with, you should have the following tools to convert the figures. They'll make your life a lot easier.

A: Hobby knife with sharp blades. X-Acto #11 is good. This is your primary tool.
B: Sprue nippers. These help get parts off the sprues without damaging them.
C: Big paintbrush with thick bristles. Good for brushing plastic crumbs off parts when shaving or cleaning flash.
D: Clay shaper. This is a soft-tipped tool, good for knocking off hard-to-reach plastic crumbs or smoothing gap-filling putty.
E: Dental pick. This tool is really useful for getting flash out from between fingers and scraping crumbs out of recesses.
F: Plastic cement. The bottle in the photo has a metal needle applicator that gives you very good control over where the cement goes.
G: Squadron green putty. This stuff is used to fill gaps between parts. Useful if you mess up a cut and have parts that don't fit flush.

These tools are all cheap, readily available, and will make life a lot easier for you.

Required Sets

You want two boxed sets: the Cadian Shock Troops box, and the Cadian Heavy Weapons Squad box.

These two boxes have enough goodies to make the following items:

2 squad leaders
2 smart gunners
16 riflemen
3 automated sentry guns
2 autoloading mortars
2 plasma gun teams

Extra Bits

You will also need 3 40mm diameter bases for the sentry guns, plus 8 25mm diameter bases for the plasma gun teams and autoloading mortars. You can buy them in bags from Games Workshop or as loose bits from The Warstore.

Optional Bits

If you have 2 Space Marine flamers handy, you can upgrade 2 riflemen to flamer operators.

If you have a couple of Space Marine auspexes handy, you can use them as motion trackers issued to the 2 squad leaders.

Space Marine belt pouches, holsters, and magazine pouches are also useful to have, but are strictly optional.

These Space Marine bitz can be purchased from the Battlewagon Bits department of The Warstore. If you buy the Cadian boxes mentioned above from The Warstore as well, you get a nice 20% discount off the boxed sets.

Another thing you may find useful is a length of thin plastic rod and some sheet styrene. While you can get away with not having these extra items, they are very helpful in further reinforcing the Aliens visual theme. The sheet styrene and rods are sometimes sold under the Gale Force 9 brand in hanging baggies at the local gaming store, but are often way cheaper to buy from hobby stores that sell plastic scale models and whatnot. Look for the Evergreen or Plastruct brands.

The Plan

Over the next several installments of the Colonial Marine Conversions series, I'll show you how to convert the Cadian plastics, one item at a time. Once all of the conversions have been completed, I will also be posting a painting guide for them with some easy-to-paint color schemes that evoke the look and feel of the Colonial Marine uniforms.

I strongly recommend reading all of the articles first, before doing any of the conversions. This way, mistakes are easier to avoid, as you won't accidentally destroy a part that you might need in a later conversion. For example, if you cut one leg off all 3 heavy weapon bipods while performing the smart gunner conversion, you won't be able to build the autoloading mortars, as the mortar conversions assume that you used both legs of one bipod to make the barrels for both smart guns, and that you have 2 intact bipod leg sets left over. So, check all the articles first.

The first conversion article is here, and covers the sentry guns.

Stupid Bitz Tricks #8: Squad Leader

2008-12-06T17:37:00.007-06:00

Introduction

I needed a squad leader, and just using the standard sergeant would have been a total cop-out after all the conversion work done on the grunts. Besides, I don't want a chainsword-waving sergeant...at least not unless my squad is going into battle against an army of homicidal trees. My bitz box yielded a splendiferous abundance of parts that would make the squad leader look like an actual leader, not a superheroic lumberjack with pretensions of being the next Patton.

This is the result:

Construction

The photos below show the bitz used and their configuration. (Click on each photo to view it at full size.)

Design

I kept the sergeant head because the Shouty Command Face expression and the headset make him look like a seasoned NCO firmly in charge of things. I also kept the laspistol arm, but used one of the open-handed left arms instead of the chainsword arm. I glued a Space Marine auspex into the open hand, which makes a pretty cool "motion tracker" device. Orienting his head in the general direction of the auspex makes him look like he's barking out orders in response to the tactical picture on its screen.

One thing that annoys me about the Cadian sprues is the lack of holsters for the sergeant's laspistol, so I swiped a bolt pistol holster from my Space Marine bitz, shaved off the bolt pistol's grip, then glued that to the squad leader's belt. I also took a bolter magazine pouch and cut it in half to make a single pouch, and glued that to the left side of his belt in order to visually balance out the large holster. For the finishing touch, I took one of the Cadian grenade pairs, cut it in half so there would be 2 separate grenades, and glued one grenade to each side of his belt. The canteen/ammo pouch/knife bit was glued to the back of the squad leader's belt.

Conclusions

I like this guy. He looks competent, characterful, confident in his authority, and I suspect that entire forests of plastic trees are breathing a collective sigh of relief at the absence of close combat weapons manufactured by Black & Decker.

While performing this conversion, the motion tracker game mechanics popped into my head. When using this guy in Guncrawl, I'm going to have his motion detector actually grant the ability to use Unknown Contact markers. During the Enemy Phase, UC markers are placed according to the standard enemy placement rules (in the nearest tile out of direct line of sight), and the players then have a tactical picture of where potential hostiles are.

If the squad leader dies or is dragged off by aliens, the ability to use UC markers is lost, and all UC markers on the map are removed. From that point on, a die is rolled for each surviving squad member at the beginning of the Enemy Phase, and the results are checked on the table below:

Ambush Table A
Roll	Effect
1	Dragged off! The squad member is dragged through a floor grate or hoisted into a ceiling crawlway by an ambushing xenomorph. Roll on Table B.
2-3	Sneak attack! Place one xenomorph in the closest empty space, on any adjacent corridor or junction tile. The xenomorph acts normally during the Enemy Phase.
4-5	Place one xenomorph using the standard enemy placement rules. The xenomorph acts normally during the Enemy Phase.
6	Nothing happens to this squad member.

Ambush Table B
Roll	Effect
1-2	The squad member disappears screaming into the darkness. Remove the model from play.
3-4	Struggle! Roll again on this table immediately.
5-6	Xenomorph loses its grip and disappears into the darkness. The squad member is shaken, but unharmed.

If a squad member rolls a 3-4 on Table B, any friendly models in adjacent spaces will automatically attempt to help free the trapped squad member. Each helper grants a +1 bonus to rolls on Table B, up to a maximum bonus of +3.

Note: These mechanics have not been tested yet, and came to me out of the blue in mid-conversion. Rolling on these tables does not use any actions, and they are meant to be short and dramatic moments that add cinematic flavor to the game.

Stupid Bitz Tricks #7: Face-hugger Prototype

2008-12-05T15:46:00.009-06:00

Introduction

Upon reviewing the Tyranid bitz in my collection, I had an epiphany that would finally allow me to easily turn the adrenal sac bitz into something resembling the face-huggers from Aliens.

This is the result:

Construction

The photo below shows the bitz used and where they go. (Click on the photo to view it at full size.)

Design

The Genestealer boxed set contains 4 infestation markers, which have always looked like eggs to me, and that's what I used for the face-hugger eggs.

The face-hugger itself is composed of 4 parts: one pair of short Tyranid Warrior flesh hooks, one piece of the long Tyranid Warrior flesh hooks, and an Adrenal Sac bit. The short flesh hooks were carefully bent with a pair of needle nose jeweler's pliers into something approximating insect legs, and then the side that normally glues to a Tyranid Warrior's ribcage was shaved flat. The flat ends of the left and right leg sets were then glued together to complete a full set of 6 legs.

The next step was to snip the pointy bit between the two short rear legs, where the left/right sets meet, into a flat surface that the tail could be glued to. The longest of the three flesh hooks on the longer set was carefully sliced off, the end was snipped flat in order to mate up with the leg assembly, and the flesh hook was carefully rolled into a sort of snakey S-shape with the help of a convenient dowel. I also bent it a little in the perpendicular plane so it would sort of droop towards the ground. The reshaped tail was then glued between the rearmost legs.

I snipped off the 6 tubes on the adrenal sac and shaved off the remaining nubs to get a more or less smooth shape around its perimeter. I also shaved down the bottom to make the adrenal sac a little bit more flat, then I glued it to the top of the leg assembly.

Conclusions

2 boxes of Genestealers yields 8 egg clusters and 16 Genestealers to use as xenomorphs, which is plenty for what I have in mind. After the xenomorph conversions, there will be plenty of arm bitz left over for converting. The Tyranid Warriors that the flesh hooks came from will be representing fully grown feral Tyranids, and they will be using the leftover Genestealer arms to replace the ranged weapons.

The face-hugger prototype is pretty rough because I was primarily interested in whether or not it could be done, and I didn't clean the parts as well as I ordinarily would have. (It was an "Eureka!" thing--20 minutes from start to finish.)

Next time, I'm going to heat the flesh hooks in hot water for 30 seconds before bending them, then I'm gonna stick them in ice water so the shape will take. This will probably simplify the conversion considerably, as it required some fairly delicate bending work at room temperature.

----------------------Update!----------------------

I forgot to add this to the Conclusions: each box of Warriors yields the following constituent bitz:

3 of the short flesh hooks
3 of the long flesh hooks
3 adrenal sacs

These bitz are enough to make 3 face-huggers. That may not sound like a lot, but that's actually plenty because of the specific game mechanics I plan to use, and you don't really need more than 3 to 6 of the things at any given time.

First, only the egg clusters are actually deployed on the table to begin with. The mechanics are set up so that facehugger models are only placed on the table under certain circumstances, which means the number of times that an actual facehugger model is placed on the table is pretty low. (I had the tables all worked out, but I can't insert them into my blog for some stupid technical reason. I'll have to post them in PDF format later.)

----------------------Update 2----------------------

Finally figured out the table thing. Here you go!

