Delaney King (She/Her/Whomst)

Or sell you frozen peas. I dunno.

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I want him to be something this bunch of cunts would dig.

I am midway through building up and detailing the sword handle replacement. I want some stylised polished root knots like Gandalf's knobbly bits.

I am shaped 1.5 mm plasticard using a diamond file for the initial core.

So I gave him a flower crown with leaves using floral wire and greenstuff. Still lots to add- I want a real Midsommar vibe.

Work in progress.

I've had this Ral Partha AD&D Firbolg giant for many years and finally got around to fixing it tonight. The sword handle commonly snaps off on this figure, and whilst repairing it I decided I wanted to give him more of a Green Man vibe...

Community projects like 'miniature curses' (you are send a miniature, cursed to add a bit then pass it on), monster bashes, trash bashing and exchanging bootlegs and bitz are producing amazing things.

It's like coming home to the original chaos... but this time we are LEGION and we have GEAR.

We are getting games that actively encourage this miniatures madness like Turnip28, Nekroplanet Grob, Space Weirdos and countless other 'Zine energy games available.

Easy access to epoxies, affordable resins, silicones, and 3d printing are blowing everything wide open.

This feels like a return to the punk roots of the hobby. The "dungeon-punk" that emerged from the Citadel team before the sale of Games Workshop.

It was that anarchy, humour and cultural boiling pot that attracted me to the hobby in the first place.

I am loving the freedom of creativity in the mini community at the moment.

Moving away from 'Eavy Metal perfection to messy, gestural, and naive styles of conversion, sculpting and casting is just a joy.

Spawned from Blanchitsu, through Inq28 and now exploding in vibrant colourful anarchy.

Mayhaps you canst have a sneakily thrust little hadouken about your chops.

Cock blocking? Oh, you mean 'derailing'.

I guess we have to keep learning this stuff as more AI bullshit keeps eating your graphics card market.

Also... I mean... all this stuff still applies if you wanna go vroom vroom, but our target sizes are way higher now to the point of it not being noticeable until it is across a certain threshold of load.

Oh yeah, and having a gradient map and coloring each poly using a pixel on it. Drove me nuts. Super expensive way to do things.

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Got all that? Good luck

This helps because anti-aliasing of downsized images suggests details and curves we cannot afford to expressly store as pixels.

Sharpening textures counters the fuzzy aliasing of filtering small textures.

We had VERY small textures. 256x256 was considered roomy. A rat would probably be squeezed into 64x64 or 128x128.

We got the most out of our textures by painting them at least double or quadruple the size then downscaling- usually after sharpening.

You should aim for maximum packing of uv islands, with just enough space between to avoid bleed in the MIP MAPs (smaller pre filtered images used at distances). A lot of the rats I have seen would fail art review on this alone. Sorry kids. Times were tough back then.

Okay, so in practical terms, what this looks like is butting up adjacent UV islands and welding and warping where they overlap/touch. You shouldn't have lots of little shells. You also should pack similar areas together so they bleed pixel colors into similar pixel colors.

I mean... this is supposed to be a challenge, right? :)

We were pretty much all flying by the seat of our pants back then desperately trying to get something vaguely convincing to fit our teeny tiny budgets.

We also didn't have clamping, so having your UV go up to the edge of the map invariably caused tiling errors that sampled pixels from opposite sides of the texture.

A reminder to everyone making a low poly rat to consider your UVs as part when aiming for authentic early console assets.

We had to keep our split edges and hard edges minimised as these drive up the hidden actual vertex count (uv count) but also textures were tiny and we needed it all.

*counts on fingers. Thinks a bit. Counts on fingers again* possibly?

You know my polycule has optional mayo. It's sexy like that.

Friends. Romans. Countrymen. Lend me five quid.

Also I didn't drop it into the sink. So there is that.

Two and a bit trays gooped. I cannot communicate just how many figures I have rebased at this stage.

It's a lot.

My bullshit brings all the bases to the yard. The slow painful process of gooping.