loriborn

@loriborn@tabletop.place

Hey everybody! I'm the caretaker of Tabletop.place and Frostgrave.net, and I hope you all enjoy the community we're building up.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

loriborn,

Is that FDM or resin? If it's FDM, that's extremely impressive! They're great regardless, a big fan of classic red skeletons, but on FDM that would be a mighty feat.

What color primer to use?

So I’m about to begin painting for the first time, but I’m not sure what colors to buy. I play Star Wars Legion so I’ll be painting a bunch of stormtroopers, death troopers, and other very monocolor minis. Should I use black and white primers for them? Or do neutral grey and paint the colors?...

loriborn,

To add to this, yeah, since contrast or speedpaints are very translucent, they don’t work on darker primers. White can be a tricky primer in general, since no matter what company you go with, it can spatter and speckle. Citadel’s “Wraithbone” is a really good rattle can since it’s not quite white and not apt to speckle, but is still light enough to let speedpaints show through.

AP’s primers are good, but their white (like all white primers) can be hit or miss. I like Vallejo’s, but whatever you have accessible!

AP grey is also good, but it’s tough for me to see where I’ve primed since it’s so close in colour to the actual mini.

loriborn,

Any light colour is fine, with white giving you the most control over your colour.

Intuitively, adding, say, a brown speedpaint on top of a white primer will maintain the colour brown. If you were to put the brown paint on top of a black primer, it would be brown mixed with black, and combine to be, well, brown-tinted black. This is the case with any paint, since its colourspace is additive, but it's especially so with translucent paints like speedpaints that show the underlying primer really clearly.

If your only two options are grey or white, I'd honestly suggest white. While I do still think Wraithbone by Citadel is a good middle ground, for a beginner, it is pretty tough to use grey rattle primer since it's hard to determine coverage and is a fair bit darker than either Wraithbone or white, which can darken your minis considerably.

https://tabletop.place/pictrs/image/81176cc1-b2f8-4fdb-8685-a86f275a2a17.png

Here's a good example from Army Painter as to how primer affects their speed paint colours, as you can see, the most accurate colours are acheived with a white primer. Just be careful, because as mentioned, white primers can speckle like the picture below.

https://tabletop.place/pictrs/image/a728585e-a1b4-4bc5-8ee5-8f57dd1bea19.png

You can't fully avoid this, but your best way to prevent it is to make sure you have low humidity and no rain, shake the can very aggressively for a very long time, warm it up under warm water if possible, don't spray in the cold, and spray in short, controlled bursts.

loriborn,

Thank you! I actually have a Google doc setup with mostly links to various 15mm minis and sculpts that work well at 15mm, and am still testing out my 15mm measure stick to get it the way I want it.

As for terrain, the best part of 15mm Frostgrave is that terrain is super abundant because hobbyist stores carry a ton of it from Railroad and historical wargaming, and 3D printing 15mm terrain (FDM) is really cheap and scales super well from 28mm, unlike 28mm minis which can be hit or miss at 15mm.

loriborn,

Nice blending! Gives it a sort of water color painting aesthetic. I've been tempted to grab a Mars 3 myself, have you given it much work at smaller scales like 15mm?

And thanks for supporting the community. Feel free to mention us, we're always looking for more members!

loriborn,

Yeah, LEGO is a pretty great tool to give people a way to represent stuff visually without having to invest the significant amount of time and money that the miniatures aspect of the hobby can require. Obviously you can use tokens or wood cubes, but seeing a themed miniature does a lot to make the game fun.

I’ve been tempted to run a game that way myself, but I wanted to use my regular game table, so I’ve been tinkering with a 3D printable base for minifigures that actually abides by the 25x25 base size. I know the rules’ are base agnostic, but I do like the consistency.

loriborn,

I find trying to build an entire terrain set out of LEGO can be pretty expensive. It’s definitely easier to get into since you don’t have to worry about sprues, priming, painting, varnishing, basing, etc., but if you try to build a proper 48x48 table out of brick based stuff, it’ll probably be prohibitive. My recommendation is to use a neoprene mat for 90% of the place space, and then to use LEGO (or any brick based toys, honestly) exclusively for terrain, minifigures, and accessories. This saves a ton of time and money, and let’s you move and rotate terrain really freely. For surfaces designed for units to actually stand on, like bridges, I generally just use tiles to create smooth surfaces. The studs vs. smooth is a nice WYSIWYG way to delineate what’s meant to be rough terrain and what’s meant to be walkable.