Basic Definitions

Triggering model: Any model that is within 2 inches of an egg cluster at any point during its movement. The model must stop at that point, and the player rolls on Table A below.

Stats

The facehugger's stats depend on what game you're using it in. The basic guidelines below should be applied when you choose the appropriate stats for the game you use this conversion in:

Speed: Facehuggers should move at least 6 inches per turn.
Toughness/resilience/whatever: Facehuggers are weak, but difficult to hit. If the game you use has a saving roll mechanism or a target difficulty number, give it a good enough value that players will have to shoot at least a few times for an effective hit.
Attacking: Facehuggers shouldn't roll to hit or anything like that. Instead, the thing should mindlessly attempt to move within 2 inches of the nearest model, at which point you can assume it automatically leaps onto that model. Roll on Table C to resolve all attacks made in this manner.

Facehugger encounters should primarily be considered a "map threat" or some form of hazardous terrain encounter, and shouldn't happen more than two or three times per game, and should ideally be limited to a specific "egg chamber" region of the map. Otherwise, gameplay might be slowed down.

If the triggering model has friends nearby and rolls a 2-4 on Table C, his/her friends can try to help the triggering model. Each friend helping adds a +1 bonus to the next roll on Table C, up to a maximum bonus of +3.

Event Resolution Tables

Face-Hugger Table A
Roll	Effect
1	Egg opens! Roll on Table B.
2-4	Egg quivers visibly, and an audible sloshing noise is heard. Roll on this table again, ignoring results of 6.
5	Nothing happens...this time. Triggering model completes its movement as normal.
6	Empty eggs. Remove cluster from table. Triggering model completes its movement as normal.

Face-Hugger Table B
Roll	Effect
1	Facehugger explosively erupts from egg and clamps onto the triggering model's face! Triggering model is now a casualty.
2	Facehugger leaps from egg, but triggering model raises its arms or a weapon just in time to partially block the attack. Roll on Table C.
3-5	Facehugger leaps from egg, but misses the triggering model completely. Place facehugger model anywhere within 1d6 inches of the triggering model.
6	Legs slowly appear one by one at opening of egg. Triggering model may immediately complete its movement or attack.

Face-Hugger Table C
Roll	Effect
1	Not good enough! Facehugger finally succeeds in clamping to the triggering model's face. Triggering model is now a casualty.
2-4	Struggle! Triggering model and facehugger spend the turn grappling. Roll again on this table in the next turn.
5-6	Get off me! Facehugger is thrown off triggering model. Place facehugger model 1d6 inches away from triggering model.

Stupid Bitz Tricks #6: Grenade Launcher

2008-12-04T18:21:00.007-06:00

Introduction

I don't like the grenade launcher that comes in the Cadian boxed set because it looks like something knocked together out of 8-inch PVC pipe for a Halloween costume. However, it's a very useful bit because the arms can be used for other special weapons, and the grenade launcher itself contributes two important parts to the sentry gun from Stupid Bitz Tricks #2.

One other weapon that I dislike intensely is the Space Marine scout shotgun, which looks funny to me. I also don't use the bolt pistols and swords with my scouts because I'm not a big fan of the whole "charge each other with oversized powered cutlery" tactical approach, and I'd rather have as many ranged weapons as possible. My scouts also carry bolters and a heavy bolter because they look more like elite commandos that way, which leaves me with a lot of unused shotguns and bolt pistols.

The bolt pistols have targeters and barrel extensions that are useful for conversions, and I also like the ammunition cassettes on Terminator storm bolters. Since there will usually be 2-3 storm bolters left over from a box of Terminators, the ammo cassettes aren't a hard bit to source. I used those 3 bitz items to prototype a grenade launcher to replace the originals.

This is the result, shown along with the flamer and SAW conversions for scale:

Construction

The photos below show the bitz used and their configuration. (Click on the photos to view them at full size.)

Design

The left hand was shaved off the scout shotgun completely, and that area of the shotgun was also shaved down flush with the rest of the shotgun body. I sliced off everything directly behind the shotgun's top rail and sanded it flat. The original shotgun barrels were also sliced off completely.

I sliced off the barrel of a scout bolt pistol, making sure to include the little tube above the barrel, and glued that to the front of the shotgun body. I also sliced off the little "flange" at the bottom of the bolt pistol's magazine and set it aside.

I went through my collection of surplus storm bolters, and settled on one that had a "half-hopper" style box magazine rather than the giant double cassette or the twin banana-style magazines, then carefully cut the magazine off. I had to shave off a little bit of excess, and I also removed some details from the top front and rear of the magazine. This was then glued to the bottom of the shotgun body where the left hand used to be, and the flange from the bolt pistol magazine was glued to the side of the shotgun, above where the magazine meets the shotgun body.

I also sliced off a bolt pistol targeter and mounted it to the left side of the rail on top of the shotgun. (I like offset sights, and it visually balances out the magazine.)

I used the normal grenade launcher left arm with this conversion, and the only change I made to it was to shave off the little peg that fits into the hole on the normal grenade launcher, as the converted grenade launcher doesn't have a hole for it.

Conclusions

It's not a particularly exciting conversion visually, but it's more in proportion with the other converted weapons, and more importantly, it doesn't annoy my aesthetic sense as much as the original grenade launcher does. I'm also not sure if I like it with that left arm, and I might try using an open left hand with one of the other arms instead, like with the flamer.

I think I'll be looking through my bitz box for additional detailing to put on the thing, especially on the flat sides. I'll see how it looks painted first, though.

Stupid Bitz Tricks #5: Fun With Flamers

2008-12-03T21:52:00.011-06:00

Introduction

I wanted to add a flamer to my converted Imperial Guard squad, but the standard flamer is much too heavy-looking next to the carbines and squad automatic weapons from Stupid Bitz Tricks #4. I wanted something a bit smaller and more Aliensy in style, so I raided my long-suffering bitz box again.

I found a Space Marine flamer, the front half of a Cadian flamer that was cut up to make the smartgun-style heavy stubber in Stupid Bitz Tricks #3, grenade launcher right arms, and some open-handed Cadian left arms. This is the result:

This flamer is smaller and shorter than the normal backpack flamer, and fits in better with the armament of the rest of the squad. The backpack flamer therefore got promoted to a heavy flamer, and certainly looks the part next to the converted flamer:

This conversion is pretty easy, and looks different.

Construction

The photos below show the bitz used and where they go. (Click on the photos to view them at full size.)

Design

The barrels and muzzle of the Space Marine flamer were sliced off where the front handgrip ends. Next, the grip section of the Space Marine flamer was sliced off immediately behind the fuel tank and tubing. The grenade launcher arm was also sliced up so that only the grenade launcher handgrip and the rear section of the grenade launcher remained, and the flamer was glued to that. Next, I sliced off the barrels of the Cadian flamer and shaved the back of the muzzle flat. The muzzle was then glued directly to the front of the Space Marine flamer, completing the weapon.

The hand on the left Cadian flamer arm was sliced off at the wrist, and the same operation was performed on the open-handed left arm. The open left hand was then glued to the wrist of the Cadian flamer arm. That's all there really is to it.

Conclusions

This flamer fits in nicely with the rest of my converted weapons, although I wish the constituent flamer bits were just a little bit smaller. I also need to clean up some more flash and fuzz from this figure--it's amazing how many flaws and goofs the camera can pick up!

I plan to use the normal backpack flamers as heavy flamers, because the word "heavy", when applied to flamers, says to me "shoots more flaming liquid a longer distance", and not necessarily "bigger than a regular flamer". Because the much larger backpack fuel tank and the beefier wand definitely do suggest exactly that, it's perfect for a heavy flamer. It also looks nice next to the bulky heavy stubber.

The converted flamers with the smaller tanks will be gas flamers like the ones in Aliens, and I'm toying with the idea of further differentiating the standard gas flamers and the heavy flamers by having the gas flamers act like jet/spray weapons, while the heavy flamers have a longer-duration incendiary effect represented by placing and removing flame markers that last until the end of the turn.

I think the next time I do this conversion, I'm gonna try making the muzzle shorter and bringing the length of the weapon down a little more.

---------------------------UPDATE!---------------------------

I made two more changes to the weapon that made me a lot happier with it visually: I popped off the muzzle and shortened it further, then shaved off the "hook" on the top of the flamer. These changes made it look noticeably smaller, and removing the "hook" made it look less like a Space Marine flamer. Here are the updated photos:

I'm much happier with it now. Yeah, there's another carbine conversion and another SAW conversion in these photos--I have 5 carbines, 2 SAWs, a flamer, and a squad leader finished now.

Painting The Lazy Way #1: Macragge Genestealers

2008-12-02T17:18:00.005-06:00

Introduction

I used to be a good painter. When I was younger, I had the patience and motivation to try and make my figures look like they did in the glossy magazines and whatnot, and it wasn't unusual for me to spend hours and hours on just one figure.

A decade later, I find myself much less interested in painting to an extremely high standard, and more interested in just getting the figures painted to a "good enough to play with" standard. Part of it is the fact that my eyesight and coordination aren't what they used to be, part of it is a lack of time, and part of it is a simple refocusing of my interests from painting to playing. So, my painting style changed, with an emphasis on picking figures and color combinations that were quick and easy to paint.

For this first installment, I chose figures that are incredibly easy to paint: the snap-fit Genestealers from the old Battle for Macragge starter set. The color scheme is based heavily upon the classic blue and purple Genestealer scheme from earlier editions of 40k, but I tweaked the palette slightly because blue and purple don't look 100% harmonious to my eye. Instead, my Genestealers are a very dark cool purple that looks almost blue, and a lighter shade of warmer purple. The claws are also a slightly darker bone color, rather than the bright ivory of the "official" palette.

