Voroshilovets — Painted

I've finally got my 3d-printed 15mm (1:100 scale) model of the Voroshilovets (see this earlier post) painted up and ready for the wargames table.

Rear-quarter view

The tilt is detachable, in the event that you prefer your tractors in the nude.

Portable Photo Background

How it works from the front

How it works from the back

Here's a very useful thing for still-life photography: a pair of clamps which will hold a piece of paper or card to create a seamless background sweep.

The files are available free from https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3638751

With this, you can quickly and easily swap out different colours, gradients, background images and what-not.

You will need access to a 3d printer though.

And here is mine, fresh off the printer.

This is a test shot, just using my standard work-table lights
and a card I sprayed with grey primer and dusted with white.

Vickers Medium Mk.III (revisited)

I've been redesigning my old model of the Vickers Medium Mk.III to make it suitable for home FDM 3d printing. This is a job that I've been putting off for quite a while, mainly because I don't personally have a need for the physical model any more, so it hasn't been a very high priority for me.

Unfortunately, wargaming3d.com (where I put my STL files up for sale) is having issues at the moment, and I can't add any new products to my catalogue. Hopefully the problems will be resolved soon, but until then it will have to remain accessible to me alone.

Wargaming3d.com is back up (-ish) again, and the STLs for this model are at https://www.wargaming3d.com/product/vickers-medium-mk-iii/

Easy Colour Correction for Photographing Miniatures

If your photographic lighting resources are limited, it's quite likely that you don't have access to daylight bulbs, and your photos will have a pronounced colour cast. The exact colour will depend on the lighting — most bulbs used in the home are quite yellowish, while fluorescents can be greenish. This process for correcting that colour cast will work for either.

I've taken this picture of two figures on a sheet of plain copier paper, and I've added a box of pure white in one corner so that you can see the exact effect.

The software I'm using for this is Photoshop, but there are equivalents in GIMP or Affinity Photo that do the exact same thing.

Step 1:

Using the Colour Sampler tool (the eyedropper) sample an area of the photo that you know is pure white. I've taken my sample from the paper between the two figures.

Step 2:

Create a new layer, and fill it with the colour you've sampled with the eyedropper.

In Photoshop, the shortcut to fill an area with the foreground colour is Alt-Delete
(Option-Delete on a Mac).

Step 3:

Invert that colour.

In Photoshop, the command for this is Control-I
(or Command-I on a Mac).

Step 4:

In the Layers palette, set the Mode for the layer to Colour Dodge.

The layer will now neutralize the colour cast on the photograph.

In this photo, I've taken my colour sample from the tone card in front of the two miniatures, instead of from the paper they're standing on. As you can see, this has created a slightly different tonal range in the image; the slight vignetting apparent above has disappeared and the whole background is pure white.

Photo Stage Setup

This is the setup I use for photographing my models.

The shell of the stage is a cheap translucent plastic storage bin, lined inside with white cardboard.

I use three cool-white LED lamps, two from above and a lower-powered one providing some frontal fill lighting. The LED lamps are excellent for my purposes, as they're very bright but emit very little heat, so I can have the bulbs sitting right on the plastic bin without melting it or setting anything on fire — they do get a little bit warm, but not very, and the lights are never on long enough to cause an issue. They're not true daylight lamps, but they're fairly close in tone, close enough for digital editing in any case.

I have a pair of mirror tiles leaning against either side of the stage to bounce around a bit more of the light coming from overhead. The cards in front and at the back of the stage are for colour and tone calibration when I'm editing the images on my computer; they get cropped out of the final images.

I prefer to use a neutral grey backdrop most of the time, but I also use a white or black one. Occasionally I'll use a more decorative stage setup, but not often.

I always use the tripod. My camera these days is a Nikon D3500 DSLR with an 18 to 140 mm zoom lense. I don't yet have a flash for it, apart from the built-in one; my old Nikon TTL Speedlight turns out to be precisely the wrong model to be compatible with any modern camera. Hey-ho.

Ancient Ruin – Now With Added Moss

I've added some foam-flock moss to the Ancient Ruin, which I think helps to make it look a lot more ancient and ruinous.

The figure is another one from Reaper, a lich of some sort. He's a lot closer to regular person size than the gigantic warrior in the last post.

Side view

...and from behind.

Ancient Ruin

This is another terrain piece from Printable Scenery, this time one from their Ancient Ruins set.

At the moment all it has on it is paint, but I think I might add some moss and weeds in between some of the flagstones.

The figure is from Reaper, a huge warrior of some kind, fully 40mm from the soles of his feet to the top of his head. I think that would make him about eight feet tall in 28mm sizing.

More Printable Scenery

I've been making a lot of use of Printable Scenery's range of 3d printable buildings for my 15mm wargaming terrain. Up until now, they've been supplied as multi-piece models, one piece per floor and the roof, and with some interior detail. Now they've updated the file sets to include single-piece solid alternatives of the same models.

It is certainly useful to have models on the tabletop which you can put figures inside, but most of the time it's not necessary. So it's useful to have alternative one-piece models available that match the hollow versions, and are both easier to handle and quicker to print and paint. Because they're alternates for existing hollow models, it's a simple matter to swap them out on the tabletop if it becomes necessary.

I think this one is their French Farmhouse.

Bulette

This is an old WotC pre-paint, one of the lucky-dip figures they were selling in boxes of about ten assorted minis way back when.

The poor unfortunate about to be gobbled up is a halfling from my D&D game, a character whose name I don't even remember now, who survived only just long enough for me to paint this mini for him, before being garroted and disembowelled by an assassin as a warning to others.

