[Kickstarter] Flat Plastic Miniatures: Character tokens on transparent plastic

[Cherno]

Some may know that I love cardboard miniatures, here is a new approach: The front and backside images of the standees as printed onto clear plastic which erases the black or white utlines that paper miniatures typically have. I think they look quite well and as they say in the KS description, it allows producing characters that otherwise wouldn't be feasible as real miniatures because they seldom get used.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1534484023/flat-plastic-miniatures

[zemjw]

I like this idea, although I feel guilty about stealing it from the Kickstarter

I made a few cardboard standees using Poser last year. They work well enough, but the white border is quite offputting. It never occurred to me to print on transparencies...

I'm not sure how well this will work in my inkjet, but it's definitely worth an experiment.

[Cherno]

I like this idea, although I feel guilty about stealing it from the Kickstarter

I made a few cardboard standees using Poser last year. They work well enough, but the white border is quite offputting. It never occurred to me to print on transparencies...

I'm not sure how well this will work in my inkjet, but it's definitely worth an experiment.

I don't know how to print front-and backside images on the same sheet so both sides line up. If only one side is printed, the ink is too weak and it's not completely opaque. As for white borders, might I suggest adding a bright outline around the silhouette and then not having a white, but a black background? Black is far less visible and the bright outline helps set the figure itself apart from the dark background.

[Major_Gilbear]

I've been doing almost exactly this for years - a perfect way of playing a game with the "correct" models until I've finished painting them.

What you do is this:

1) Get your front and back images aligned in photoshop or a similar image editor. They should be arranged side-by-side in a "butterfly wing" style, and there should be a thin line dividing the two images where you will fold. make sure these is some free space around each image on each side of the line.

2) Print it out in colour on normal white paper. Fold along the line, and with a little glue, stick the halves together.

3) Cut out the standee.

4) Laminate the standee.

5) Cut out the laminate.

6) Attach the laminated standee to the base of your choice. Done!

A laminator can be bought on Amazon for about £10, and a stack of credit card sized pouched is only a few of pounds more.

This allows "models" to be very durable, very cheap, very transportable, and you can mark on them with a dry-wipe marker pen if you wish (for tracking wounds, effects, etc).

Aside from saving your the modest inconvenience of making your own, the only real advantage of this KS is that you don't need to look for images of the models you want.

[zemjw]

Yeah, lining the sheet up for the second pass could be tricky Inkjet transparancies (if I remember correctly) only have one side that takes ink properly, so duplex could be out.

I was also wondering about taking the Cardboard Heroes approach, where the figures and base form a triangle (see bad ascii art below of side view), rather than trying to perfectly match the views.

  /\
 /  \
/___\

I'll need to look into trying the white border thing. At the moment I have it so that I render front and back images in Poser, then run it through a script to turn the back image upside down, add base details and write everything to a file ready for printing. Adding a border would probably mean I have to import it into paintshop pro first for some image work. Yet more things to experiment with