Skip to main content

Still More GURPS Terrain

I've been playing with a few more hex floor pieces.

One thing I've been seeing in a lot of printable floors is a sort of natural stone texture. It's a little irregular and uneven, though not so much so to make it unusable as terrain. It crossed my mind that rather than build a "natural stone floor" set of pieces, I could print flat floor pieces, shear some "rock" designs in half, scale appropriately, and print with a very, very small Z height. Those get glued to the flat floor and painted. That way, I'm not dealing with huge files (those rock forms use a lot of triangles). Seems to work pretty well.


What I'm not quite so happy with is a wooden plank texture. I swiped some very detailed wood plank hexes from a design on Thingiverse and scaled it down to my 1-inch hexes. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like it works well at that scale. That said, I recently switched down from a .4 to a .3mm nozzle, so I'll try it again and see if that helps.


Finally, something that I think works really well. I caught a YouTube video, which I naturally can't find now, where a guy who does miniatures points out that using actual sand on your mini bases is bad for representing real sand and dirt because the scale is wrong. Real sand is too big to be mini sand. His solution was baking soda. Baking soda apparently catalyzes cyanoacrylate. That is, if you want your Superglue to set fast, sprinkle a little baking soda on it. The very fine grains also give it a bit of a rough texture. So, then, you can paint your surface with cyanoacrylate, dust on a bit of baking soda, let set a few minutes, and paint. I think it produces a marvelous surface texture.




Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Spaced Out Rides

(This is the kind of thing I'd have sent into Pyramid   back in the day, but that's not an option now, so here we are.)   The GURPS Action series is the gift that keeps on giving for a lot of modern-and-later gaming. GURPS Action 2: Exploits has rules for sneaking around, running away, and all kinds of other activities which can be easily transplanted to cyberpunk and other high-tech settings. GURPS Action 6: Tricked-Out Rides provides more of the same for its topic, giving an easy framework for describing and even designing common types of vehicles without all the math and paralysis-by-analysis of GURPS Vehicles. Pick a standardized vehicle type (van, compact car, etc.) and apply modifiers (rugged, tinted windows). But, of course, it’s limited. It’s just ten pages, after all, so it’s great for common passenger vehicles for the modern(ish) era. But higher-tech vehic...
Post a Comment
Read more

G$ --> DND GP

A GURPS $ is worth 1.27 D&D 5e SP, which is interesting because in GURPS Dungeon Fantasy, the typical $1 coin is a silver piece. And a D&D GP is worth about $7.87 in GURPS. So, where does that come from? A while back, I cautioned someone considering using (among other things) GURPS Renaissance Venice: Merchants of Venice  in a non-GURPS game that prices listed in the extensive lists of trade goods were expressed in GURPS $, which might not have obvious conversions into other game systems. But if one wanted to convert GURPS prices into D&D or vice versa, how would that work? It crossed my mind to take a "basket of goods" approach. Economists measure inflation not by picking a single commodity, like the price of gold or oil or wheat, and seeing how that changes over time, but by taking the combined value of a set of common commodities. This provides a more comprehensive picture of the cost of living. Perhaps gas becomes less expensive while the price of whe...
Post a Comment
Read more

2020 GURPS Challenge PDFs: Incense Trail prices

Over on the forum, somebody asked me how much frankincense and myrrh cost in antiquity. Well, we don't know. We never get as much price information as we like out of history. There's the occasional mention of this or that product being worth its weight in silver or gold, but we can reasonably believe that those are descriptions written by political, cultural, or philosophical commentators trying to give an idea of how expensive things are, not people who have actually done an economic analysis and discovered that the material in question is, by coincidence, exactly the same value as silver or gold and not, say, one and a half times the price of silver or three quarters of the price of gold. We know it was valuable, but not how valuable on the level of individual purchases. But for the convenience of the GM, we can use those comparisons to establish some ballpark figures. Mind you, this is based largely on GURPS rather than historical sources, so it's not something I would h...
7 comments
Read more