Organized Memories

I've got a lot of Hirst Arts molds. I've had them for quite a while. Since making the modular dungeon back in 2010 I haven't done much of anything with them. I'm in the process of cleaning and organizing the hobby stuff - a never-ending process by the way - I decided to finally put them away properly.

These are photo storage containers from Michaels but work excellently for storing molds. Most molds. Some are a bit tight in there but not enough to worry me. They have squish points. Luckily I had exactly the right number of containers for my molds. I didn't count them first. Typical of me, I know.

It took me some time since I wanted to do it once, do it right. That meant pulling up my old page which had all my molds so I knew which ones were there and then correlating them back to the Hirst Arts store to get their names. My page only had their numbers since that's what is on the images I took.

But first they needed to have the excess plaster scraped off (I probably should have washed them thoroughly but they're lucky they got this much attention) and then powder them. The powder is just one of those extra steps that is more of a precaution than a necessity. It's on the site to do it, I was going to do it.

Then it was a matter of going out on the patio and working slowly through each mold. Finding the next numeric one, cleaning it off, dusting it, making the label, putting it away. Mold by mold.

To make it more interesting I have a number of molds that are no longer in production. I do have a printout of them so those were easy enough to sort out. I also have some third party molds that I pretty much guessed the names at.

Two of my molds are on loan. I know who and when. I left open spots for them where they'll go when they're returned.

And I seem to be missing one mold. I'll have a better look at where they were since it's a thinner one but if I can't find it I'll put out a message to the old group to see if anyone borrowed it and didn't return it. I'm not very fond of it but it was on my list so I might as well see about getting it back if I can.

For a bit of eye candy here's the modular dungeon set up for a convention game.

Several of the fancy floors are A&K molds that aren't on the market any more. They were fun to paint if slightly too small to fit in with the Hirst ones properly. The rest of the fancy floors are painted by me to be fancy. Mostly.

I Airbrushed! (No Pictures)

I finally used my darn airbrush. I only used one and I used it to prime the minis for my dungeon crawl. I did this long after I should have done so.

I expected this to be good practice and it was. I learned that it's another tool that I need to learn to use better. Priming is great for practice because it doesn't matter what it looks like in the middle - it's going to be a solid coat at the end.

I'll be on my third photo tent enclosure when it arrives. I went from 60x60x60cm to 40x40x40cm to 30x30x30cm. I can't really go smaller than that. I didn't really measure the area well and I don't know what I'm going to do with the extra photo tents but I'll figure something out. Or not.

I did find that wearing a mask is A Good Idea. I also hope the fan I'm getting is powerful enough to pull the overspray into the filter. If not I may have to do some surgery on it to get a better fan in place. I'm hoping with practice there will be less of that but from what I read from my friends there's always paint flying about.

I'm debating about trying the airbrush on the minis for actual painting, even if just doing some base coats. I do need to learn but I also need to get these painted. It's a tossup. Plus I've got appointments after work pretty much all week so that limits my time overall.

The good news is that I used the airbrush, I understood how to use it, I realized that I'm going to need practice, I'm OK with needing practice, and that I cleaned it with a minimum of effort. All those are good because they're steps forward.

Which is why I'm tempted to use it for actual painting. But it's probably smarter to hold off and practice with ink and paper when I have more time. That means breaking out the brushes for the minis. Although those base coats are tempting me...

All Right Then

Airbrush

I have the compressor, the moisture trap/pressure regulator, the AIR HOSE, and all the air brushes where I can find them. The compressor et al is also set up where I think it's going to be when I'm using it.

The space for the booth has a piece of foamcore on it as a base for the photo tent/spray booth when it arrives. The turntable for inside the booth is sitting in a box but I can find it easily enough.

I haven't done any airbrushing because:

1 - It's been too freaking cold.
2 - Housework was needed.
3 - 3D printing.

That will change this week since the temperature is going up and the housework is getting done. About the 3D printing...

3D Printing

I was completely sick of printing grey and printing dungeon pieces. Printing grey dungeon pieces was excruciating. Therefore I took the holiday to print some stuff that wasn't grey and wasn't dungeon pieces.

I properly labeled all the test prints (low poly cats) with the brand and color of each one. I have the start of a filament cat army on the windowsill.

I also printed up useful stuff like a grip for painting miniatures, a clipper for filament (it has to be cut at an angle to be loaded), and a new case for the Raspberry Pi media server. I printed in colors! Pretty, pretty colors.

I also put up the last long shelf on the adjustable spacers and filled it with .. filament! That got the worst of it out of double rows under the printers. I also lowered the short shelf one notch so it fits all the types of boxes I have. That helps. A little.

3D Printer Repair

Absolutely nothing was done on this since the board is still in transit. It got to spend new year's eve in Germany but now it's on it's way here. It's still showing tomorrow as the delivery date but we'll see if that happens.