The reason the Genestealers are so easy to paint is because there are really only 3-4 areas of color, none of them are too fiddly to paint, and the colors used are easy to work with. The large amount of raised and inset surface detail on the figures also means they take washes and drybrushing very well, which speeds things up significantly.

The results are more than good enough to play with, but they'll probably make hardcore painters cry, because my quality dial is set to "looks a little better than a prepainted plastic figure" instead of "makes the 'Eavy Metal painters turn green with envy".

Photos

The painted figures are shown below. Click on the photos to see them at full size.

As you can see, it's a pretty basic color scheme, and the model's surface detail does most of the work for you.

Paints Used

Vallejo Game Color Royal Purple
Vallejo Game Color Warlord Purple
Vallejo Game Color Earth
Vallejo Game Color Bone White
Vallejo Game Color Charred Brown
Vallejo Game Color Scrofulous Brown
Vallejo Game Color Dark Flesh
Vallejo Game Color Gory Red
Citadel Leviathan Purple Wash
Citadel Gryphonne Sepia Wash

Painting Overview

The entire body, with exception of the head and hands, was painted Royal Purple.
The head and hands were painted Warlord Purple.
Leviathan Purple wash was applied liberally to the entire figure and allowed to dry.
The main body was drybrushed with Royal Purple until smooth to the eye.
The hands and head were drybrushed with Warlord Purple until smooth to the eye.
The claws were painted with a 1:1 mixture of Bone White and Earth.
The teeth were gently drybrushed with the 1:1 mix of Bone White and Earth.
The tongue was painted with Dark Flesh, then highlighted with Gory Red on the top surface only.
Gryphonne Sepia wash was applied to the claws and teeth, then allowed to dry.
The base was flocked with sand and painted Charred Brown.
The flocked portion of the base was drybrushed with Scrofulous Brown.

When drybrushing, make sure your paint is a little more watery than normal, and don't be afraid to repeat the process until the blending looks relatively smooth. (Dry paint causes a chalky buildup.)

When drybrushing the teeth, touch them only with the tip of the brush, and gently drag in one direction only--from the back to the front. Repeat until the teeth pop out visually. (It's easier to do than it sounds.)

Using the Citadel washes requires some faith on your part. Don't worry about how hideous the model looks while the wash is still wet--when it dries, it will look like it's supposed to. The drybrushing step simply restores shading definition and smooths out the blending a bit.

Conclusion

This color scheme is a homage to the classic Genestealers, but darker, more subtle, and much less garish than the brightly highlighted official scheme. Despite the number of steps involved, it's easy to do, and the lack of fiddly details means you can get quite a lot of them finished in a short time.

Stupid Bitz Tricks #4: Fun With Lasguns

2008-12-02T15:25:00.005-06:00

Introduction

This is another attempt to come up with a squad automatic weapon for the Imperial Guard plastics. In a previous Stupid Bitz Tricks entry, I showed how to turn a vehicle heavy stubber and some leftover bitz into an Aliens-style smartgun, but not everyone has ready access to the vehicle heavy stubbers. So, this conversion needed to use cheaper and more readily available bitz.

This time around, the trick in this particular conversion is actually to make everyone else's guns smaller, then build up the squad automatic weapon from a standard lasgun. This is the result:

By shaving down standard lasguns into carbine-length weapons, the squad automatic weapon version of the lasgun suddenly looks much bigger and more substantial.

Construction

The following photos show the bitz used and their configuration. (Click the photos to see them at full size.)

Design

For this conversion, I thought a more contemporary look to the weapons would be nice, as well as making it an easy conversion. So, most of the troopers would have carbine-sized weapons, and the squad automatic weapons would be full-length, with some extra bitz added to make them look different.

To start with, I dug out my lasgun bitz and separated them into two piles. All lasguns on which the left hand is completely behind the front sight hump went into the carbine pile, and all lasguns on which the left hands were slightly forward of the front sight hump went into the SAW pile. I took a lasgun from the carbine pile, then shortened it by carefully cutting off everything forward of the front sight post, then sliced off the muzzle and glued it back onto the shortened lasgun. The winged skull motif on the side of the lasgun was also shaved off.

I also shaved off the "sight tube" that runs through the front and rear sight humps. (When I get more plasticard, I'm gluing a strip to the front/rear sight humps to form a carrying handle like the one on the Aliens pulse rifles.)

For the SAW, I chose a lasgun that had an attached bayonet, then carefully removed the blade and trimmed the rest of the bayonet a little so it would look like some sort of gas tube. The original magazine was shaved off, and I needed something that looked like it had a very high capacity to replace the original magazine with. I found some leftover flamers in my bitz box, and there was a portion of the flamer that looked like it would make a good high-capacity power cell. That portion was sliced out and shaved down a bit, then glued to the bottom of the lasgun's magazine well.

I had a lot of leftover Space Marine Scout bolt pistols and a couple of heavy bolter bipods, which I didn't use on the Scout heavy bolters because they looked too goofy to me. I sliced off a bolt pistol targeter, shaved its bottom flat, then glued it to the upper right side of the lasgun receiver. The heavy bolter bipod was simply glued to the front of the lasgun.

Conclusion

I like how the Cadians look carrying the short carbines, and the squad automatic weapon is kinda interesting. The main appeal to me is how different the carbine/SAW pairing looks, and it lends a nice contemporary feel to an Imperial Guard squad.

Next time, I'm going to see if I can convert the winged skull motif on the carbine to a single-winged skull rather than shaving the whole thing off entirely, and I'll be looking into alternative bitz for the SAW's high capacity magazine and bipod.

Stupid Bitz Tricks #3: Aliens-style Heavy Stubber

2008-12-02T01:04:00.004-06:00

Introduction

I'm a firm believer in the old adage "waste not, want not", so when I carve up something for bitz, I'm always looking for something to do with the leftover pieces and scrap. The sentry gun from Stupid Bitz Tricks #2 yielded several useful pieces that I decided to put to work filling another hole in my Imperial Guard roster: the lack of squad automatic weapons. I had a pintle mounted heavy stubber in my bitz box, and I'd always wanted to find a way to make it a handheld weapon system. However, it wasn't until after doing the sentry gun that I realized I could convert the heavy stubber into something that looked like an Aliens smartgun. This is the result:

Construction

The images below show the bitz used and their configuration. (Click the photos below to view them at full size.)

Design

The main parts used are a spare set of Cadian flamer arms and the heavy stubber from the Imperial Guard Vehicle Upgrade sprue. The flamer was sliced apart in two places so that only the rearmost segment with the handgrip and the sling remained attached to the arm. The heavy stubber's barrel was shortened by clipping out everything between the muzzle and the ventilated shroud, then gluing the muzzle directly to the shroud.

Next, the upper surface of the heavy stubber was shaved clean of all large protuberances (the lever-looking thing and the sight hump), and the rearmost end of it was squared off so it could mate nicely against the flamer's handgrip. The bottom was also shaved flat, then glue was applied to the front of the flamer handgrip and the front sling swivel on the right flamer arm, and the heavy stubber was then pressed into place. The ammo drum was the ribbed section of the autocannon barrel that was left over from the sentry gun project, which was shaved flat on both ends and then glued into the notch on the bottom left side of the heavy stubber.

The sighting system is a Space Marine targeter that was left over from the sentry gun also, its front end having been sliced off to serve as the sentry gun's sensor lens. The front of the targeter was sanded flat, and the targeter was then glued to the upper right side of the heavy stubber, above the ejection port. The next step was to incorporate the visual suggestion of a waldo system, so I rooted through my bitz box and found the lascannon barrel that was left over from the sentry gun project. On the bottom of the barrel, there's a long rail--the frontmost, tapered section was sliced off.

The lascannon barrel rail segment was glued to the bottom of the heavy stubber, directly in front of the flamer handgrip, so that the flat end was flush with the heavy stubber's receiver and the tapered end of the rail segment was pointing to the left side of the heavy stubber. This is what gives the visual suggestion of a waldo system. The next step was to add a vertical handgrip on the side of the weapon, in order to make it look more like an Aliens smartgun, and I used a leftover autocannon ammo drum handle for this purpose. The ammo drum handle was cut so that only one flange remained on it, and glued to the lascannon barrel rail segment.

Conclusion

If you happen to have leftover heavy stubbers from Leman Russ or Chimera kits, this is one way to make them man-portable. It's also not a particularly difficult conversion, and it follows the same basic Aliens-inspired theme as the sentry gun.

One other fun thing you can do with the Imperial Guard Vehicle Upgrade Sprue is to use the tank commander parts to make a junior officer with upraised hand and binoculars, which would be a good stand-in for Lieutenant Gorman. You could also just use the tank commander's head with the Cadian sergeant bitz to make a more heroic-looking lieutenant, so long as you remember to shave the sergeant stripes off the chainsword arm.

I think the weapon is a bit large, however, so I'm going to shorten the flamer handgrip and the heavy stubber body the next time I perform this conversion. I figure if I shave one or two more millimeters off the overall weapon length, it'll be snugged in a little closer to the body and look a little less oversized.

Stupid Bitz Tricks #2: Sentry Gun

2008-12-01T18:42:00.011-06:00

Introduction

I've wanted a couple of the Forge World Space Marine Tarantula sentry guns for a while now, because I've had a thing for sentry guns ever since watching the director's cut of Aliens. In that movie, there were a couple of scenes in which the Marines deployed some UA 571-C sentry guns and used them to fend off the xenomorph onslaught. However, I have some problems with the Forge World Tarantula models, namely the facts that they're too expensive at the current GBP-USD exchange rate, Forge World doesn't deduct the 15.5% VAT for overseas customers, and I'd actually like something a bit smaller anyway. So, I decided to check my bitz box and see if I could make my own.

The Prototype

I found enough of the right bitz, and this is the result:

It's small, looks the part, is surprisingly easy to make, and can be made solely from leftover Cadian and Space Marine bitz.