Obviously minifigures don’t stand up well on flat surfaces, but I did create two STLs for basing minifigures in accordance to 1” Stargrave/Oathmark/Frostgrave base sizes. The first one is base with 2x2 studded surface, but because every resin printer and resin is different, it’s a bit tough to get an exact fit and probably needs minor scaling depending on the printer (+-.01%). The second has a slot for a 1x2 studded plate so a real LEGO piece can be placed inside and glued in; this ensures minifigures attach to a proper LEGO piece and have proper clutch power. The bases are 25x25, and I’ve made a basic Oathmark movement tray for these as well that I’ve not tested yet but should allow for infantry movement with round bases.

https://tabletop.place/pictrs/image/cc58b6c2-d8f1-4b8c-9fbe-d345e5ffc179.jpeg

https://tabletop.place/pictrs/image/dd48d303-e859-4bfe-8a4f-3acc81ac06cf.jpeg

This basically means quick and customizable terrain, modular warbands (especially if you like to place WYSIWYG style), and you can still measure with a regular ruler and use the regular rules. If you’d like to give them a shot, I have a 3D printer and can send you a few to try out!

loriborn,

These are great! I've been delving into 15mm myself (skirmish, Oathmark and Frostgrave mostly) and find that it's tough to really find miniatures that print well at that scale, I can't imagine the work in getting 6mm going.

Need Help Deciding: Gamemaster Character Paint Set or Reaper Miniatures Learn to Paint Kit?

Hey, painters! I’m in a bit of a dilemma and could really use your advice. I’ve been thinking about getting into the miniature painting hobby, but I can’t decide between the Gamemaster Character Paint Set and the Reaper Miniatures Learn to Paint Kit. My main goal is to explore this hobby and determine whether it’s...

loriborn,

I would actually recommend something else entirely! For beginners, one of the best types of paints to ease into the hobby is a type of paint known as a "contrast" or "speed paint". There are a number of brands that have paints like these. The paints are a bit thinner than normal paint, and pool into recesses of the model, creating a natural gradient of shade on the model that simulate highlights and shadow. Citadel is Games Workshop's brand of paints, and they're quite well regarded, but otherwise fairly expensive. For beginners, I'd recommend Army Painter, as they just released a new line of "speed paints" (their contrast paint equivalent) called "2.0" and my personal experience with the line has been very good for the price.

https://www.thearmypainter.com/shop/us/wp8059p

I'd recommend giving at least one Citadel contrast paint a try, just to experience it, but I'd definitely avoid the Reaper stuff as it tends to be very low quality and overpriced for what you get.

loriborn,

I'd still say Citadel's contrast paint has a slight edge over Army Painter, even their 2.0 formulation. That said, I actually don't know if I'd say I would recommend Citadel's contrast instead of AP2.0 for newcomers, for a couple of big reasons:

  1. Cost - Army Painter is about half the cost. That means twice the amount of paint for the same price, and that means more colours to choose from. For a lot of beginners, the quality of the paint isn't the limiting factor, it's the colour choices. You quickly realize that if you want to paint a variety of different minis, you need a variety of colours, and that adds up pretty fast if you stick with just Citadel.
  2. Settling - Contrast is notoriously quick to settle on the bottom of the pot. With some colours it's bad enough that I have to use a stick to stir up the bottom of the pot. If you're painting infrequently as a newcomer, you'll likely experience this every time you paint. No matter what paint you use, you should probably shake your paints, but in the case of Citadel contrast paints, sometimes it's multiple minutes and still no homogenization. Blender balls help, but those are yet another cost barrier to entry, as Army Painter includes those for free inside their paints.
  3. Flow - For experienced painters, the flow properties of Citadel contrast is nice, as it allows for wet blending. It's a criticism of AP2.0 that they dry relatively quickly. For newcomers who won't be doing wet blending, this is a benefit you pay for with Citadel's higher price, but don't get to take advantage of. Like buying the highest end graphics card just to play Minecraft, for instance.
  4. Pot vs Dropper - This is a subjective thing, but having used both pots like Citadel's, and droppers like Army Painters (for use with palettes), I find the latter to be much easier to use. Citadel pots sometimes don't stay open, close while you're using the paint, and because their "paint lip" can only hold a small amount of paint, you have to refill the lip frequently or dip directly into the pot. You can pour paint out onto a palette, but there is a reason the "spilling nuln oil all over your desk is a right of passage" meme is a thing.
  5. Consistency - Citadel contrast colours vary tremendously in their flow properties. Some colours are very watery and thin, and flow like water, and others are thick and viscous and dry slowly. Some contrast significantly into a kind of hue gradient, others contrast straight to black, others contrast barely at all. It's a learning curve for sure, but Army Painter's speed paints are generally all more consistent with one another and have a much more consistent result. The skill ceiling is lower, and the effects you can get are much less pronounced, and thus AP2.0 paints do tend to give a certain "look" that you can't change much, but as a beginner, this is probably preferable.

