papalonian

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/24224747

Last night, I accidentally ordered a pair of pants while trying to get an estimate on shipping speed. Not only is the shipping going to take much longer than I'd hoped, I realized afterwards that I had the wrong size as well. No big deal, I thought, I'll cancel the order.

Well, you can't on their website. So I had to wait until this morning to call. I called them up as soon as they opened, hoping to get someone before the pants shipped out. And I did! Only, they still can't cancel the order. They have to ship the pants across the country to me, and then I have to ship them back across the country to return them. The person I talked to even offered to print out the return label, and ship it with the pants!

Such a wasteful, broken system. I can only imagine it works the way it does to make people who have second thoughts on a purchase have to jump through additional hoops to cancel it.

Something I've noticed when watching my resin printer work is that a lot of time is spent every later lifting the plate well after I hear the model unstick from the FEP.

It's not a huge deal on smaller prints, especially ones that can be printed with "vroom" settings, but on larger models that are being printed at 1-2mm/s lift speed, several hours are spent just waving the model in the air for no reason...

I had the idea of making a test model that is essentially an intentional suction cup in the center of the plate (where FEP stretch is most prominent and required lift distance should be highest). I would print this model multiple times, with slightly lower lift heights each iteration, until it fails to release from the FEP. I'd add a safety margin and set my raise height to that...

Does anyone see any fault in my logic, or know of a better method of achieving what I'm after?

This is one of the characters from Valandar's second Player Character pack. His weapon made me think of mer-people, so I wanted to paint this guy with an aquatic theme. About halfway through I realized the color scheme wasn't going in the direction I wanted, so I abandoned the aquatic theme and just picked colors that I thought would look good together.

After applying the final wash, I felt the model looked too dark and monotone, so I decided now was a good time to give edge highlighting a try, something I've always been too lazy or impatient to try. Holy crap, does a tiny bit of white make a difference! You can see that my blending and edge selection leaves plenty to be desired, but for a first time, I think some parts of his robe look really cool.

As always, here are a few more angles:

If anyone has any advice or pointers for color selection, I'm all ears. For this guy, I started with the color I knew I wanted to make a bulk of the model (blue/ aquamarine), picked a few nearby colors (green and purple) for the secondary bits, then jumped across the color wheel (yellow and gold) for the highlights. I think the model has good contrast, and the colors look ok together, it just doesn't have the look I was going for. I'm sure I'll get a better eye for color selection as I continue to paint, but if there are any places to start looking I'm open to pointers.

I realized that I never posted my complete army of Ice Orcs that I'd posted a WIP a little bit ago.

Here they are! Some of them definitely turned out better than others, but I had a lot of fun painting them up and I'm happy with how they look as a whole. I've only ever painted one other "army" of minis, and I used the same color scheme for all of them, thinking I needed to in order to make them look like a cohesive unit. It worked, but just as they were cohesive, they were boring.

I tried a different approach here, picking out a general list of colors (black, brown, tan, and gray) that fit the theme I was going for. For each orc's armor, I mainly stuck to the selected colors, but threw them on wherever I thought it would look good, not caring if the previous model was brown with black accents, black with tan accents, etc. I figured as long as they all used them same colors overall, the colors would tie themselves together.

The skin came out a little wonky, but if you've seen my other posts or comments, you'll know that was kind of expected. I'm pretty ass at painting skin tones, and used the orcs as a playground to hone the skill a bit. They still don't look great, but I'm getting better at things like highlighting muscles and shading skin folds and the like.

Anyways, sorry for the giant wall of text. Here's a few glamor shots, featuring my paladin from a few weeks ago.

You looked, didn't you.

This is slightly different than my normal paint jobs. As evidenced by the background of the picture, he was painted using only cheap craft paints (save for the sword and other metallic highlights). The reason for this is that I plan on hosting a Mini Painting Party, where I'll be providing all the supplies needed to paint up some little dudes. I want to do this without breaking the bank, but I also wanted to make sure that the cheap paints weren't going to make the experience unenjoyable. So, I put together the same kit I plan on giving everyone (#0, #1, #2 brushes, a DIY wet palette and some toothpicks) and got to work.

I've got about a dozen of this same mini. I might tweak the color scheme a bit, but the plan is to teach everyone step-by-step how to replicate the above, then bust out the assorted minis once everyone has an idea of what they're doing. Originally, I was going to pull the nice paint out after the first mini, but after seeing how well the cheap stuff held up, I think I'll save the pricey stuff for myself...

That being said, the craft paint worked much better than I was expecting. Part of it is likely due to the experience I've gained since I last used the stuff, but the only time I felt frustrated with the paint was when applying the final wash a good amount of green washed off. This happens to me a lot when applying washes so I think it's more something I'm doing than the paints fault, but it was much worse with this craft paint than the nicer stuff.

Anyways, here's a couple other angles.

This is a work in progress pic of what will eventually be an army of icy blue-gray skinned orcs. I plan on making a range of colors between pure light gray and pure baby blue, and grabbing colors from different parts for each orc so they'll all have different but similar skin tones.

The models are from Valandar's awesome Orc Horde collection on Thingiverse. These models are a ton of fun and a great balance between high-detail and printability/ paintability. I wish the bases were a little more interesting, or printed separately so I could attach my own, but a flat base allows me to add my own terrain later on.

I plan on doing a typical green-skinned orc army, as well as a fire-red army. Orcs are a fun way to play around with different armor color schemes because if something ends up looking like crap you can just say, "they're orcs! They just grabbed what's available!"

This is my friend's character for a campaign that we are in. He used AI to create the general look of his character, then designed a mini based on the outcome. I printed it out for him and used the AI image as a color reference.

Here are a few other angles:

And here is the AI generated image that the mini is based off of:

(The small girl is the character's sister.)

This is my paint job on Yasashii's "Mind Flayer / Illithid Tabletop Miniature" from Thingiverse.

This was one of the first prints off of my resin printer, and the first piece I attempted air brushing; to make both of these a little easier, I scaled him up a bit, so he isn't quite "tabletop minature" scale, but still much smaller than what I'd been used to painting (~70mm tall).

Everything except for the red eyes and purple highlights on the armor was done with a 0.3mm airbrush.

Here are a couple different angles:

Unfortunately one of the robe dangly bits snapped off the back before I could start painting. I didn't expect the paint job to turn out this decent so I didn't bother reprinting, kinda wish I had.

This is a miniature from TitanCraft's "RPG Mini Starter Kit" on thingiverse. I painted him up just to get some practice painting minis as I'm just starting out on the small scale stuff.

Here he is from a couple of different angles:

I wish that the paint on his face came out a little better, it's something I've always struggled with.

I may be preaching to the choir here, but if you haven't already heard of it, check out TitanCraft. It's another mini maker website, but you can actually download minis that you make for free (they have paid and free assets, but there's a ton of free ones and you don't have to pay anything to download an all-free model). I'm not affiliated with them in any way, but I've been showing it to all my DnD friends and a few of them are sending me minis to print out for them, and it costs us nothing but the $0.25 of resin.

I've been resin printing for maybe a month. I've noticed that on all of the resins that I've got, and all of the profiles I've downloaded for them, the lift speed is usually at least 3 to 4 mm. However, when listening to my printer operate, I can tell that it is fully separating the print within the first millimeter or so. I've changed almost all of my resin profiles to only lift 1 mm, cutting each layer time down like 2 seconds, and absolutely zero change in any quality whatsoever. Am I just lucky with my printer configuration, or my fep is especially tight? Or why else would such a large distance be commonly recommended?