Construction

The next two photos illustrate the bitz used and where they go. (Click on the pictures to see them at full size.)

The Design

I chose to use Cadian heavy weapon bitz because I wanted the sentry gun to be plastic and fit in seamlessly with my GW plastic figures. The main body of the sentry gun is a lascannon with the entire barrel removed, and mounted on a tripod. The front half of the sentry gun is a heavy bolter with everything behind the ammo feed/ejection ports removed. I took a Cadian grenade launcher arm and removed everything except the drum, then cleaned it up to serve as the ammunition drum for the sentry gun. The drum was glued to the feed port of the heavy bolter.

At this point, the sentry gun looked a little unbalanced, so I added the muzzle brake from an autocannon to lengthen the barrel. I also sliced off the carrying handle from an autocannon ammunition drum and glued it to the top of the lascannon body. Next, I needed some sort of sensor cluster on the left hand side of the sentry gun in order to balance out the drum and make it look more like a sentry gun, so I rescued the grenade launcher's barrel and shaved it down to serve as a large sensor housing. The rail along the bottom of the grenade launcher barrel makes a nice mounting point, so I applied glue to the bottom of the rail and attached it to the side of the lascannon body. The targeter from the heavy weapon sprue was glued above it, along the angled portion of the lascannon body.

I liked the way it looked, but it still didn't quite say "sentry gun" to me yet. I decided it needed two more elements: some sort of control box that would make it look like a remote weapon system, and the sensor I made from the grenade launcher barrel really needed a lens in front. I went through my bitz box again, and found a Space Marine targeter and a baggie full of spare voxcaster backpacks. I sliced off and glued the front of the Space Marine targeter to the grenade launcher barrel, and it finally looked like a proper sensor. I cut off the bottom half of a voxcaster backpack and removed the long antenna from the top. To form the control box, the bottom half of the voxcaster was glued to the right side of the lascannon body, behind the ammo drum, and the antenna was glued to the control box to finish it off.

Conclusion

You can make a sentry gun out of one $13 heavy weapon team box and leftover bitz from a box of Cadians, and still have enough bitz left to make a missile launcher team and a mortar team. Use the kneeling legs for the mortar team, and the missile launcher bitz work with regular standing Cadians pretty nicely. You'll use the included 60mm base for the mortar team, and the sentry gun will need a spare 40mm base. If you buy the $35 heavy weapon squad box, you'll get 3 sentry guns, 3 missile launchers, and 3 mortar teams out of it.

I'm thinking about using the leftover sandbags and stuff to set up a sentry gun control station, with some sort of scratchbuilt command display, a communications unit, and a couple of kneeling guys on a 60mm base. One of those could control multiple sentry guns, and it'd look pretty cool on the tabletop.

Looking at the completed sentry gun model the next day, I think I'll do it a bit differently next time. The heavy weapons sprue has two autocannon drum carrying handles, so the next sentry gun will have two carrying handles on the top of the body, along the angled bits of the lascannon body, which would make the sentry gun look like it could be carried by a couple of guys. The smaller targeter from the heavy weapons sprue would be moved up top, between the carrying handles and close to the front. I'll probably leave the larger sensor on the left side of the sentry gun exactly where it is to visually balance out the drum on the right side.

More Citadel Wash testing

2008-07-13T22:42:00.008-05:00

Following up on the Citadel Washes review I posted a few days ago, I painted a couple of human figures to see how the Citadel Washes work on clothing and flesh.

2 Copplestone troopers and one of the bots from the review

(Now, I'm nowhere nearly as good a painter as I used to be in my youth, back when I could actually see what I was doing with the brush, so pardon the lack of eyes and absence of fancy highlighting.)

The fatigues are a 1:1 mix of Vallejo Caiman Green and Vallejo Khaki, while the boots, undershirts, weapons, and gear are a 1:1 mix of Vallejo Black and Vallejo Cold Grey. The fleshy bits are a 3:1 mix of Vallejo Dwarf Skin and Elf Skintone. The lady's hair is Vallejo Scorched Brown, while the guy's hair is Vallejo Beasty Brown. The fatigues and gear received a wash of Devlan Mud, while the exposed flesh and hair received a wash of Ogryn Flesh. I applied a coat of straight Future to seal the paint, and brushed on a layer of Vallejo Matte Varnish after the Future dried.

When I get some more air-drying clay, I'll be blending the figures' integral stub bases into the slottabases, then finishing the bases properly.

Citadel Wash Set Review

2008-07-10T03:16:00.008-05:00

I mentioned in the Carnifex review that I had also purchased the new Citadel Wash Set, which comes with all 8 of the new washes. I had a chance to try them out earlier while painting up some Copplestone Castings Terminator Robots to use as security robots.

The washes, with a Vallejo Game Color 17ml bottle

The 8 colors, in order of usefulness, are: Devlan Mud, Badab Black, Ogryn Flesh, Gryphonne Sepia, Thraka Green, Baal Red, Asurmen Blue, and Leviathan Purple. They come in dinky little 12ml bottles that, at first blush, made me grumble a little about how it seems that every time Games Workshop comes out with a new line of paints, the bottles shrink and the prices grow. I popped open the lids, and was annoyed to see that the bottle design doesn't significantly improve on the problems that the older flip top bottles had. I'm planning to transfer them to spare Vallejo dropper bottles, because I really don't like flip top pots.

The next step was to paint something so I could give them a try. Since I needed the Copplestone robots for an upcoming game anyway, it was a good opportunity to kill two birds with one stone. I basecoated the robots in Vallejo Sombre Grey, then painted the weapons, shoulders, hip actuators, knee actuators, and the thigh piping a 1:1 mix of Vallejo Black and Vallejo Cold Grey. The same 1:1 mix of Black and Cold Grey was applied to the bases.

I had 5 robots finished, so I looked over the colors. I decided to use the Badab Black wash because I wanted a dark, slightly desaturated, and somewhat oily look to the robots. I basically just dipped the brush in the pot and glopped the stuff all over the figures, with the occasional pause to wick away the excess with the brush. This is the result:

Group shot: 5 Copplestone Castings Terminator Robots

Close-up shot

I was more than a little surprised at how easy the washes were to use. The consistency is quite a bit thicker than than I expected, they go on smoothly, and they settle down into the recesses nicely. Straight from the bottle, they do stain and darken colors significantly, so they would seem to work best with lighter shades of the colors you want to use. I think they would be terrific to use for beginners, or getting those boring figures that you have to paint a lot of out of the way quickly.

I don't think advanced painters are going to get much out of these washes, especially if they're already used to mixing their own washes and glazes. For beginners, though, they're a good confidence builder, as the initial results are fairly tableworthy, and they can move on to layering and highlighting from there. Also, they dry pretty flat, as you can see in the photos. (The figures aren't even varnished yet.)

My initial grumbling about the small quantity and flip top pots aside, I like these washes.

Update: More testing here.

Tyranid Carnifex Review

2008-07-06T20:18:00.010-05:00

Introduction

My wife and I visited the local gaming store the other day just to pick up some dice I needed for a game. We walked out with a brick of green 12mm 6-sided dice, the new Citadel Wash set, and a Tyranid Carnifex. Heh. So much for just buying the dice.

I took a look inside the box last night, but didn't have time to really get into it since I still had some work to finish. Today's a light day for work, so I figured I'd take a poke at building the thing. Here are my impressions:

The size of this thing is unreal. I knew it was big, it looks big on the box, and it looks big in photographs. Seeing it in the flesh is something else...this thing is big. It towers over everything else I have by at least a good inch and a half, and that includes my Space Marine dreadnought and the Tau battlesuits. Here are some photos of the finished model:

Group shot with my Space Marines and a couple other Tyranids

Same setup, Carnifex rotated for a side view

Box Contents

The box contains a glossy black and white instruction booklet, three sprues, and a 60mm base.

The first sprue contains 5 and a half 2-part heads, a pair of Devourer arms, a pair of Deathspitter arms, two large scythe arms, two decorative head bits, six carapace spikes, a spiked mace tail attachment, and a scything tail attachment.

By "5 and a half heads", I mean five whole heads, with an optional damaged half that can replace the right side of the normal head. The normal head is pretty much just that, a huge version of the normal Tyranid head. The other 4 heads are: one with a pair of very prominent tusks, one with a giant dripping tongue that would do Gene Simmons proud, complete with a couple of scrotum-like venom glands hanging off the chin, another head with a gaping maw showing a bio-plasma weapon, and a strange head with two very prominent vane-like structures arranged like a pair of horns and three pairs of eyes.

The two decorative head bits are a blade-like protrusion that sort of looks like a rhinoceros horn in profile, and a ridged, V-shaped bony mass. Either one of them fits on the frontmost ridge of most of the heads.

The second sprue contains a 3-part upper torso, two giant crab pincer arms, three choices of carapace, a pair of legs, the lower torso, and half of the ball socket attachment that secures the lower torso to the upper torso.

The three carapaces included are: a smooth carapace, one with spore cysts, and one with spine banks.

The third sprue contains weapons and accessories. There are two smaller scything arms, a pair of Venom Cannon arms, a pair of Barbed Strangler arms, four spikey shoulder armor bits, a large Adrenal Gland biomorph bit, and some scrotum-like Venom Gland sacs that the instructions suggest gluing to the arms.

The Barbed Strangler arms come in three pieces. The right arm is holding the weapon, and the left arm is holding a giant sac filled with spheroid projectiles, which connects to the weapon with a long, meaty-looking hose. The third piece is a barrel half for the weapon itself. A cute touch is that you can see round bulges along the hose, which visually suggests projectiles being moved to the weapon from the sac.

The Venom Cannon arms come in two pieces. The right arm is holding the weapon, and the left arm has the fingers growing into a long tube that enter the weapon body on the left side.

The instructions also show several possible configurations and armament options for the model.

