3D Printing and At-Home Fabrication Tips

As my patrons have seen, I've been working on a proxy model for the Lurker Mindsnipper monster lately.  I had thought that I'd have a good head start on the model, with the intent of remixing my original Lurker model into this new monster... but that didn't really work out.  When I made that model, I wasn't really practicing many techniques to improve model modularity or reusability, so I pretty much remade it from the ground up.  But, that gave me a chance to learn this cool technique that I want to write about today! Vertex Group Parenting is a technique where an object is parented to a set of vertices, instead of another object.  I use object parenting extensively in my modelling process , where one object's location and rotation is locked to another object.  I most often do this for limbs, so that when I do something like moving the torso, the arms follow it.  Vertex Group Parenting does this same basic thing, except that you pick a set of 3 vertices ...

I've made a new thing - a Harrower Infester model for Gloomhaven !  I think that this is my best creation, yet!  I feel like I'm really homing in on a balance between parametric design and sculpting that's working well for me.  When I made this model, I used the "extruded cube" method to make the shape of the main robe, with completely separate extruded cubes for the arms.  I then made the cowel, pauldrons, knives, legs, spikes, and all of the little details as separate meshes, which I arranged on the main robe.  When I didn't like where something was or how it looked, I moved that something around to get it into a better place.  To that end, I want to talk specifically about the insect legs that I made for this guy. Those legs are remarkably parametric.  I went over the robe pretty heavily with Blender's sculpting tools, in order to add the folds and creases in the fabric... but those legs are pure parameterized geometry!  Here's a screenshot o...

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...