Driven By Steam

Another steampunkish thumb drive.

So: The body is 3d printed and decorated with fake brass-ish color. The wood-looking part is, in fact, actual wood (a thin strip of veneer with some shellac). The gauge has a printed dial, epoxy "glass", and an actual metal needle. And the glass tubes are actual glass tubes, snapped by hand, which is easier than I had expected. Silly, but fun.

At some point, I need to get out the soldering iron and work on things with more lights in them, but not until I can go out to the garage without dying of heat stroke.

More Panic

Our custom-built Castle Panic set keeps getting more elaborate. Right now, it looks something like this:

We've added some external accessories to the set, like the printed "treasure chest" which contains all of the fire markers (flat cardboard for monsters, 3d printed for architecture) and a couple of new cards (new fronts pasted onto cards from worn-out old decks) like the squire here (any color, hits in castle ring).

Lately, though, I've been doing stuff with the monster pieces lately, mostly the big monsters from the Wizard's Tower add-on. I've been reading up on miniature painting techniques, and I've been applying the base-wash-drybrush process to some newly printed pieces, which I believe are all designs by the indispensable Miguel Zavala, glued onto custom bases, which I think I need to upload to Thingiverse. I've also been experimenting with printer settings to give me better-looking minis. The idea, which I got from 3d Printed Tabletop, is slow printing, small layers, high infill. I'm getting it to work well, but these are early attempts which, I think, don't look great as minis on their own. Notably, the layer height I used for this run wasn't a great for the printer I'm using, resulting in a very striated print. I'm getting better prints with some slightly different settings, but ironically I think the more stratified print paints better. It takes the wash better than my smoother prints, so I'm not sure whether or not I'll replace them with "better" prints. Here's what we've got:

That's the hydra.

That's the chimera. I'm pretty happy with the paint job, given the small scale and my very unsteady hand.

And the dragon. This replaces another one which wasn't as good a model, but Alex liked a more colorful paint job it had. Can't blame him, and I might reprint/repaint for that.

And finally, there's Agranok from the Dark Titan expansion. I was fortunate enough to find a mini which closely resembles Agranok (I just left the wings off the pit fiend), but there was an issue with the base. The Aggie's double-sided base is great for a cardboard counter, but not good for a 3d figure. So I modified a HeroClix-compatible base and put a little paper insert in it so we can rotate the base to indicate how many HP he has left.