Build Notes

The lower body was pretty simple, only requiring that you glue the legs to the sides of the lower torso, glue the feet to the 60mm base, and then glue the hemispherical ball socket dealie onto the "waist" part. The legs are not posable, and use rectangular slots and tabs for fitting. I didn't use any of the optional tail attachments.

The upper torso comes in two left-right halves, and a third upper center piece that fills the gap between the left and right halves. Building the upper torso was kind of like building one of these old ERTL USS Enterprise models from the 1980s--a little frustrating and requiring some clamping and a lot of cleanup work. The last part to go on is the carapace, and I chose the smooth carapace.

All of the heads assemble identically--just glue the halves together, glue on either of the two optional decorative bits, then glue the completed head into the neck socket. I chose to use the tusked head.

I still haven't decided what arms to put on the thing, but they all connect to the torso by way of a ball at the shoulder and 4 sockets on the upper torso. Right now I'm leaning towards the large scythe arms to fill the two uppermost arm sockets, and I'm torn between giving it a pair of Deathspitters or using one of the larger weapons.

Conclusion

I really like this model. It's big, it's frightening, and because of the large number of included options, you have a lot of choice in how you want the thing to look. I feel like I got my money's worth out of this model, which is a pleasant difference from how I felt about the Space Marine Terminators I reviewed a couple of months ago.

Update: I decided to use the 4 scythe arms and tool it up into a giant slashy stabby bitey endgame boss. I also took some photos for scale and added them to the entry.

The Tungsten Powder Experiment, Part 2

2008-07-04T05:12:00.005-05:00

I've weighted the bases of all 18 Genestealers with the PVA and tungsten powder mix, and I have some additional observations to make.

First, I went to a drier, somewhat more crumbly mix that had a higher proportion of powder, and this mix is noticeably heavier. It's also a bit messier while kneading, but still cleans up easily.

Second, I believe I'm down to about 70% of the original amount of powder after weighting 20 bases. I had some leftover putty that I didn't want to waste, so I also weighted the bases of two of my other plastic figures. Once I run out of powder, I'll post again with a final count of how many slottabases can be filled with one can of this stuff.

Third, the added amount of heft from the new mix is unbelievable. If you flip a Genestealer over just right, it'll do a little ninja roll and snap back to its feet, which is kinda funny to watch.

Overall, I'd have to say that while this stuff works nicely, the normal price point of $20 USD per 8-ounce can is steep enough that I would only recommend it wholeheartedly if you have absolutely no access to #9-#12 lead shot in small quantities. If you can find the shot, go with that instead...it'll be heavy enough, and if you're lucky enough to know someone who loads their own shotgun shells, you might be able to buy a pound's worth from that person at a better price.

If you're in the same boat that I am (not knowing anybody that loads their own shells, and not keen on buying 25 pounds of shot for $50), then the tungsten powder is an acceptable alternative despite its price.

The Tungsten Powder Experiment

2008-07-02T20:23:00.016-05:00

A few days ago, I was looking for ways to weigh down the bases of my plastic Tyranid Genestealer models. The main problem with them (and some of the other Tyranid models, such as the Hormagaunts) was that the base size wasn't in proportion to the size of the figure. As a result, these models have a tendency to faceplant on angled surfaces, or be knocked over easily because their center of gravity is too high and too far away from the center of the base for optimum stability. So, the bases needed to be weighted somehow.

The nice thing about Games Workshop slottabases is that they're hollow on the bottom, and that concavity is handy for filling with something heavy. The unslotted versions are very easy to weigh down--all you have to do is glue something like an US penny to the underside. The slotted version that my Genestealers came with, however, has walls that partition the concavity into three areas, so you'd have to saw the penny into odd-sized bits to fit within these "compartments".

Now, I don't know about you, but I have better things to do with my time than spending an hour defacing US Government property with a hacksaw and a vise just to keep my little plastic army men from falling over. My second instinct was to buy some small lead shot in the #9 to #12 range, and use cyanoacrylate gel to fix the shot into place.

After 20 minutes of consulting with Professor Google, I came to the conclusion that spending $50 for a giant sack of lead shot was something of a non-starter, as I only needed a small amount. So, I switched the focus of the search to "lead powder". I mean, some chemistry lab somewhere would sell the stuff, right? Shortly after I had that idea, however, I realized that lead powder is a fairly nasty substance that I don't particularly want to breathe in or get all over my fingers.

Fortunately, one of the hits was for tungsten powder, which is quite a bit less toxic, and is used by golf club makers to adjust the weight of golf clubs. I ordered an 8-ounce can of the stuff from Golfsmith, which was on sale for about $16 at the time, and it just arrived today.

Now for some observations. I was extremely pleased to see how finely ground this stuff was. I was expecting to see a pile of coarsely ground and snaggly metal crumbs that looked like iron filings, but this stuff is extremely fine and smooth, in a very dark gray color with just a hint of metallic shine:

The next step was to try it out and see how it worked. I decided to make a paste using a small amount of PVA glue as the binder, so I scrounged up some empty cap to use as a mixing palette, some of my Elmer's craft glue, and one of my sculpting spatulas:

I squeezed out a blob of PVA glue about the size of a penny into the cap, then spooned in a spatula's worth of tungsten powder to start the mix. Initially, the mix will be very fluid, like pancake syrup. This is okay, as we want to focus on getting a good initial emulsion first.

Once the mix is an uniform shade of dark grey, add another spatula's worth of tungsten powder and continue mixing until it thickens to about the consistency of a sticky cookie dough, which is almost where we want it. Next, scrape the blob off the spatula and drop it into the jar of tungsten powder. Give it a good roll around, like you're coating a sugar cookie. The objective here is to get as much metal into the mix as possible, and to give the glue a bit of time to thicken nicely.

Remove the blob from the jar after the initial sugar-coating, then roll and knead it with your fingers to expose more sticky bits. When the blob feels sticky again, give it another roll around in the powder jar. Repeat until the blob is of an uniform, rubbery, ever-so-slightly tacky consistency like Silly Putty, and it no longer sticks to your fingers in little separate bits and pieces. This is exactly the consistency we want for the next step.

Tear the blob into two pieces, one slightly larger than the other. The bigger of the two goes into the larger concavity in the slottabase, and the smaller one goes in the second concavity. Squish them into place with a clay shaper, sculpting tool, or spatula, making sure the blobs are packed into the slottabase as tightly as possible. This is what you should end up with:

The reason I chose to use PVA as the binder is because it is a naturally flexible and nontoxic substance that dries relatively quickly, and goofs are very easy to clean up before the mix solidifies, and if it dries on your fingers, it's in a rubbery form that's easy to just peel off. The PVA-based putty is also very clean and easy to work with. I can't say the same about stinky 2-part liquid epoxies or cyanoacrylate glue, and I didn't want to use sculpting putty because I wanted the binder to be a viscous liquid rather than a resinous solid.

Next, I compared a weighted and non-weighted figure to see what kind of stability improvement I could expect. I was pleased to find that the tungsten putty mix lends a significant amount of stability and a little bit of extra heft to the weighted figure, making it much more difficult to knock down or accidentally displace than the unweighted figure.

At $19.99 USD for an 8-ounce quantity, this stuff is not cheap. However, the amount in the jar seems like a lifetime supply considering how little of it was actually used in the process, so I think I can safely do all of the slottabases in my collection and still have plenty of the stuff left over.

Another squad of New Israelis

2008-06-06T15:16:00.004-05:00

I painted up a second squad of 15mm New Israelis a few days after the first, this time in a tan scheme using straight Vallejo Khaki instead of the 1:1 Caiman Green/Khaki mix. At that size, color-coding the teams seemed to be the simplest way of differentiating one player's team from another.

GZG New Israelis and Xenomorphs

2008-06-06T14:44:00.005-05:00

These are my 15mm New Israelis and Xenomorphs from Ground Zero Games, which I painted up for a 15mm sci-fi "dungeon crawl" style game.

The New Israelis' full body armor suits were painted with a 1:1 mix of Vallejo Caiman Green and Khaki. Their weapons and equipment were painted with a 1:1 mix of Vallejo Black and Cold Grey.

The armor and weapons were washed with a 1:4:8 mix of Vallejo Black, water, and Future Floor Finish for shading. The high points on the armor were then touched up again with the Caiman Green/Khaki mix after the wash dried, the visors were painted with Vallejo Glorious Gold, and the bases were done in the same 1:1 Black/Cold Grey mix. I then applied some PVA glue to the bases, and sprinkled on some black sand. The whole thing was then sealed with a coat of Future Floor Finish, and then I used Vallejo Matte Varnish on the armor and weapons. The visors were left unvarnished so they would remain shiny.

The Xenomorphs and egg clusters were simply painted in a 1:1 mix of Vallejo Black and Cold Grey, washed with the same Black/water/Future mix, and then drybrushed with the black/grey base color again. Basing was done the same way as the New Israeli figures, and then sealed with a coat of Future Floor Finish.

I left the Xenomorphs in the glossy Future clearcoat because I liked the way the gloss lends a nice specular highlight to all the minute detail on them. The egg clusters got a coat of Matte Varnish because they looked a bit funny in the glossy clear coat.

The facehuggers were basecoated with Vallejo Earth and washed in the same way as the other figures, highlighted with a few progressively lighter mixes of Earth and Bone White, then sealed with Future Floor Finish and a layer of Matte Varnish.

Stupid Bitz Tricks #1: Cadian Parasite Zombies!

2008-03-29T14:28:00.002-05:00

Here's a silly conversion I did after realizing that the Adrenal Gland piece on the basic Tyranid Biomorph sprue looked an awful lot like a cross between an armored brain and a Facehugger from Aliens. I figured it'd be funny to do a parasite zombie that lurches around with a grenade in one hand.

