New Things: City Archer, City Guard, and Hound!

I've uploaded three new Gloomhaven remix models recently: the City Archer, the City Guard, and the Hound!  The word of the day was definitely armature, because I didn't make any of those models myself.  All I did was make some slight model changes and, in the case of the Hound and the Archer, change their poses.  I love how thoroughly the 3D printing community has embraced the Creative Commons!

So, here's some notes about armatures.  I started the same way as I did for the Forest Imp's armature, except that I'm now using Blender 2.79 and Rigify 0.5 so the options have slightly changed (to the benefit of those wolves, above!).  Also, this time I was laying out my Armature over an existing model, instead of drawing a model over an existing Armature!  For the Archer, I added a basic human armature and scaled it up to fit MZ4250's model, then used Edit mode to line the armature up with the existing model.  To do that, I just grabbed each individual armature joint and lined them up with their appropriate joints on the actual model.

Once the armature was scaled and in place, I went into Pose mode, selected all of my bones and parented the armature and the model with automatic weighting, just like I did with the Forest Imp.  Then, I started moving bones around in Pose mode to make sure that everything looked good... and saw horrible dripping goop on the model's right hand!

My 9-year-old son was in the room, so I called him over to check it out.  He cackled gleefully as I swung the arm around and made silly noises while we watched the geometry crazily deform ;)

Fortunately, the fix was really easy.  After turning on wireframe mode, I saw that MZ had extruded extra material from the fingers into the thigh, so that they'd print joined together for strength (and to reduce the required support).  Since they looked like wholly new extruded faces, I just selected them all, pressed x, then selected dissolve faces.  That deleted those faces and left a new, flat face, over the gap.  Easy-peasy!

With the model changed, I went through the parenting process again, and since I didn't get any mutant geometry when I moved the bones around I figured that I was good to proceed.  I went ahead and moved the arms around, to get them into a roughly crossbow-holding configuration.  When I positioned the right hand, I was careful to keep it in towards the body so that it would still be printable.

With the hands in a good looking position, I grabbed the crossbow from another one of MZ's models (in that same Fighters bundle), put it in place, and scaled it until it looked good in the character's hands.  I used a boolean function to cut away some of the stock of the crossbow, so that it wouldn't be cutting so obviously into the model's arm.  After that, I sculpted a tassel for the helmet and a cape, very much like the sculpting that I did on the Forest Imp.

The Hound was even easier.  I found Agademer's great Fenrir model, which is one of the coolest wolves that I've seen on Thingiverse.  I wanted to make some slight changes to the sculpt, so I opened it up in Sculpt mode, enabled Dyntopo over in the Tool Panel, then went over to the Symmetrize section and made the model symmetrical from -X to +X (I liked the look of the ear on the negative side better than the one on the right).  I then turned on symmetry and sculpted the slight changes that I wanted to the model... and then it was time to pose it!

The original pose has the wolf looking downwards, which makes perfect sense for a giant wolf like Fenrir.  I didn't want a giant wolf though, I wanted a normal sized one.  So, I pressed shift-a and added another armature.  In this new version of Rigify, there's a Basic Quadruped armature already built - score!  I put this armature in place, just like I did with the Archer, and soon I had a moveable model!

So, I played around with a bunch of different poses until I found one that I was happy with.  In the end, I decided that it would be fun to make it look like the wolf was circling, so I bend the joints in its spine and neck to make that happen, and I moved the legs around so that it would look like it was stalking.  I tried to get the paws all more-or-less flat on a plane, but in the end, I decided to go ahead and use a Boolean Difference operation to ensure that the feet were perfectly flat on the bottom, to make it easier to print/glue to a base.

I don't think that I did any meaningful work on the City Guard.  I just took the original model that MZ made, smoothed out the chest a bit (to make it look more like a breast plate and less like a bare chest) and put the sword in the hand.  Then, for consistency's sake, I cut off the helmet tassel that MZ made and put on the same one that I used for the City Archer.

And there you have it, 3 more Gloomhaven compatible models, ready for printing.  Assuming that I can get everything painted in time, they should make it to the table this weekend!

9/1/18 Update: I just watched another of Zacharias Reinhardt's Blender videos - this time about adding an armature to a model.  I wish that I'd've watched that before doing all of this armature based positing work!  His tip about using snapping to volume to place bones where they belong is pure gold, so be sure to check it out!