3D Printing and At-Home Fabrication Tips

I recently made a model of an armored female character, which gave me a really good opportunity to look at my modeling workflow.  I've written about my modeling process before , where I make my models by crafting each individual part and then arranging them together into a whole piece (not counting the scales around her torso, this model is composed of over 50 individual parts).  I do this because it compartmentalizes my model nicely, allowing me to focus on each individual part until it looks right, without running the risk of damaging some other part of the model. It also keeps the model highly dynamic... because all of the different body parts are still different objects, I can easily do things like this! I'll call it, Valrath interpretive dance!  I really took advantage of this with my Inox Shaman models , where I made one pose that stuck fairly near to the official artwork, but then I made a second one that I felt was a little more dramatic. So, when I'm mak...

A fellow Gloomhaven fan on Reddit asked me for some help combining a couple of Thingiverse models, and after a bit of discussion, we decided that it would be best if I put together a tutorial so that he could make the changes himself!  Also, this particular change will serve as a really good introduction to Blender, so I figured that it'd be a nice post to make in general (since Blender intros are helpful for a lot of people!). So, what was our situation?  Well, this fellow really liked the hitpoint dials on these Summon models  and wanted to use them with all of the models in this collection .  So, the overall goal is twofold: 1) Cut the HP Dial off of the bottom of the first model, and 2) Put the new models on top of it.  I'm going to try and write this tutorial for a Blender newbie, so please pardon me if I'm covering all of the little steps in excessive detail.  Also, please let me know if I failed to cover anything in sufficient detail, as I'm sure t...

I've recently worked on a bunch of models to use for enemies in Gloomhaven's Forgotten Circles expansion (as seen on my Gloomhaven Models page), and I thought it might be interesting to write about the process that I used for the Aesther Ashblade , from start to finish. The first thing that I did was to spend some time appreciating the  official artwork  for the enemy.  While I was looking at it, I took note of the characteristics that made this enemy type visually distinctive.  In this case, I found myself really focusing on 3 traits: she has her hood up, she's wearing a jacket with asymetrical armor, and she has an excess of blades (so many blades).  The jacket really caught my attention, as it almost looked like a military surplus jacket that you'd see in the real world. That thought about the jacket really sparked my imagination.  Cephalofair ran an ARG to announce Forgotten Circles, and part of that game involved an Aesther (Cassandra), punching t...