My scifi projects. (updated 30-01-2020)

[Bahir]

My kids are awesome.  For Christmas they got me some Cobalt-1 SF miniatures by Black Hat Miniatures.

First up some Ar-men who are going to serve as body guards.  They have a lot of character and were fun to paint. There was a lot of flash on them, but they cleaned up nice.




Next up is Erkon and Manchos (I'm not sure which is which). One is a weird, mutant alien, while the other is an Aruk (Space Worm Man?!) who is his bodyguard.  I imagine the little guy is a psi/force user genius type, while his body guard is a barbarian, smash it until it stops moving, type. There were a few problems with these miniatures.  The small guy had a huge hole in his left foot and the big guy had a large air bubble in the back of his left leg.  Nothing some Green stuff wouldn't fix, but I wasn't in the mood, so I painted them as is.  Again, lots of character and a lot of fun to paint!


And the group together:

[Bahir]

Well after finishing my graduate degree, working for six months away from home and moving to a new home a month after getting back to Europe, I finally have been able to paint!

I found these guys in a bits box at a local game shop.  They were missing their feet so I had to try to sculpt new ones.  THe feet are a bit large, but when the subject is an alien, I suppose I can get away with it.



I've painted them up to be science / lab types for scenario games.

Next up a batch of Mantic Zombies!

I got about 15 of these guys from the first kickstarter that I'm finally getting around to painting. Having not painted in some time these offer an easy way to "limber up" and get back in shape.

The uniform came out a bit more green than I wanted. The next batch I will do a brown wash over the khaki rather than green wash. Hopefully this will provide a bit more contrast between the skin and and the uniform.

Comments and suggestions to improve my painting are always welcome.



On a side note, I just discovered Google is not supporting Picasa. It is a litter more complecated to link photos.  Is anyone using another service that may be a bit more user friendly?

[zemjw]

Yeah, miffed about the loss of Picasa

However, your photos should now be in google photo (mine were).

Navigate to the picture, right click on it and select "copy image location". This should give you a huge url that you can paste in here - at least it worked for me at the weekend.

[Bahir]

Yeah, miffed about the loss of Picasa

However, your photos should now be in google photo (mine were).

Navigate to the picture, right click on it and select "copy image location". This should give you a huge url that you can paste in here - at least it worked for me at the weekend.

Yes, the url's it provides are HUGE! In Picassa I could also select the image size, now I have to remember the code for resizing the photos on the forum...

I was able to upload the photos from Picassa, but I suppose their is a way to do that from google photos. I'll have to mess around with it when I get home from work.

[Argonor]

On a side note, I just discovered Google is not supporting Picasa. It is a litter more complecated to link photos.  Is anyone using another service that may be a bit more user friendly?

You can attach pics to your posts here:

Below the editor window is a button called 'Additional options'.
If you click that, you will find the option 'Attach´, works just like attaching files to webmail.

[Bahir]

In an effort to take better pictures of my miniatures, I purchased and inexpensive light box with built in LEDs. I got it for about 20€ on amazon. It bows in a bit on the side, but I think I can fix that.



This picture came out rather nice light wise, but the rest of them came out on the dark side.


I am using a Sony Cybershot Model DSC-WX50.  I'm sure there are some settings that I need to tweak that will help.

Here is a closer shot of some of the boys.


Using the No Limits Rule set here are the stats for the rotting green guys:


This is for your typical "slow" zombie. I'm also thinking of creating a "fast" zombie version of these guys... just to keep things interesting for my players.

[fred]

Looking good.

I think the most likely problem will be that the camera is seeing all the white of the light box and adjusting the settings to take this into account. What you want it to do is to look at the dark figures and set the camera settings for them.

How you tell the camera to do this really depends on the camera - from a quick google yours looks to be a point and shoot style one, but hopefully it has a few settings to override the automatic ones.

Ones to look for adjusting the exposure, making it a couple of stops longer (i.e. let more light in)
Or look for one where you can set the point where the camera picks the light in the shot from.
Another approach is put in a base and background that is more neutral in colour, this will stop the camera from seeing so much white. You can either use some gaming scenery, or a graduated single colour (grey or blue are popular), you can print these off from the internet.

Its worth preserving as you are getting a good amount of light on to all sides of the figures (which is the main benefit of a light box)

[Bahir]

Looking good.