Since the order is a decent amount I need to sign for it. I certainly hope it shows up early because I was kind of planning on going to the post office and to the craft store after work. But if I'm waiting on the delivery that gets postponed.

Once the board is here I can restart the upgrade process and hopefully have it running by the weekend. That will be more grey dungeon pieces being printed but for a shorter period of time. Win some, lose some.

Convention

I'm still on the fence here. A big incentive for me is gone since there won't be a Chessex dice booth there. High cost and low profit were the owner's reasons for not showing up and those are perfectly valid. But I have a long shopping list and now I need to think about why I would go besides running my games.

BTW - the vendor list is currently almost empty. As in most of the spaces are showing as Available. If they haven't updated the website that's not a good sign. If that's true it's not a good sign.

My events are still showing as free even though it was supposed to be fixed a month ago. Their dashboard shows them at the correct price, the event ticket buying site shows them as free. I'm letting them work it out. Their systems are not my concern.

I'm giving it a few weeks to see how sales go. If it gets within a couple of weeks of the convention and there's very low or no ticket sales then I'm going to cancel. I know, I know. I committed to running the games. But if there's no one choosing to sign up then I won't be running games. I'll be sitting next to a table being bored. And having to pay for the privilege since I don't know if they reimburse for events that had no players. Actually I don't know their full badge reimbursement policy - commit to run the games or actually have enough players?

Housework

We're not going there.

Churn Baby Churn

This poor printer is just running through kilometers of filament churning out dungeon pieces. I am personally very tired of grey filament. Very, very tired.

There should be two printers doing this, halving the time, but my other one is still down waiting for the replacement board I ordered this week. They haven't even shipped it. Sure, they're blaming the holidays but I need the stupid board. The printer is a doorstop without it.

And then I had a clog that was resistant to the normal methods of removal. It was kind of cool to see the filament extruding in two streams instead of one but that's not really the point. For the first time I used the acupuncture needle they include with the kit to try to move whatever little piece of gunk that was in the way to a place I could remove it.

Then it was a few rounds of cleaning out the nozzle (look up 'atomic pull' for the details) and then it looked like it was good. Although I didn't see the piece of whatever in the cleaning filament.

I 'lost' about twelve hours of printing because of this. I could have tried to clear it last night after the print finished but I was too darn tired to trust myself with printer maintenance. I know better. I'll give up the time to make sure I do it right. This morning I was there, swearing at the printer, doing maintenance.

I should do some calibration again and I think I'll do that when the other printer is ready to go. I will calibrate them both at the same time and then it's off to the races. At least off to 'printing the rest of the dungeon pieces'.

I have the lights for an LED torch wall section but I'm iffy on doing it now. At least I'm iffy on doing it for the convention dungeon. I have a legitimate reason. Hear me out.

The piece is rather clever. The part where the torches are is a separate piece you print in transparent orange (or yellow or whatever) and then there's holes in the back where you shove the mini LEDs. Overall it's a very efficient design using an off-the-shelf light string and battery holder. But here's the catch. That entire panel of torches is out of the transparent filament. So there's this line of orange in the middle of the stone.

This isn't a problem with the addition of that thing called 'paint'. But as of now I don't think I'll have time to paint it before the convention and I don't want to bring it primed because then there's fingerprints on the primer and I don't know how the rest of the paint will adhere. Right now it's all a consistent light grey. To use the LED torch walls I would have to paint the orange sections at least and then they'd stand out just as much as if they were still orange.

It's something I'm pondering. Once I find my airhose for the compressor (dammit I hate losing things) then I can figure out how long it would take to paint this. I can practice on scatter. I plan on using the primer as the main color and then just accenting it with some random bricks and overall drybrushing. And then there's varnishing. So it takes time. Time I could be spending painting the darn minis.

I might have to give up on the airbrush for priming and either use the rattle can or paint it on. I want to use the airbrush but I don't want to waste too much time looking for the missing hose. And before anyone suggests it I want this hose for a reason. It's brand specific so it's threaded properly, it's a braided hose so it's more flexible, and it has the quick disconnect adapter attached to match the quick disconnect adapter on all my airbrushes. It's not cost effective or useful at all to buy another hose and adapter. I'll look more tonight and if not tomorrow I bring out the rattle can and be annoyed.

The Doorstop and The Dungeon

My original 3D printer is still a doorstop. The controller board is bad. I'm in communication with the manufacturer since the printer itself is out of warranty but the board failed during the upgrade. I'd like them to cover at least some of the cost of replacement if they won't cover the whole cost. We'll see  how it plays out.

The other printer has been chugging along just fine. I had planned on twice the output because I'd have twice the number of printers but that's life. I'm running it almost 24/7 and it hasn't complained.

