Camera Woes and Consoles!

Hey folks

I've discovered why a bunch of my photos seemed weirdly blurry in the same spot. Must have cleaned the lens a dozen times thinking it was a smudge before I noticed the lens itself has broken! Something must have hit it from the front. I don't yet know if it's repairable, but it has caused a difficulty in photographing my models in the last while!

What I will upload now until I can put together the means to photograph more, is a set of consoles I decided to design for our local gaming group.

Often in tournaments we're playing with either flat bases, or random shrubs and chunks of crystal that roughly fit the size. Infinity is such a visual game it seems depressing to have to use such scraps as objectives, so I decided to make something durable and rough to be our objectives for tournaments, using a laser etcher and trying to keep it as simple as possible to make.

Here's the first test run. After confirming the shapes would work on a clear acrylic, I started printing them on a nice glossy black acrylic so I wouldn't even have to paint the console itself!

You can see the ease of construction here. There are 6 pieces, all made from 3mm acrylic: Base, deck, riser, two braces, and the screen itself. Everything is tabbed and inserted so there's no shear points, except the screen.

Speaking of the screen, the symbol is your typical "signal not found" icon from cell phones, as well as a burst of text suggesting why it's not yet connected.

Here was another test run, this time testing out screen colours. The popular vote was yellow-green, since it'll stand out so well on a table.

In theory, the consoles are useable at this point, even unpainted. But of course, I want them to look as distinctive as possible, and easy to use!

Next up was painting the keyboards and 'mousepads' (holo hand cursor spots) to make them stand out properly. Simple white vallejo acrylic does the trick.

Here's the shot I sent to my fellow gamers, asking which screens work better. Personally I think the blue is more realistic, but I do agree, the green is more obvious.

And then, an entire tournament's worth of consoles! Not enough for some of the more ridiculous missions, but certainly enough to get through 6 tables of most missions. Also, durable enough to survive an entire 3-round tournament of play with only two screens popping off!

More pics soon of other active projects, once I can find a viable camera workaround, or just decide to use my cell for a while...

Crates!

A friend and I have been trying for a while to create our own set of terrain, tokens, etc. You've likely seen some of the previous posts involving laser-etching things, but here's a new neat discovery.

I wanted to make a personalized USB for my brother, and accidentally discovered basswood. It's a kind of balsa I think, and it is amazing. Acrylic can warp under the laser, cut strangely, and is immensely temperamental when it comes to trying to print anything out consistently. Basswood on the other hand, is consistent, cheap, surprisingly durable, and smells a lot less harmful to breathe in during cutting.

So I went to town on some ideas. Initially I tested on regular rectangular crates, but after the first run of those, I had to try something more Infinty-fitting. For my first test runs, I mocked up a few different Nomad-style crates: Tunguska Secure Transportation (A well secured crate for important documents); Corregidor armaments (no words, just warnings on the side); and the basic Nomad Shipping and Freight (for all other concerns).

This is what they look like assembled! The pattern is loosely inspired by something I saw another company doing to mitigate the angles, since laser cutters cut mostly at 90 degrees, which means you can't put two angles flush to one another without a lot of post-cut bevel work. This over-under solution still looks like an interesting intentional design, and removes the weird gaps people would have to fill in.

They're rather sizeable, but I did want to make them big enough where some detail would register. I'll have another post soon about round two, where I fixed up the measurements and started crafting my own corporations, rather than the CB-trademark ones. The nice thing about this design too, is if one doesn't want the pre-etched logos, reversing the end-caps and two of the plates entirely hides them!

I'm running through painting tests now, to see how visible the grain is after painting. I can say so far black primer (vallejo surface) works a lot better than white.