Colour Balance Target

I have a pretty decent camera now, which is held back mainly by my own ignorance and incompetence. It is, in theory, highly configurable in terms of the images it spits out, but 99% of the time I rely on its automatic settings, as they generally do a good enough job for my purposes.

Wrestling with colour balance for photography under lights is something that has always been problematic. I know that its possible to get lights that are tunable — that is, the colour temperature is adjustable, so it's possible to get a reliable simulacrum of daylight from them. However, I can't afford that sort of thing, so I rely heavily on software colour adjustment and standard "cool white" LED lamps.

I put together this little colour and tone target, printed from my CMYK laser printer. It's not nearly good enough for scientific accuracy, but it gives me a repeatable reference to work from, which is an improvement over guessing.

I Like My Maxes Dickered

The 10.5 cm K gepanzerte Selbstfahrlafette ("10.5 gun on armoured self-propelled mount") was a prototype self-propelled gun used by Nazi Germany during World War II. Although it was originally designed as a Schartenbrecher ("bunker buster") for use against the French Maginot Line defences, following the defeat of France it was evaluated for use as a long-range heavy tank destroyer on the Eastern Front, but action reports were not encouraging and no more were built after the first two.

It was colloquially known as Dicker Max ("Fat Max").

This is a 1:100 scale FDM 3d print, from a model by Zac Kavulich. The figures are Battlefront 15mm German early war grenadiers.

Yet Another Robot

This 3d printed robot is a freebie from somebody's Kickstarter. I've printed it at 200% of it original size, which makes it roughly 34mm tall.

Monsters of the Psychedelic Era

These are Topps Monster sticker designs from 1965, the artist being (probably) Basil Wolverton.

I remember these sorts of things cropping up here and there in my youth; they were all part and parcel of the style that produced the Rat Fink hot-rod cartoons and the like.

Somewhere in the AD&D DMG there are some random generation tables for creating demonic critters from the infinite planes of the Abyss. These guys would suit quite well as pictorial resources for the sort of nonsense that results from those tables.

Sorcerer's Tower from Printable Scenery

I thought I'd try my hand at a larger piece of 28mm fantasy scenery, and went for this one: the Sorcerer's Tower from Printable Scenery.

I was unprepared for how large it would be, nor for how long it would take to print. It ended up taking me six days of more or less non-stop printing to get all the major components done (minus doors), and god knows how long it will take to paint it. When I get around to painting it, which might be a while, because I'm well and truly sick of it now.

Stage 1: I decided to print it from top to bottom, on the theory that if I got delayed for any reason, I could still use it as a smaller tower without needing any of the under-bits. As it happened, that wasn't an issue, but the theory was sound I think.

Stage 2: The first stone tower bit. Only the top two pieces are primed in this photo. You can see that I had some printing issues with the balusters around the top balcony; I'm vaguely considering cutting that whole section of the balustrade out and replacing it with a traditionally modelled "crappy DIY" repair of planks and things.

 Stage 3: more tower. It's all sitting on my modeling table. The blobby things around its base are Mushroom Men.

Stage 4: the last of the tower segments is complete.

There's a spiral staircase running right up through the whole height of the tower, which is nice I guess, but it's unlikely ever to be seen much.

The wizard in the doorway (for scale) is an old Grenadier figure; a Julie Guthrie sculpt I think. It came as one of a boxed set of 25mm wizards.

 Stage 5: the ground floor of the house part of the structure.

The figure up on the top balcony is a 28mm (more like 32mm really) monk, from Reaper.

Stage 6: the first floor of the house.

Stage 7: All the major components finished at last.

That main roof section was a 29 hour print, just on its own.

Fungus Folk

This is the test-paint piece, upon which I'll base all the others.
It's fairly quick and simple, so it shouldn't take forever to paint up the whole group.

For certain reasons I'm in the process of printing up a small army of Mushroom People (about a couple of dozen, in the end) and I need to start to consider how to paint them.

Fungi are remarkably diverse when it comes to coloration, but I've decided to stick with that old trope of the amanita muscaria, if for no other reason than that it's immediately identifiable as being mushroomish.
The models are
Mushroom Folk by Fat Dragon Games
— they're cheap. You should definitely buy them.

I intend to end up with a couple of dozen of them; this is just the first lot.

Canoe

Here's a canoe, a free model I got from https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4181962, along with a Reaper monk for scale. It will fit two figures comfortably, three at a squeeze.

I printed it at pretty low rez (0.2mm) for speed, and it looks pretty OK I think. It would be better at a higher resolution of course, but I'm using it as a game token, not as a diorama piece, so this is fine for my purposes.

I imported the STL into Blender and stretched it to make a three-seat and four-seat canoe, one each of which are on the printer at this very moment.

Ram Kangaroo (revisited)

 I painted one of these once before, in the colours I thought it would have appeared in the Italian campaign, but it turned out that the Kangaroo didn't come into service until after that Mud/Black scheme was abandoned. So, here it is again in plain old olive drab.

The figures are Battlefront's old 15mm Mediterranean Brits.

Rear view

The model does have a little bit of interior detail. Not much, but a little.

Bergman SU-76 M Remix

This is a remix I've done of M. Bergman's 1:100 scale SU-76 M model.

All I've done is separate the fighting compartment and gun, to ease the placement and removal of supports, and add track pin and guides detail.

You can get the STLs (free) at https://www.wargaming3d.com/product/su-76-m-bergman-remix/