#eldon cramberry

[csleko]

"Hey, look! It's me!"

Because not ALL my OCs can be perfectly recreated with Hero Forge. I've had the idea to try turning my Leko model into a miniature for a while, and it seemed like a good time to give it a go.

Pull in the model, scale to mini size, pose it, add base, delete the rig, re-mesh to combine individual pieces into a single solid model, crank up the detail, hope my computer doesn't crash while regenerating a couple million polygons, decimate polycount to reduce eventual file size without compromising detail, export STL.

Worked without a hitch, except I had scaled Leko down to be about the size of my halfling miniature, and it was immediately clear to me that would have caused structural issues regarding his extremely thin arms and legs. So I scaled him up closer to a regular human size and hoped that would keep the small parts from being too fragile when I printed it.

Oh, I also had to remake his head because the original model is actually hollow, which I had completely forgotten about until the re-mesh completely broke it.

It looked to be printing perfectly fine, but I was still nervous about those limbs. They're thinner than the light supports I use on minis! Hopefully my flexible resin mixture will keep him bendy, and not breaky. Getting those supports off is going to need surgical precision.

WELL, CRAP! Surprisingly, though, the failure point was actually his ankles. After those broke I gave up on trying to save it and just ripped the rest of the supports out without care, which is actually when the arm and leg snapped off.

Luckily, I had the foresight to put an extra on the plate in case of just such a catastrophic failure. I was a lot more careful with this one.

Success! After a few minutes in the curing bucket, his fragile looking limbs are actually quite bendy, and not as brittle as I worried they'd be. I'm not going to put the mini to any harsh durability tests, but he stands up to some reasonably forceful poking, so my fears of Leko being obliterated by an errant dice throw are *somewhat* lessened.

Now that the anxiety part is over, we can get to the fun part. Let's paint this little guy!

I thought the dark metallic base might let me get away with not having to manually paint the more detailed darker pieces (upper limbs, waist, neck, palms,) but it's a little too shiny and not quite as dark I would like. Not that I'm going to complain about having to do more manual painting. Like I said, this is the fun part. It's just that getting good results from laziness is also fun when it works out.

I don't know why, maybe it's just me, but I think most of my painted minis look absolutely horrendous in closeup pictures, even though they look pretty good to my own actual eyes. Like the silver parts in this final paint job look really spotty and messy in the picture, but they're honestly not! It's like my phone camera has some "make painted minis look extra crappy" setting that I can't figure out how to turn off or something. I dunno. I've been looking at getting a decent camera for future video making purposes, so maybe it'll be able to take decent closeups.

ANYWAY, Leko's OC gang is all painted up and ready to kick some multiversal butt!

Leko: "My scans indicate that these creatures have a durable exoskeleton, and some sort of corrosive retaliatory defense mechanism. I would highly advise ranged attacks."

If for whatever reason you want to try printing your own tabletop mini Leko, the STL will be available on my PATREON, and nowhere else! It'll only cost you a single American dollar! Besides the occasional exclusive downloadable stuff like this mini, sometimes you can find higher resolution, non-watermarked, or even alternate versions of stuff I've posted elsewhere!

[csleko]

I’ve had this idea for FOREVER, but I was just too lazy to actually draw everyone. So I just made the characters in Hero Forge, did some Photoshoppery and made Borderlands intros for some of our D&D party.

Shod has wandered off and is unlikely to return, and Neiri won’t be joining the team unless Eldon dies. Or I get tired of playing him and send him home on urgent business. Of course, none of that will ever happen until a certain virus stops crippling society as we know it. 

[csleko]

Keeping up with printing this whole thing out on aged paper is rapidly proving to be a challenge. I’m up to 25 pages already, and really want to keep getting this story out here. So I guess I’ll just slap some Photoshoppery on it and post it this way. 

This is part one (again, but plus two new pages) of “The Cramberry Chronicles,” the journal of newly adventuring halfling gunslinger, Eldon Cramberry. This is the story of our D&D campaign, as told from my character’s perspective. Meaning his telling of certain events may not be completely accurate to what actually happened, and are subject to misunderstandings and misinterpretation, but he will try to refrain from undue exaggerations and speculation about events he did not personally witness.

So yeah. I hope this is as much fun to read as it was to write.

[csleko]

I had an idea to draw an awesome character themed coat of arms to put in the cover of my DnD binder, but ran into difficulties refining my sketches. The original idea involved two crossed pistols shooting out vines that intertwined around a large berry in the center. (Kind of imagine this version, basically mirrored.) THING IS, it’s really hard to make the silhouette of a berry read properly. So I simplified everything and made a book cover instead.