Digital Art Zone

Thanks for the thread resurrection! This was one I followed with interest-so far not much has been bringing me back to the Daz forums-hopefully this thread will change that!

MADMANMIKE - 23 May 2012 10:31 AM

My second most active thread was for Role Playing Game art.  As a published artist for Palladium Books, I’ve used First Poser, then Bryce and now DAZ Studio to brighten the gaming scene with character portraits and set pieces. Currently I am working a set of Paper Miniatures for the Palladium® Fantasy Role-Playing Game to be sold at DriveThruRPG.com.

When the images come back to the forums I’ll post my teaser banner, and I encourage anyone else with art for the table-top RPGs to post away too.

Personally I’d prefer the Video gamers put their art somewhere else, but I’m sure there are plenty of others who don’t know the difference between the two genres, and the art is generally good either way, so post away folks!

-Mike <8]

Shadowrun street mage.

It can be best seen here: http://fav.me/d53k1kk

Yeah, I hear you. These new forums are terrible; I haven’t even checked them in a couple of weeks.

Eric Walters - 10 June 2012 01:27 PM

Thanks for the thread resurrection! This was one I followed with interest-so far not much has been bringing me back to the Daz forums-hopefully this thread will change that!

I’d be posting more to this thread but I’ve been busy on my first two packages of Paper Miniatures for Palladium Books® Palladium® Fantasy RPG to be sold on DriveThruRPG (as teased here in post 7).

For now, here’s a closeup of one of the mini’s front-sides; a Hobgoblin: Larger version

Wow, this message board has killed it for more than just me I guess.

Here’s a sneak preview; As I mentioned above, I’m doing paper miniatures for Palladium® Fantasy RPG; to advertise (and let the customers know what they’ll get when they buy) I’m doing a freebie set with some quick combat rules; Each mini will come with a card of stats based on the Palladium Fantasy RPG, but in Dragnet fashion, “Just the stats, Ma’am.”

Anywho, the freebies are four Gladiators so you can have a mini-game in the set; here’s the base art for them, all to scale with eachother; a Dwarf, an Elf, a Human and a Wolfen.

-Mike <8]

These are a work in progress.
I’m making avatars for the characters in my Pathfinder group.  Then I’ll make some images of some of our most epic battles.

This was a commission for a friend who happened to catch the 10,000 views on my DA page.

Full sized image here: http://fav.me/d59nci3

Elven female archer, protecting her kid from goblin invaders!

Did the figure about a year ago, finally got around to doing the scene for it, hehe

Full sized pic
http://www.silverblades-suitcase.com/characters/forestwarelvenarcher_2012.jpg

Still working on Paper Miniatures, here’s a few previews..

Character form my latest “Spelljammer” scene

When the Captain gets that look in his eye…the one that says…
“Ooooh! I’ve had a great idea!”
Folk who know him well, run, far far away!
Such ideas usually involve hordes of carnivorous undead, treasures so dodgy even Sinbad won’t touch ‘em, and dragons with flaming hemorhoids…or worse.
Maybe it’s the soupcon of tiefling blood, hm?

MADMANMIKE - 16 August 2012 06:09 AM

Still working on Paper Miniatures, here’s a few previews..

Very nice!

DWG - 17 August 2012 10:17 AM

MADMANMIKE - 16 August 2012 06:09 AM

Still working on Paper Miniatures, here’s a few previews..

Very nice!

Thanks. I’ve been cleaning up my Fantasy minis for final packaging; I had white backgrounds on them and that doubled the size of the .pdf..  When GenCon is over and my publisher gets situated back at work a freebie sample set should be put up on DriveThruRPG.com with gladiators and an arena; hopefully I’ll be done with the stat cards for the rest by the end of the month so the official sets can go up. 115 minis done for Fantasy!

Set 1:
27 O.C.C. miniatures (covering almost all of the classes from the Palladium® Fantasy main book), 6 Orcs, 11 Goblins, 3 Ogres and 1 Troll. 48 in all! Each includes an N.P.C. Quick Stat card so a Game Master can use them as foes, allies or cannon fodder.

Set 2:
Set 2 provides 1 Squire, 8 peasants, 5 city guards, 1 guard Captain, 1 Collector, 1 Scout, 4 bandits and 6 nobles, 17 Skeletons (2 Ogre), 1 Necromancer, 5 Zombies and 7 piles of bones. Bonus!: 1 extra page of 17 mounts! Each minature includes an N.P.C. Quick Stat card.

Oy vey..

This afternoon I was rendering a panther for a miniature for a friend, and the D|S locked up; I was messing with the date and time settings on my computer trying to figure the time difference between myself and a friend in Europe, and the render engine got confused and suddenly thought it was taking an extra six hours to render, so I really accidentally locked it up myself.

The designated location for the render was on my 1TB LACIE Rugged external hard drive.  When the program locked, I rebooted the computer, and noticed the hard drive was very hot. When the computer came back on, the hard drive didn’t come back up, so I rebooted, unplugging the drive and letting it cool a while.

Long story short, the drive is dead. I bought it on February 25th, and EVERYTHING I’ve done since then was on the drive.  Since my accident in December I’ve been recovering on Workers Comp, so I’ve had all day every day to make art, and have done a substantial amount. Much of it is on DeviantArt, quite a bit of it is still on my computer in raw ready to render files, but none of it is backed up anywhere else, so all the post-work would need to be done after rendering again. Likewise I render to .tiff for editing and save with layers, and the files online are all finished .jpgs..

To the point. My miniatures. Thankfully, just two hours before the crash, I finished all of the art for the first two packages, and have the base pdf files on my computer. Likewise as mentioned above, the base ready to render files are on my computer as well. But, the finished ready to edit artwork for each individual mini is actually done at 9x11.5 inches, 300dpi, and all of that is gone.  Remaking any of them will mean spending the extra 1-2 hours rendering each image.

I need to focus on the drudgery of making the NPC stat cards for each (all 115 of them) so they can go up for sale, hopefully in the next couple of weeks. Many of them will be similar to each other (like the 17 Skeletons, or the 6 City Guards), but it will be time consuming to say the least..

it does depend a bit on just how the drive is failing. From your description it doesn’t sound good, but it is possible that data recovery can be done. Might be worth checking with a firm that does that kind of work.

thoromyr - 19 August 2012 08:55 PM

it does depend a bit on just how the drive is failing. From your description it doesn’t sound good, but it is possible that data recovery can be done. Might be worth checking with a firm that does that kind of work.

My tech guy says from the sound it’s making that it’s “trying to reset the heads”.. The problem is I can’t afford any expenditures right now, and cracking open the case to try and retrieve the data voids the warranty.  I think it’s probably best to let sleeping dogs lie, and accept the loss as the lesson it is. Still, 24 years of regular computer use without ever having this happen before, seems like a pretty good record to me..

There’s always the old throw it in the refrigerator trick. Definitely worth trying to see if you can get it up for long enough to get your data off (and it will work without cracking the case). ISTR I did this successfully myself a few years ago, but there’s a description of someone else doing it (with link to an article by the same author on other disk recovery techniques) at this link http://geeksaresexy.blogspot.co.uk/2006/01/freeze-your-hard-drive-to-recover-data.html

You need to be aware that this may only work once and for a limited period, so have another drive ready to copy to, plan an order of priority for what you want to save in advance and get straight to it if the drive comes up.

And while it won’t cover disk recovery, I think you should have a valid claim on the drive’s warranty with a failure after 6 months.