Tetsujin no Llama

I've been using 3d printing to make gaming terrain. That's cool, but there's a time issue. That piece took a couple of hours to print. Doing enough for a large room takes days, or weeks for a sizable dungeon. Pieces can be reused, certainly, but that's still a lot of lead time, and if I want to have terrain representing, say, forest floor vs. natural cave vs. paved dungeon floor, that's either a lot of repainting or a lot of new prints. Then I saw that there are people selling reusable rubber molds for casting terrain pieces. You can mix up a little plaster or, if you're willing to spend a little extra, dental stone, fill up several of them at a go, pop them out a few minutes later once it sets adequately, and in...well, not no time at all, but in vastly less time than it'd take to print them out, you've got an awful lot of terrain to play with. So I wondered: Can I do that? And the answer is yes. I got some two-part silicone rubber stuff which ...

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 tha...

One of the things about printable terrain for D&D and other square grid based games is that their floors are really nifty. Stone tile textures, brick floors, curved sewer floors, and lots of other textures which I don't have the chops to reproduce at the moment. But I'm working on it. The easiest thing for me to start on has been tile-like textures. That's basically just imposing a rectangular grid--a slightly irregular one for character in this case--on the raised hex surfaces. These took to painting pretty well, I think. The design is, of course, over on Thingiverse . Then I was thinking about floors with a wooden texture. And I remembered I own a CNC machine. These are a bit rough. I recently replaced some old belts and pulleys, and I think one of the pulleys isn't tight enough, so I'm losing the occasional y-axis step. Still, they're good enough to be functional. In my copious spare time, I'll probably stain and shellac these.

So far, I fail utterly at painting miniatures. I don't have the steadiest hand or best feel for the texture of paint, so when I see people's fully painted minis, I naturally assume they're wizards and will in due course be burned at the stake. But I've come up with some approaches to painting terrain and architecture which appear to work for me. And if like me, you can't paint details, here's a guide to how I do it. The materials I use include: Cheap acrylic paint, the thicker the better. Kitchen sponges. Maybe some paint brushes. The first process I figured out working for me involves layers of stippling. Putting down multiple layers of what's essentially paint spatter gives this sort of natural stone look. To begin, cut the sponges into strips and pick at least three colors. For example, I often use dark, medium, and light brown or off-white or charcoal, medium gray, and white. Dip the end of a strip of sponge into one of the colors and use it...

Inspired by this portal by the Crafting Muse, I started thinking about portals to somewhere <woo-woo> else </woo-woo>. Naturally, my implementation ended up being over-complicated, but it lights up, so that's OK.   The idea was to create an "infinite mirror" embedded in a 3d printed doorway. The idea behind the infinite mirror is that you have a box with a mirror in the back, a half-mirrored surface in the front (like the "one-way mirrors" you get in police interrogation rooms on TV), and a light source somewhere in between. The light source reflects off of the mirrors, the reflections create reflections of their own, and so on until you create the illusion of enormous depth. Appropriate for a magic portal in a dungeon. It's rather more demanding on materials than what I normally do, but I had most of the components kicking around anyway. For a light source, I settled on a couple of LEDs. I experimented with a bit of electroluminescent wi...

I do love me some 3d-printable gaming terrain. It's the next step after using attractive miniatures or at least good-looking stand-up cardboard figures. The problem, alas, is that I play GURPS. GURPS uses a hex grid, while all the really good printable gaming terrain (or, indeed, basically all of the gaming terrain) like the lovely OpenForge is based on a square grid. So I had to create my own. What I've put together is a series of hex-gridded floor sections available over on Thingiverse . They're sorta-kinda semi-compatible with other gaming terrain so long as it doesn't have integral floors. For example, I'm using my floors with some OpenForge walls. They're scaled for 1" = one hex, as is only right and proper for GURPS. I've also created a few "area of effect" overlays to indicate things like an area of hexes which are on fire or protected by Dome spells. I'm not using them much so far, but I incorporated a f...