As for the painting handles, YMMV. I own one, but as other hobbyists will tell you, the handle does restrict the base, which you do usually paint. It's also kind of expensive. Personally, while I have one, I end up sticking to just grabbing a dowel from the hobby store, or any other handle shaped thing, and sticking a bit of blue tack (sticky tack, teacher's tack) on the end and plop the mini that way. You could also use a metal rod and put magnets on the base of your minis as is common, but that's a bit of a higher barrier to entry.

Really, I think your best bet is to buy a basic D&D set of minis, as they're accessible and cheap, and you usually get two or three, and then buy a few individual colours from either company to test how you individually like them. You can always use both, for example, and I find that I still really like to use Citadel's "Skeleton Horde" for all my skeletons, but use AP2.0 for most other things.

Just make sure if you do test out individual paints, that you're getting the AP2.0 formulation specifically, as I'm not sure how widely available the new version is.

loriborn,

Thank you! I'm still debating how I'd like to base these guys since they're a bit "built up", and they definitely need a dry brushing, but good paints do heavy lifting!

loriborn,

Most miniature painters I know usually go without, at least with 28mm miniatures. I've usually stuck with that scale due to accessibility, it's just way more common, but I've fallen in love with the cost and space savings of 15mm, and the board feels much bigger when you play to boot.

With this scale, and 10mm, I always use a set of magnifying glasses with a light and flip-up lenses. They came with both headband and glasses-like adapters but as I wear glasses, I stick with the headband. They've been honestly one of my best purchases for painting and I even find myself using them with 28mm work as well!

https://tabletop.place/pictrs/image/70498aa8-dbfa-4105-8fdf-98159bc7cfb7.jpeg

loriborn,

My biggest bother is that the resin base the model has built-in resists sticking to green-stuff, so the seams between the two are fairly large. I'd like to mask it with some flocking of some kind, but I also do generally like clean bases and I tend to paint to a "tabletop ready" standard rather than anything fancy. Or maybe the seams aren't that bad, who knows!

loriborn, (edited )

Honestly, I wasn't impressed by the first round of speed paints, the original formula, because they had a tendency to smear and reactivate. This second round though, I'm very happy with. The 2.0 formula completely fixed the reactivation and slow drying issue, but as a result, the paint dries extremely fast. For 15mm, since you're using much less paint, this does mean that you get little working time and have to be generous with your amount of paint, but very careful in application (so pooling goes where you want it to go).

Compared to contrast paints, which have been my go-to, its hard to pick one over the other. I really like the consistency of the AP 2.0 paints. They flow well, and more importantly, all the paints I've tried flow the same as one another. The paints also dry more consistently, and streak much less. Citadel contrast paints, however, probably have better, well, contrast, and some colors, like skeleton hode, create much more unique color shifts from recesses to highlights; AP2.0 pallid bone or bony matter, for instance, feel more translucent and the colour shift more one-tone.

In general AP2.0 is more translucent though, and it takes multiple coats mucn better, and you need multiple coats more often. As a result, their paints also doesn't separate nearly as bad as Citadel contrast paints, which have a habit of completely separating in only a few days of being unused.

Altogether, I prefer some handful of colors from Citadel and the options for more advanced painting methods and styles, and I prefer a lot of the "just sit down and paint" usability of AP2.0, not to mention the lower cost and color selection. If someone told me to pick only one to suggest to a newcomer that wants a lot of colors to start with, I'd probably recommend the AP2.0 mega or complete set over any Citadel starter packs, but my real recommendation is to experiment with one or two of the AP2.0 paints, and see if your painting style fits the worktime and scale limitations.

