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Dice of Place

Another thing I've enjoyed seeing out there is dice which give a sense of place: tiny landscapes, galaxies, and so on. So naturally I've been putting together some dice which work with those ideas, with a big boost from 3d printing for some of them.

The one that didn't use 3d printing involved the use of a series of hemispherical molds. I started with making a mottled blue and green hemisphere with tinted resin. Then I glued the flat side to a stick and suspended it over a slightly larger hemisphere filled with clear resin. Once that was set, I painted clouds directly on the resin, so the cloud layer is slightly above the "ground" surface. That went into a mold half-filled with black resin with a few bits of glitter thrown in for stars, then topped off with more clear resin for night and day sides.

One of the nice things about this is that it's all resin, save for a trivial quantity of paint and glitter, so it's as balanced as the mold allows. The remainder are based on terrain out of the real world. It starts with the Terrain2STL generator, which uses GIS data underlying Google Maps to create STLs of a selected area.

Once you've got that, you can import it into your favorite 3d editing program and do as you like with it. This one, iirc, is a river valley somewhere along the Colorado river.

What I did, after appropriate scaling, was to merge it with an icosahedron to get the union of two shapes. That gives me a shape like this:

That is, it's the bit of terrain carved into the body of an icosahedron scaled to fit tightly into on of my d20 molds. I handed the shape off to my 3d printer, painted it, popped it into the mold, and filled with tinted resin for this undersea canyon.

Finally, I got arty. I was thinking about Bocklin's iterations of the painting "Isle of the Dead." It's a tiny island, isolated on a dark sea with a few tomb-like structures built into the cliffs. 


The technique was essentially the same as for the undersea canyon, plus a little messing around with the icosahedron-limited terrain to add the niches and structures, plus a few bits of artificial greenery for the trees.



 I like aspects of this, like I like aspects of all of them as first attempts, but I've got an underlying technical issue: too many bubbles. I'm going to have to pull out the air compressor and fiddle with a pressure chamber to really make these work well. Next project, I suppose.


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