Slowly but surely I'm getting the pieces I need for my new modular dungeon. They're all printed in grey so even if I can't paint them in time they won't look that bad on the table. I'd like to paint them if possible. I even ordered a big bottle of the primer I want to use with the airbrush when I ordered some other things during their pre-holiday sale. That bottle should easily cover the entire dungeon and then some.

I also set up the new print server for the new printer. I finally printed a case for it that attaches to the frame. My previous one was just kind of sitting on the table and I think I broke the power connection because it wasn't secure. I have to exchange the memory card and I think I'll give this a try as-is because the new case is really steady on the frame so the power cable won't move around much.

I haven't set up the cameras yet because I'm waiting for both printers to be in place so I can get it all in order. I have the lamps I wanted so there could be enough light for good time lapse videos and I think I know what camera stands I'll be printing. I may print out a sample of that to see if it needs adjusting or if it will work as designed. I also have to make sure that I have the proper length cables for them. So much to set up but then it's done.

I ordered spare parts for the printers and will be ordering more from the manufacturer when I get my board. I have to pay for the overseas postage anyway (unless they cover it for me, which would be acceptable) and the things I added didn't increase the cost. They're parts I may never need but if I do I can be up and running again soon. The ones from Amazon will be here in a few days. All this means is that I need a box I can put on the shelf under the printer.

The dungeon itself is looking quite good. At least the pieces are. I haven't tried to assemble any of it yet. Honestly I've been working on getting enough of them printed. 3D printing takes time. Just to print nine of the corner pieces takes 37 1/2 hours. Nine of the single walls take around 25 hours. Note that these are attached to floor tiles so that adds time. Printing nine floor tiles takes 12 hours. It all adds up.

Mind you I'm doing different levels of the pieces at different layer heights. The stuff that doesn't matter as much - the things that don't have a top surface - I'm printing at the thickest layers the printer nozzle will handle. But doing that on the flat, textured layers means they look terrible. So I change those to be very thin layers. Thinner layers means longer prints. I weighed it out and I'd rather spend the time up front and have pieces I like rather than go faster and be unhappy with how they look.

I'll do a post just on the dungeon setup itself when there's more to talk about. Right now it's all about printing the pieces that go into it. I may do the math at the end for how much time and how much filament went into making the pieces since that's kind of interesting.

There's been some discussion on how 3D printed dungeons compare to Hirst Arts dungeons in terms of time and money. It's an interesting discussion. 3D printing is 'set and forget' while Hirst is a lot of steps. Having done both I think I might try to compare them and see what differences there are for those considering which way to go. I don't know if there will be a clear winner or not. I would surprised if there was. The Hirst vs Dwarven Forge ended up with "both have advantages and disadvantages" after it was all said and done.

DungeonBash Board Info

I'm running several sessions of the miniatures game DungeonBash at GenghisCon in February. I decided that a Hirst board would look way better than the cardstock tiles provided with the game. Perhaps I need therapy.

The (sadly defunct, it seems) game is a randomly generated dungeon built on-the-fly as are the encounters. This means I need to build enough pieces to cover every configuration possible, using every section. I know I'll have more than I need in the game but better too many than not enough. The sections themselves are pretty small. Walls are 2 tiles, 2 levels high. Corners are 3 tiles, 2 levels high. I finally sat down and figured out just how many of each I needed. Turns out I need 157 wall sections and 72 corner sections. And 23 doorways with doors. Doorways are 2 tiles wide and each door needs to be cast twice to make them double sided. So 46 door casts.

The floor tiles are actually twice what I thought I would need because I forgot to add the wall, corner and doorway bases into the mix. So instead of 60 casts of the floor tile mold I need 120. 10 tiles per cast - 1,185 floor tiles in all. That's not including the fancy bits to fill the room tiles. Since I'm making each one different I'm casting them myself but I still need 340 tiles of some sort to make the rooms.

Floor tile total - 1,525.

Walls are 2 rows high. Each wall needs 3 1" blocks and 2 1/2" blocks. 471 1" blocks. 314 1/2" blocks. Luckily there's a piece on a couple of molds that's 2 1" blocks in a single cast but I'll be mixing them. I could have made a custom mold and made each wall a single cast but that would actually have been more casting. I don't mind building.

Let's continue.

Corners are 2 rows high. Each corner needs 3 1" blocks and 4 3/4" blocks. 216 1" blocks. 288 3/4" blocks. The 3/4" blocks will be the ones I need to cast more since there's fewer on the molds.

687 1" blocks. 314 1/2" blocks. 288 3/4" blocks.

Doorways use separate types of blocks and while I have a custom mold to cast the uprights in one piece (each cast of the mold makes the base doorway) it's currently AWOL. Now that I know how many I need I'll take a little more time to look for it. Otherwise it's 6 pieces per upright, 2 pieces per arch. And I haven't decided on the finishing detail for the tops of the doorways so I don't know what I need there.