If you're a more advanced painter, you'd likely want to use Citadel contrast and more "normal" paints because of how limiting AP2.0 can be, even if the results out of the box are very, very good.

Google unexpectedly sells its domain-hosting business to Squarespace | Engadget (www.engadget.com)

Imho a decision that doesn't make sense, Google already has paid for all the infrastructure so running the service to them is pure profit, not to mention the lost possibility to upsell Google workspace (paid gmail with a custom domain) or Google cloud services to all their customers....

loriborn,

And I just purchased a domain from them. GoDaddy is not great and while Squarespace is a fine company, no worse than Google at least, more consolidation of domain providers doesn't seem like a good thing.

loriborn,

I'm a big Tabletop Simulator / Tabletop Playground guy myself, and it tends to be the easiest way to get a bunch of real-life friends together when we can't actually be together. I tend to like longer form slower paced games that can be played passively, like 4X games; it's just a more fun environment when you just want to chill and chat/play.

For fun competitive games where chatting is secondary to the competitive experience, probably Age of Empires 2!

loriborn,

This is just another side effects of the proliferation of AI generated text that is difficult to distinguish from human generated text. Obviously, SEO optimization has always been an issue, but more now than ever, distinguishing the fluff and nonsense from the valid is a significant challenge. I can only imagine small businesses are going to find it even more difficult to stand out when pumping SEO optimized sites requires only a few clicks. How can you compete when the tools are ubiquitous, easy to use, and available to all and the game values the results of these tools rather than the product or company themselves?

loriborn, (edited )

Hey there!

So the general way to federate is pretty straightforward! All you have to do is find a community (similar to a subreddit) you want to join from another instance (website, such as tabletop.place) via somewhere like Google or even Reddit, or some existing lists of subreddit replacements, and once you find that community, say https://lemmy.world/c/selfhosted (which is the "self hosted" community of the instance Lemmy.world, a very popular instance) you open the search icon at the top of our instance, Tabletop.place, and paste the URL of the community into the search field and click search.

Once you search, the page will say that nothing was found, but if you return to the homepage, there will be a population of posts from that community on our "All" page. From there, you can open a post, and subscribe! So long as at least one member of our community is subscribed to a community, our entire instance will see the posts, comments, and upvotes updated in real time in their "All" page, and will be able to comment, post, vote, etc. with those posts as well, or subscribe to the community if they'd like. They can also block the community on their end if they no longer want to see the posts from that community in their "All" feed, but this will not affect federation.

If you'd like to share a community from here, you can usually find places, such as other communities, that allow advertising alternative communities, and you can often post there saying, "hey, tabletop.place has a GURPS community, here's the link!" so other users from other instances can post in those communities without necessarily having to make an account here.

Finally, if there's a community you want to see, but can't find an existing one on the "fediverse", and it seems related to our core principles, just let me know and I can create one! While we stick to tabletop related topics, we already do have both a Tolkienfans and LEGO analogue, so there's no hard and fast rule on community creation. We don't, however, host NSFW communities on tabletop.place, though you are free to use your tabletop.place account to join NSFW communities on other instances so long as they are properly labeled as NSFW on the instance settings and are not egregiously obscene.

If you never want to see NSFW content other users might generate by joining NSFW instances, simply toggle off NSFW in your account settings page.

Do note that if you join a community of an instance that is considered unacceptable, such as an instance dedicated to racism, the federation of that community will be blocked.

loriborn,

For sure! I’ll do that today.

loriborn,

We now have a Warcry community. Feel free to share it with others!

loriborn,

Added!

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • megavids
  • thenastyranch
  • rosin
  • GTA5RPClips
  • osvaldo12
  • love
  • Youngstown
  • slotface
  • khanakhh
  • everett
  • kavyap
  • mdbf
  • DreamBathrooms
  • ngwrru68w68
  • provamag3
  • magazineikmin
  • InstantRegret
  • normalnudes
  • tacticalgear
  • cubers
  • ethstaker
  • modclub
  • cisconetworking
  • Durango
  • anitta
  • Leos
  • tester
  • JUstTest
  • All magazines
    •