I took a plastic Cadian figure, one of the "throwing a grenade" arms, and a grenade launcher left arm, and then set to work.

I glued the adrenal gland bit to the face of the Cadian, then cut the left hand off at the wrist so I could rotate it a bit, and filled in the gap between the helmet and the adrenal gland with Squadron modeling putty.

This conversion, in total, took about 20 minutes to do, from finding the bits in my bitz box to getting it all glued together.

Space Marine Dreadnought Review

2008-03-28T21:08:00.002-05:00

Introduction

Okay, I just finished building my Space Marine Dreadnought, and it's review time. I mentioned in my Space Marine Scout review that the Scouts were a little bit of a letdown in the plastics department. The Dreadnought, however, totally makes up for that and then some, because it was a fun build.

Box Contents

What you get in the box are 4 sprues and a pretextured 60mm urban base. The base has several cracked concrete slabs, rubble, bullet holes, spent assault cannon shell casings, and a cute little skull in the rubble. I don't want to use it, though, so I'm going to be using a normal 60mm base instead. I think it also came with a sheet of decals, but I can't be positive because I have zillions of these SM decal sheets.

There are too many parts for me to give you the usual "what's on the sprue" section, so instead I'll go over the included parts by body location.

Legs: The legs are composed of front/back halves with nicely detailed cabling, hydraulics and servos, two 4-toed feet, and 2 curved lower leg armor plates. The waist is almost a ball-socket joint, except a lot flatter, and so are the ankles. The armor plates glue to posts on the front of the legs.

Torso: Composed of a top plate, a front plate, a bottom plate, 2 side plates, and a 2-part engine/exhaust assembly. You glue the top plate to the front plate, then you glue the side plates into the recesses on the underside of the top/front plate assembly, and then you glue the bottom plate to this assembly. The engine/exhaust assembly is in front/back halves, and closes off the back of the torso assembly.

The last piece to add is the faceplate panel of the sarcophagus, and you have 3 cosmetic choices here: one with a Crux Terminatus, one with a winged skull, or a dorky looking "human skull on eagle body" panel. All three have a rectangular vision slit up top and a banner at the bottom that you can add the name of your Dreadnought to. I chose the winged skull because it looked cooler than the other two options.

Right arm: You get 2 choices-an arm with twin-linked lascannons in an over/under configuration, or an assault cannon arm, each of which is a 2-part assembly composed of an inside half and an outside half. The inside half of both weapons has a deep hole for the arm pegs on the torso.

Left arm: You get 2 choices here as well-a 3 piece close combat weapon arm with optional storm bolter or heavy flamer, or a 3 piece missile launcher arm. Both arms consist of inside/outside halves like the right arms. The CCW arm has a claw that glues to the front of the forearm, and the missile launcher has a front plate with the missile tubes on it. The storm bolter/heavy flamer options glue to the underside of the forearm, with their respective ammo/fuel feeds gluing to the underside of the shoulder block.

Note on the arms: The hole/peg mounting system for both arms is snug enough that you don't have to glue the arms into place, and you don't need magnets. If you don't glue them to the torso, you can swap out the arms if you need to.

Optional parts: You get a 2-part searchlight, a 3-tube set of smoke dischargers that comes in 2 halves, a large Crux Terminatus icon that fits on the side torsos, and two purity seals. I used all of the options-the Crux Terminatus on the left torso, smoke dischargers up top above the sarcophagus, the searchlight over the left torso, and one purity seal each on the assault cannon/CCW arms.

I got some sprues from different lots, incidentally…the one with the assault cannon arm, heavy flamer, smoke dischargers, and purity seals is in a much lighter gray color. The other 3 sprues and the bases are in a darker gray. This doesn't affect the model in any way, and is just an observation on what I got.

Unlike the other boxed sets I bought recently, there's no instruction booklet. Instead, there are 6 exploded assembly diagrams on the back of the box, which cover all of the included build options.

Build Notes

Assembly went well, with less cleanup required than the Terminators or Scouts. This is partly because of how several of the Dreadnought parts were sprued to minimize mold lines, and partly because I happened to get good sprues. However, the parts often go together in deceptively simple ways that could result in applying glue to the wrong place if you aren't careful, so I recommend dry fitting EVERY part BEFORE applying any glue, and making a note of how the parts join. That way, you'll know exactly where to apply the glue and where not to apply it. I know it sounds stupid and patronizing of me to say the above, but when you dry fit the torso parts, you'll see what I mean with the whole glue thing.

Conclusion

The original metal Blood Angels dreadnought with the multimelta right arm and CCW left arm was one of the models that sucked me into 40k back in 1995. The metal ones were a pain to build sometimes, and I've accidentally dropped metal dreadnoughts more than a few times with painful cosmetic effects. The plastic model I just reviewed is a vast improvement over these earlier models for several reasons: it holds up to falls better, it stays together better, you get more options in the box, and it's just a really nice model with a lot of pleasing technical greeblies on it.

Sizewise, this thing is squat and beefy. It's over 2 inches wide, stands over 2 inches tall, and is about an inch and a half deep through the torso. It looks huge next to Scouts and tactical marines, and looks really nice with the new Terminators.

Also, I don't know if this is representative of ALL plastic dreads, but there are a couple of small spots on the arms that you might want to fill with a little bit of putty to hide gaps. In my case, there's a small gap under the assault cannon's ammo box, and another one on the front of the assault cannon right below the frontal slope of the shoulder. These defects were only on the light gray parts, and I didn't see any fitting issues on the darker gray majority of the parts.

Tyranid Warriors Review

2008-03-28T13:40:00.001-05:00

Introduction

I ordered some extra Termagants from the Battle for Macragge set to replace my 5-colored painting experiments, 6 empty Vallejo paint bottles, two boxes of Tyranid Warriors, and a Space Marine Dreadnought. The dreadnought will get its own review later, and I'm gonna review the Tyranid warrior box here in the usual fashion.

Box Contents

Included are 4 40mm bases, 3 Warrior sprues, a biomorph sprue, and a monstrous creature sprue.

The Warrior sprue has 2 legs, a lower body/tail piece, 2 scythe arms, a set of deathspitter arms, 2 choices of upper head armor, 2 choices of face, 2 sets of 3 flesh hooks, a set of front/back torso halves, and a large Ripper. The 2 face choices let you choose whether you want the normal open jaws with tongue or open jaws with a barbed flesh hook tongue. The 2 head armor choices are basically different styles of ridged crests, with one being more elaborate and pointier than the other. You get 3 of those sprues per box.

The biomorph sprue includes another Ripper, 3 sets of Devourer arms, 3 sets of spinefist arms, 3 sets of 2 toxin sacs each, 3 adrenal sacs, and 3 small chitinous armor plates. You get one of these sprues per box.

The monstrous creature sprue has a set of Barbed Strangler arms, a set of Venom Cannon arms, a set of huge scythe arms, a set of huge grabby Genestealer-style clawed hands, a horned Ripper, and 2 larger chitinous armor plates. You get one of these sprues per box. The scythe arms and grabby claw arms are aesthetically far too large to put on the Warriors in my opinion, but the 2 heavy weapon options are useful if you like meatguns. The Ripper is always useful, because these things are too cute to resist.

Build Notes

All told, there's enough stuff here to build a set of 3 Warriors and 5 Rippers. You get enough options to tool up all 3 Warriors with the smaller biomorphs, which is cool.

Warrior assembly is pretty straightforward. You start with the legs and the lower body/tail piece, which have a hexagonal male-female interface that makes correctly aligning the legs a snap. Glue that to a 40mm base. Next, you glue the front/back torso halves together, then you glue that onto the quasi-hemispherical protuberance on top of the lower body piece. Pick a face and a head, glue 'em together, then glue that onto the rounded neck post on the torso. After this, pick the arms you want and glue them to the torso. That's it.

You also have 5 Rippers that you can put on the extra 40mm base included. I think 5 Rippers looks more swarmy than the old 3-per-base rule of thumb, but I plan to base all of mine individually on 25mm bases. Rippers are my favorite Tyranid model, just so you know.

Conclusion

The Warriors are pretty big models, and I'm particularly fond of how they look when you replace their lower arms with Hormagaunt scythe arms. They're my second favorite Tyranid model after the Rippers, with the new Carnifex in third place.

Incidentally, this boxed set has convinced me that I need plastic zombies. Specifically, the adrenal sac things look like armored brains with half-length Facehugger-style legs on the sides, and I want to glue them to the head of some hapless plastic model, sculpt the rest of the legs around the head with ProCreate, and add a little strangly tail wrapped around the figure's neck. What for? Tyranid mind slaves in Advanced Space Crusade!

Of course, now I need to figure out how to appropriately convert the WHFB zombie regiment to look more futuristic, because I like my zombies to look like awkward meat puppets.

Space Marine Scouts Review

2008-03-26T13:29:00.002-05:00

Introduction

I ordered 2 boxes of plastic Space Marine Scouts, along with a giant pile of Tyranid Rippers, hive nodes, and infestation markers from the Warstore a few days ago. Service, as usual, was superb, and they arrived today.

I got the scouts, Rippers, and infestation markers because Advanced Space Crusade is another one of those games that I was feeling a bit nostalgic about recently. That game came with 15 of the old-fashioned mohawked plastic scouts with poofy slashy sleeves and 6 of the old-school plastic Tyranid Warriors.

I have the Warriors on order, and I was planning to use the infestation markers as spawn points for individually based Rippers because they look a lot like alien egg clusters. Throw in the 30 Genestealers from my Battle for Macragge and Space Hulk collections, and I've got a nice 3-tiered peon-goon-miniboss setup for the enemies. Anyway, that's what I bought them for. On to the review!