Casting!

If I use all the molds that just make the basic blocks I get:

• 17 1" blocks per cast. 41 casts


• 3 3/4" blocks per cast. 96 casts


• 9 1/2" blocks per cast. 35 casts

Yes. 96 casts to get the necessary blocks for the corners. Luckily I can cast just those blocks when I move into casting floors and other bits. Just because a block is on the mold doesn't mean I have to cast it. Only counting what I have completed I still have 600 1" blocks (36 casts), 268 3/4" blocks (90 casts), 266 1/2" blocks (30 casts).

Making this kind of game board takes a lot of patience and a LOT of casting. I did a bunch yesterday, probably 12 casts. That doesn't sound like a lot but if I keep up that pace the 1" and 1/2" blocks will be done in 2 more sessions. The 3/4" ones in about 8 more. But I still have a lot of floor tiles to cast and once I get the basics done for this board I can work on pieces for my arena and another project as well. So a little more than a week of casting left to get what I need and I'll be building at the same time.

Again, this is why doing up totals makes me sad. But it gives me a constantly reducing number of blocks to cast and that shows progress.

The pieces themselves aren't very exciting but once I get enough to make a small example I'll post a picture. They won't be painted but you can see what it looks like.

Some DungeonBash in process shots

I don't *need* this until the convention in February so I'm finally being kind of responsible and not rushing at the end.  I planned it using Sketchup and need to tweak the 'official' pieces to match adding in wall segments.  That's easy.  A few sections need to be enlarged a bit to accommodate the walls and corners.  It won't matter in game play so I'm not worried.  That and that DungeonBash seems to be a dead game since the publisher isn't available any more.  Sad.  I would have liked to have shown him the game board.

Yep.  I use my off-brand Legos from when I was a kid as building frames.  Still playing with toys.  There's a couple of gothic arena pieces tucked in this construction set.

Here's a nice stack of wall and corner sections.  There's also a stack of wall bases on top.  I need to use my True Sander to smooth the bottom edge of the walls and then I'll epoxy them in place.  One thing I've learned is that I can use wood glue on almost all of the construction but when attaching walls to floors for pieces that will be handled I have to use epoxy or they snap off.  Easier to just attach them correctly in the first place.

I prepped these tonight and will GENTLY reposition them tomorrow before priming so they're a little more dynamic.  Reposing skellies is tricky since they can break easily.  I can probably pin the arms back on if needed but would prefer not to do so.  Heck, if they seem weak I'll probably put in a small pin just to make them more durable.  Looks like the bases on this set will be sand painted similar colors to the dungeon itself.  It's a cheat but if you're not cheating, you're not painting.

By the way - I need two sets of every encounter since there's a chance that if there's two random encounters going the second one can be the same as the one that's in progress.  That's the luck of the dice.  So not only do I have to paint twice the number of minis I want to distinguish them so each encounter is visibly different.  In the case of the skellies I'll do different color glowing eyes and different colors on the shields and weapons.  And I'll be numbering the back of the bases to make record keeping easier.

A very busy weekend, take 2.

Vox ate my post when I was trying to confirm that a picture was actually what I thought it was.  This displeases me.

So you get a summary instead of the longer ramble.  It might actually not have been that bad of a thing.

Mr. Rastl worked hard all weekend to get his club website changed over from the existing static pages to a Wordpress site.  We had tested it and got it functioning but once it was live there was lots of work to do to move the existing information over and structure it correctly.  To make it easier on both of us he worked on his computer in the dining room and I worked on making paper terrain at the other end of the table.  That way I was there if he had questions.

He was able to get the site up and working then found a theme he liked better and had me apply that for him.  A few tweaks later and he called it done.  Actually he said "I'm done" but it all works out the same.

I was able to start making some pieces from the World Works Games Gothic Realms set to use with my DungeonBash games.  The game provides tiles but these are just much cooler.  There's some inconsistencies between the tile sizes that came with the game and what comes with Gothic Realms but not enough to matter.  I have to do a couple of bashes to make it work better.  One of them I already did and that's the modification of the small corridor into a dead end.  Here's a couple of pics.

DungeonBash 02

This is a long corridor, a corner and my dead end.  I didn't clip them together for this photo which is why there's some gaps.

DungeonBash 01

Here's a bit of a closeup of the dead end that I made.  It's cooler in person and I hope to get much better pictures.
 

I also have another corner and a T intersection half completed.  Mostly completed.  Not assembled.

And after all this I was able to finish up painting the zombies.  They're not lined but they have all their paint on them.  Once more I'll say the lighting was less than optimal.

Razig Zombies 02

Click on any of the smaller pictures to bring up a larger image.  These are the ones where I painted all the leathers out of humanoid skin tones.  Ick.

So that's what I've accomplished.

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