I think the most likely problem will be that the camera is seeing all the white of the light box and adjusting the settings to take this into account. What you want it to do is to look at the dark figures and set the camera settings for them.

How you tell the camera to do this really depends on the camera - from a quick google yours looks to be a point and shoot style one, but hopefully it has a few settings to override the automatic ones.

Ones to look for adjusting the exposure, making it a couple of stops longer (i.e. let more light in)
Or look for one where you can set the point where the camera picks the light in the shot from.
Another approach is put in a base and background that is more neutral in colour, this will stop the camera from seeing so much white. You can either use some gaming scenery, or a graduated single colour (grey or blue are popular), you can print these off from the internet.

Its worth preserving as you are getting a good amount of light on to all sides of the figures (which is the main benefit of a light box)

Thank you for the helpful information Fred. I did see something that looked like an exposure setting. I plan on doing some more shooting in the morning and see if that does the trick. Thanks again.

[fred]

Happy to help. This helpful GW link was posted on another LAF photography thread, its worth a look as it contains lots of good stuff

http://www.blacklibrary.com/Home/how-to-photograph-miniatures.html

[Bahir]

I have a few games that will be played this weekend and I had a project that I wanted to finish up so I could use the miniatures for this go around. The paint job was fast and not as detailed as I would have liked, but I was fighting the clock.

This project started as I was putting together the Veer Myn I received as a part of the Mantic Kickstarter.  As I assembled the Veer Myn I found that I had a lot of arms left over and then I remembered that I had some GW Skaven that I rescued from the Bit Box a local games shop. And I wondered.... would the arms fit?

So after a bit of surgery... They look like knuckle dragging reject runts of the litter... but I suppose that will work for alien space rats.



A few of the Skaven were missing tales so I tried to make some out of Miliput... but I think I should have used Green Stuff.  The Miliput didn't want to stay on my frame work.  Perhaps I used too much at one time or it was too wet.  But eventually I was able to get to this (the one on the right was not one of my tail sculpting attempts):


And a shot of the runts with their larger bothers in the back.


Finally the space rats along with some other bits that I finished up in time for this weekend.


A side project I had cooking was to create some objective markers and counters.  I found some Ink Jet compatible Shrinky Dinks that were hiding in a file cabinet and I was able to come up with these:


They are easy to make this way. Just print them out, cut them out and bake for about three minutes.  I was able to make many tokens (50+) using this method.  I plan on using a black sharpie to edge them.


The gears are salvage tokens, the blood drops wound tokens, the cross hairs represent units that are targeted (+1 to hit) and the half circle thing is a scanner blip. (Units that have scanners can find hidden enemy units, but will not know what kind of enemy unit until LOS or combat with that unit erupts. So when a unit is discovered via the scanner, the "blip" token is placed in area of the hidden units.)

[Bahir]

A recent game used my shrinky dink tokens.  There were new players so we kept the game simple so they could learn the moment and combat rules. Each player was given the same unit and the goal was simple, gather as many "salvage" tokens as you can and exit via the starting area.  The player who had the most salvage wins.

The players could gain salvage simply by moving into the adjacent square of the salvage token and loot salvage from a fallen foe.

Two of the players got so involved in shooting at each other that they ignored the third player who grabbed six of the ten tokens and exited the facility.

Here are some photos of the game in progress.

The players in their starting zones.



Two players staring out cautious, using cover. The third player is under the bridge.



The player on the far right eventually one the game. The one in the middle and on the left started their own private war.



Thanks for looking!

[Bahir]

My Ver Myn from the Mantic Kickstarter are complete.  Along with the kit bashed rats, I now have a nice little force to experiment with.

The newly painted guys:


A shot of the entire crew guarding their horde of scavenged supplies:


A small group guarding their shineys while rest are chasing off interlopers/looking for shineys/up to no good.


Thanks for looking.

[Michka]

Nice looking rats.

[Bahir]

I head out to a week of summer camp tomorrow and I finished up these guys just in time.  I'm in the middle of packing so I grabbed a few photos with my phone. I apologize in advance for the poor quality photos.

The swarm of critters that will attack my unsuspecting players.


And a close up shot...


These critters are fast, but relatively weak... one on one. Get a few attacking at one time and the players can quick get overwhelmed.

I wonder if I should tell my players that these little guys are vulnerable to AoE weapons like shotguns and grenades... or should I let them figure it out on their own?

[vodkafan]

Great job on the repurposed Skaven. The Ver Myn are excellent too.