Box Contents

The Scout boxed set contains 2 parts sprues, 2 4-base sprues, a sheet of decals, and a really rudimentary instruction booklet. The first sprue contains 5 sets of legs, 5 torsos, a heavy bolter with the right arm attached to it, a left arm for the heavy bolter, a bipod for the heavy bolter, a shoulder pad for the heavy bolter left arm, a heavy bolter ammo bag, six heads, and an assortment of extra pouches and grenades.

Six heads probably sounds like a funny number for a 5-man boxed set, but one of them is the sergeant's head (it's got a different headset and a Shouty Command Face expression), the other is for the heavy bolter guy (this one's got a headset/eyepiece that looks like the smartgunner headset with eyepiece in Aliens), one's got the Geordi LaForge visor dealie, and the other three are normal scout heads. The unpainted heavy bolter guy's face bears an eerie resemblance to Tahmoh Penikett, incidentally.

The extra gear pieces go in 2 different body locations-there are 5 pouch/grenade bits that glue to the right chest, and there are 5 pouch/grenade bits that glue to the left rear waist. Two of those waist pouch bits have coiled rope on them.

The second sprue is the weapon/arm sprue. There are 5 right arms with bolt pistols, one of them being the sergeant's special with Honking Big Scope and the other four being regular scout bolt pistols with scopes. There are 4 left arms with swords and a left arm with a chainsword for the sergeant.

There are 4 right arms with attached shotguns and 4 right arms with attached boltguns-both the boltgun and shotgun arms share the same left arms. The matched left-right arm pairs are letter-coded on the sprue, so be careful to keep them organized if you desprue them all at once.

There's also a scabbarded sword, which presumably belongs to the heavy bolter scout when fielded as part of a boltpistol/sword armed squad. (This is how the metal 3rd Edition heavy bolter scout was sculpted, if I recall correctly.)

Build Notes

The instruction booklet was a bit lame, so it took me a minute or so to understand exactly how the arms are attached. There are 2 wedge shaped bits on the torsos-each arm has a matching concavity, and this forms a male-female connection that fixes the arms into their proper place.

The heavy bolter scout was a little annoying to assemble because the arms are actually posed holding the heavy bolter pointing upwards a bit, NOT pointing parallel to the ground like it shows on the box, so I thought I was doing something wrong for a while there. I ended up having to bend the torso a little bit forward and fill in the gap at the back to get the firing pose that I wanted.

The bolter-armed scouts were a little bit of a pain to assemble because the arms don't really want to work together without some coaxing, and the junk on their belts gets in the way a little bit. You sort of have to tweak things around a little to get the arms to fit together neatly, and the main problem is aligning the left forearm with the left wrist on the weapon.

Conclusion

Once they're assembled, though, they look better than I expected. Whoever painted the scouts on the box did a terrible job with the faces, making them look like some kind of albino Frankenstein's monster clones with flabby chins. The unpainted models don't look anywhere nearly as dire as the ones on the box cover, so that's a relief.

Overall, I like these models. I've always been partial to scouts, and the 3rd Edition metal scouts were my favorite Space Marine models. They just sort of have this fun underdog charm compared to their power-armored brethren, I guess.

Zuzzy Terra-Flex Mat Review

2008-03-20T16:55:00.001-05:00

Zuzzy sells roll-up latex gaming mats with sculpted surface relief:

Zuzzy Miniatures

I ordered a 36x36-inch version of the mat in the link above on the 11th. The confirmation email told me to expect a 1 to 3 week wait for shipping, so I figured it'd arrive sometime next week. To my surprise, it arrived today.

It comes rolled up around a stiff cardboard tube and a layer of foam padding, in a plastic sleeve. This, in turn, is shipped in a box. You'll want to keep these items so you can store the thing rolled up.

I cleared off one of my work tables and lay the mat on it to see how it looked. It's a very thin latex mat that lays totally flat, and is in a very dark gray color. The 3D detail on it is interesting-you can see rocks, dirt, fallen tree limbs, and other things like that all over the place. It looks so much better than a flocked paper or vinyl mat-the surface relief makes it look much more natural, so your figures don't look like they're fighting on a giant sheet of green sandpaper.

I was worried that the raised 3D detail might make it impossible to lay flat-bottomed terrain items on the mat, but the latex seems to have enough give that things can settle nicely on it. Even the cardstock landing pad I built the other day didn't look obnoxiously out of level. I then took the unpainted Battle for Macragge lander wreckage pieces and laid them out on the mat for the sake of curiosity…I visualized the whole thing painted, and if the finished result even looks just half as awesome as what I saw in my head, then this mat is gonna be very cool to play on.

I was also half expecting it to be easily torn and a little flimsy, but it feels pretty strong. Now, I'm not suggesting that anybody stretch theirs out like some sort of exercise aid, but you can be assured that it'll hold up to gaming pretty well.

The only issue I have with it doesn't really have anything to do with the actual product itself-I'd feel a lot better if Zuzzy sent out tracking numbers or even just a courtesy "We shipped it today, expect it in 3-4 days" email, because OMG the local delivery drivers suck, and I'm always paranoid that my stuff is going to be misdelivered. (It happens a lot around here. In fact, UPS delivered my BSG Season 3 DVDs to our next door neighbor today.)

I'm really happy with the mat itself, and I'm looking forward to getting it all painted up. I'll have to hit the Warstore's webshop and order some extra Vallejo browns later tonight.

Space Marine Terminators Review

2008-03-18T14:19:00.001-05:00

I ordered some Space Marine Terminators and 18 of the Battle for Macragge Genestealers from the Warstore for some Space Hulk action. I had a chance to open the Terminator box and put some stuff together this morning.

The box contains a rudimentary instruction booklet, a sheet of decals, 4 sprues, 5 40mm round bases, and a sprue of 4 25mm bases.

The first sprue has five different pairs of legs, a pair of sergeant shoulder pads, four pairs of basic shoulder pads, 4 basic Terminator helmets, 1 Terminator helmet with additional optics over the left eye, a teleport homer, and 5 little Crux Terminatus icons.

The second one has a 4-part Cyclone missile launcher, a matching front torso piece that has cabling running up to where the socket on front of the Cyclone launcher is, two heraldry shield plates, an Inquisitorial shoulder pad with the Inquisition marking and a raised flange with an "Imperator Deus" marking, a bare sergeant head, a nicely sculpted backbanner, three choices of backbanner finials (a Crux Terminatus, an Iron Halo, and the standard eagle-and-skull), a set of rolled scrolls, some sort of little wreath device, 5 different sets of purity seals, and some sort of hanging cloth dealie that looks like a tabard or something that drapes from a shoulder pad.

The third sprue has 5 different front torso halves, 5 rear torso halves, another set of rolled scrolls, and another one of those tabard/drapery things.

The fourth sprue has a power sword arm, 4 different power fist arms, 2 different chainfist arms, 4 different storm bolter arms with the new-style box magazines, 1 storm bolter arm with the classic double curved magazines, an assault cannon arm, the assault cannon's ammo box, and a heavy flamer arm.

There's a lot of stuff on those sprues, more than I was expecting. However, a lot of it isn't really the kind of stuff to be excited about, and there aren't enough of the things that people ordinarily *do* want. You get one of each heavy weapon, for example-I'd have preferred an approach more like that of the plastic Devastators, which includes multiples of the same weapon in the boxed set.

Okay, on to the build. The first thing that went through my head was "Holy flash, Batman!". It took quite a bit of scraping and delicate knifework to get all the flash off of some of the parts, but I consider that a minor issue, and I've dealt with worse before.

The basic assembly process is to pick a set of legs, glue it to a 40mm base, build the torso from a set of front/back halves, glue that to the top of the legs, pick a pair of arms and glue them to the sides of the torso, pick a pair of shoulder pads and glue them to the arms, then pick a head and glue that into the concavity in the torso.

The finished plastic Terminators look a lot better than the older plastics that came with Space Hulk 2nd Edition, and look more "alive" than the old metals because of the more active poses. I was worried that they'd be so hulking and massive that they'd dwarf the new plastic Genestealers, but when compared side by side, both the Terminator and the Genestealer take up a pretty similar amount of real estate, and they look good together. Next to a basic tactical marine, the Terminators are much more massive and imposing, and they certainly put the "dreadnought" in "tactical dreadnought armor".

Overall, I like them, but I don't really feel like the set is truly worth the full asking price of $50, at least not without adding something more substantial to the box than a lot of little decorative bits. I'm glad I got them at a 20% discount, and I'm even more glad that I don't need a lot of them.

Battle for Macragge Review

2008-03-17T18:58:00.000-05:00

I picked this set up last week for the toys in it, and I've had a chance to build most of it. Here are my impressions.

The box was stuffed to the seams with sprues, and there's a lot of toy appeal when you see all that plastic. The biggest thing in the box is the wreckage of an Aquila lander in the form of 5 plastic terrain pieces. There's a cockpit piece, the fuselage piece, and a few busted wing and engine pieces.

They're all thick, relatively heavy pieces with nice detail for the most part. The only thing I didn't like was the open parts of the cockpit section-there's a huge empty space in the back, and broken glass in the canopy and the bubble up top, which means you can see all the way through it to the underlying table. It's a minor issue because I fixed it by stuffing the cockpit piece with Crayola Model Magic air-dry clay, and then refining it with some clay tools.

Next on the terrain list are 3 Tyranid infestation markers and a hive node. The infestation markers look a lot like alien egg clusters, and the hive node looks like some sort of disturbing Giger-inspired giant alien space rectum with spikes and whatnot fringing the rim. As with the lander's cockpit section, the hive node is open at the top and bottom, so I stuffed it with Model Magic and smoothed it down a bit. I'm planning to pour a bit of colored PVA glue into it after painting so it'll look like there's a pool of slimy gack in it.

There are also 4 energy fence post dealies, which made me a bit nervous during the despruing process because they were connected to the sprue at several awkward and inconvenient points. I was also nervous while cleaning them up because the sprue nibs were very close to the fragile eagle finials, and I was afraid they'd snap off if I wasn't careful. I managed to get them cleaned up just fine, to my relief.

There's also a removable cylindrical fusion core that goes into one of the lander wreckage pieces-I thought that was a cute feature. There's a teleport homer/Thunderhawk beacon device as well, which looks sort of like a taller version of the one that comes with the Space Marine Terminator boxed set.

Now, on to the figures…the set comes with 10 Termagants, 6 Genestealers, 8 spore mines, 10 Space Marines, and a character figure for the crashed lander's pilot.

The Termagants were kind of iffy-it's really obvious that 4 out of the 10 are 2-piece models when you look closely at the left arms of some of them, 'cause there's a huge chunk of featureless plastic that eliminates the undercut between the torso and the bicep. I think they should have just done them all the same way, because the other 6 look fine.

They were also worrisome to desprue because they're connected to the sprue at the middle of their back, so you have to partially resculpt their backs with careful shaving, but the angle at which you have to hold the blade is kind of awkward. It wasn't *too* demanding, fortunately.

The Genestealers are pretty cool and don't suffer very much from the simplification-they're like the old Space Hulk plastics, but with the detailing and anatomy of the new-style Genestealers. Of the included Tyranid models, I like them the best, and I ordered 18 more from the Warstore's bitz department for Space Hulk games.

The spore mines turned out pretty good and were easy to clean up. There's also some variety there. You get 4 explodey ones that look like the illegitimate genetic lovechild of a pineapple grenade and a jellyfish, 2 weird looking squirty acid spore mines, and a couple that look like decapitated fencer heads trailing tentacles.

The Space Marines are sort of in the same pickle as the Termagants. At first glance, they look pretty damned nice for 3-part plastics, but a few of them have cases of Giant Deformed Mold-Friendly Elbow Syndrome that you need to hide with some creative painting. To be fair, you aren't really going to notice that in tablevision, and they're fairly decent figures in the end. The character figure for Lieutenant Varras is pretty good for a one-piece model.

The set comes with a sawed-off Warhammer 40,000 rulebook in a very convenient pocket size-I was expecting something cheap and cheerful, but the whole thing's printed on a nice glossy magazine stock with color throughout. My favorite item is the scenario book, which is about 8.5x11, full-color, and walks newbies through playing 40k with 6 scenarios using only what's included in the box. There are also additional scenarios on the GW website that gives you more stuff to do with the box contents. Also included are a couple of these cheesy red measuring sticks, a set of translucent white flamer/blast/ordnance templates, a scatter die, and a set of 6 six-sided dice.

I think, out of all of the 40k editions that I've had experience with (2nd, 3rd, and now 4th), this one has the most play value out of the box, and I think it's a pretty good deal for the current $40-$50 price tag. They should stick with this formula for future intro sets.

Tau Rapid Insertion Force Review

2008-03-07T08:34:00.001-06:00

I started putting together the models in my brand new Rapid Insertion Force boxed set, which contains 9 XV8 battlesuits, 3 XV25 stealth suits, 18 gun drones, and a markerlight drone.

It's basically the contents of 9 XV8 battlesuit boxes and a stealthsuit team box, which come out at $200 USD USD total. The Rapid Insertion Force box costs $125, however, which is $75 USD USD less than you'd spend buying the suits separately. I like deals like that, so I tend to hold out for them rather than buying a lot of smaller box sets at the same time.

Anyway, on to my build impressions.

General stuff: They've changed the plastic they use, since it's a much darker gray than the plastic my Space Marines and Imperial Guardsmen are made out of. This plastic also seems to feel a bit harder, denser and heavier. My Testors plastic cement works pretty well on this plastic. (Update: I was informed by a former GW employee on The Miniatures Page that the plastic is the same, and that the color variations and feel depend on the proportions of the plastic ingredients.)

Sprue quality is acceptable for the most part, with some casting defects here and there. These will be mentioned specifically in the individual reviews below.

XV8 Battlesuit: The whole suit is on a single sprue. Each sprue contains 2 feet, 2 one-piece legs, 2 1-piece arms, a 3-piece torso, a 3-piece head, 5 weapon options (burst cannon, plasma rifle, fusion blaster, flamer, missile pod), and 3 non-weapon accessories (shield generator, drone controller, target lock).

Sprue quality was more of an issue with this model than the others in the box. The missile pod is noticeably distorted on the sprue, but it's almost unnoticeable on the built-up model. There's also a pretty consistent sinkhole on top of the heads, which I just smoothed over with some putty and a clay shaper. The jetpack/rear torso pieces are also very slightly warped-they assemble fine, but you'll really want to use rubberbands or spring clamps to hold them together while the glue sets.

There are minor sinkholes on the left and right sides of the jetpack, which I filled in with a little bit of putty.

There are 4 hardpoint slots on the model (one on each arm, and one on each side of the jetpack). All of the weapons have three mounting tabs-one on the bottom, one on the right side, and one on the left side. This lets you stick any weapon on any of the 4 hardpoints. The accessories have one tab on the bottom. The shield generator looks pretty cool mounted on an arm, but the target lock and drone controller look best mounted on the jetpack.

I find that attaching the plasma rifle or the fusion blaster to the arms upside down looks much, much better than the official GW way, since it moves the ammo supply to the bottom where it looks more appropriate. Also, if you angle the head downwards a little bit when you glue it into place, the head doesn't look like a box on a stick.

What I really like about this model is that the ankle ball joints snap into the feet, and you can rotate and move the legs around to tweak the pose before you glue the hip balls into their sockets.

XV25 Stealthsuits: There's one sprue, and it contains parts for 3 suits and a markerlight drone. Each suit is composed of a pre-posed leg set (like those of normal infantry), a 2-piece torso, an itty bitty little sensor cluster that glues into the hole in front of the torso/head, 2 arms, two shoulderpads, an antenna-looking dealie that glues to the top of the head, and a 2-part burst cannon.

One of the leg sets has a knife strapped to the advancing left thigh, and the other 2 are in different poses. The extra parts include a fourth antenna, a fusion blaster, a 2-part drone controller, a target lock, and a variant sensor cluster for the team leader's suit. The stealthsuit has 2 hardpoints-one on the right arm for the burst cannon, and one on the top of its jetpack for the drone controller or target lock.

The markerlight drone is a 5 piece affair-there's the upper disc, a large antenna vane, a lower body piece, a second antenna looking device that glues to the right side of the lower body piece, and a 2-part sensor module that glues to the left side of the lower body piece. I glued the spare stealthsuit antenna to the second antenna slot on the upper disc, which looks pretty cool.

The gun drones come 1 to a sprue, and they go together in the same way as the markerlight drone, except you glue a left-right pair of pulse carbines to the lower body, and the antenna is smaller. They're adorable, they look like murderous little baby UFOs.

So far I've put together 1 XV8 battlesuit, the stealth team leader, the markerlight drone, and 2 gun drones. I figure it'll take me about a week's worth of spare time to finish building the rest of the models.

Chez Ebbles

Blog Moved

My newest acquisition

Uppity Robots: The Resurrection

Roll Arena released!

September Ebbles Labs releases

Broadening my horizons

Podtel 6 and HL 300 released!

Miscellaneous updates

Checking into the Podtel

Ebbles Labs

And my baby takes her first tottering steps into the wild...

The 24 Hour Challenge

DMC-Northstar HL 300 completed

Taxicab WIPs

Editable models

2 more Interceptor schemes and new plates

Finalizing the Interceptor

Art and programming, part II

When art and programming collide

Yet more work on the Interceptor

More work on the Interceptor

A few days' worth of breaktime doodling

Off to the races!

Wash Me

Pain in the glass

Of automotive colors, job transitions, and so forth

Digging stuff out of the Vault

Another peek into the vault of unreleased models

Damn you, Adobe!

Office Re-Organization

News at 11: The World Is Still Here

Mr. Counterfeiter, part trois

Blogger outage

Mr. Counterfeiter, part deux

Well played, Mr. Counterfeiter!

I'm a bit dizzy...

Dear Automotive Industry: *raspberry*

Bonus!

Photo gallery added

Photoshop CS5 Extended first impressions

Speaking of that big project...

Finally, it's upgrade time!

The Lounge is now open

Found 2 more models!

Variations now up!

We need to get out more...

More paper models added!

Woo! One week plus one day...

First batch of paper models up!

Big changes upcoming!

Metallic Horticulture!

Flying Lead Squad Pictures, Round One!

Ever have one of those days?

Finally painted something again...

Tau Battlesuit Conversions

Painting The Lazy Way 2: Zuzzy Terra-Flex Mat

Colonial Marine Conversions #5: PIG

Colonial Marine Conversions #4: Autoloading Mortar

Colonial Marine Conversions #3: Flame Unit

Colonial Marine Conversions #2: Smart Gun

Colonial Marine Conversions #1: Sentry Gun

Colonial Marine Conversions: Introduction

Stupid Bitz Tricks #8: Squad Leader

Stupid Bitz Tricks #7: Face-hugger Prototype

Stupid Bitz Tricks #6: Grenade Launcher

Stupid Bitz Tricks #5: Fun With Flamers

Painting The Lazy Way #1: Macragge Genestealers

Stupid Bitz Tricks #4: Fun With Lasguns

Stupid Bitz Tricks #3: Aliens-style Heavy Stubber

Stupid Bitz Tricks #2: Sentry Gun

More Citadel Wash testing

Citadel Wash Set Review

Tyranid Carnifex Review

The Tungsten Powder Experiment, Part 2

The Tungsten Powder Experiment

Another squad of New Israelis

GZG New Israelis and Xenomorphs

Stupid Bitz Tricks #1: Cadian Parasite Zombies!

Space Marine Dreadnought Review

Dear Automotive Industry: raspberry