jlcox5, Author at MiniHoarder

Artist Spotlight: Ember Smith Creative

Posted on May 2, 2022May 2, 2022 by jlcox5

Aaaaaaaaand we’re back with another artist spotlight! This month we had the pleasure of chatting with our friend Ash from Ember Smith Creative. He’s a seasoned 3D sculptor with experience in the game industry as well as 3D printable miniatures. He also happens to be a veteran of two successful Kickstarter campaigns (one that’s currently running right now featuring some incredibly unique goblins), and has a keen sense for business. On a personal note, Ash has done a lot for MiniHoarder, and it was a true pleasure to speak with someone that is not only invested in mastering his craft, but spends a lot of time thinking of ways to enrich the market for artists and creators.

Miniature Spotlight: Goblin Pirate

For every Artist Spotlight, we have one of the artist’s miniatures professionally painted. This months, we’ve asked our friend Max at MadMax Miniatures. Ash was kind enough to donate one of his models as a MiniHoarder exclusive. In fact, you can get this model for free just by signing up for our newsletter! After seeing this fella, I know exactly what I’ll be playing in my next D&D campaign!

MH: We almost always start with a name related question… that seems like a good spot to begin with today. Where did you come up with the name Ember Smith Creative?

ESC: I wish I could say this is an exciting story… Unfortunately, it is not. I just knew I wanted my name to be affiliated with my creations. So I created a giant spreadsheet of possibilities before basically narrowing it down to a small handful and picking at random. I added ‘Creative’ onto the end because I did not want to be locked into any one specific thing. I wanted to be free to go beyond creating miniatures if I ever felt the need.

MH: How did you get your launch into the world of digital model sculpting?

ESC: It’s a typical story of a man at a crossroads, unhappy and unfulfilled with the direction of my life and really not knowing what I wanted to do. Then one day driving to work, I heard an ad on the radio for a school called ‘Academy of Interactive Entertainment.’ The ad completely sold me on the possibility I could make games for a living.

So after completing my course… I wish I could say I was living the dream. Hell, I was even made lead artist/art director at the studios I worked at with my limited experience. Unfortunately, I was stuck in an incredibly competitive and underpaid industry working under constant crunch conditions and suffering from burnout. Creating games I really didn’t have much interest in, and having all my creativity squashed and thrown out the window to instead mirror existing trends under mostly poor and uninspired direction.

After a brief stint as an apprentice electrician, I found myself once again unfulfilled and hungry for creativity once again. Eventually, I found 3D printing and it has opened up so many new doors for me. I have found an industry I truly love with so many avenues and opportunities to express my creativity. The best part is all the awesome new friends I have made already and getting to meet and share my work with so many wonderful new people. It’s the genuine joy in people when they reach out to tell me how much they loved printing my work that really keeps me motivated.

MH: Can you tell us a bit about your creative process? Where do you get inspiration from, and what tools do you usually use to get the job done?

ESC: I draw a lot of inspiration from comics and video games, as you can probably tell, I really try to reflect that in my work. My favorite artist, like many others, is Joe Madureira. He’s the mastermind behind the Darksiders series, a series that inspired me to create art. Fantasy is my comfort zone, but I thoroughly enjoy the odd sci-fi model here or there. I work primarily in ZBrush for organic sculpting and utilize the modeling capabilities of blender for the hard surface stuff, such as armor, weapons, and props.

My process is heavily derived from game asset creation. Starting with a concept sketching in photoshop. I start with either a base mesh or a simple primitive in ZBrush, blocking out the anatomy and character design in a neutral A pose before posing the final miniature. At this early stage I ALWAYS keep my geometry resolution very low (often under 50k points per subtool for those wondering). This is very important for beginners to get used to, because it is far easier to manipulate the mesh and keep it clean when you have fewer vertices to move around. I often have artists approach me to ask how I keep my surfaces so clean and refuse to believe the answer I give them. It is simply working at a lower resolution to define and control your shapes. Trust me, I used to jump to one million points immediately too, when I first started sculpting.

After posing the character, I clean up all the anatomy and subtools that have been deformed by the mannequin process of posing before I begin to really have fun with expressing and exaggerating the anatomy. It is at this phase I have the most fun, portraying dynamic motion and expression while trying to ground a story into one single still 3D image. I may slightly break or push the initial anatomy as long as it remains believable if it helps to create a better piece. So don’t be scared to experiment.

Once I am happy with the model, I will use ZBrush’s Boolean feature to combine the model together and clean up any rat nests of stray geometry or resin traps inside the mesh that may throw errors in my slicer or cause problems for people during print.

Then, we support and we print… then repeat the process another 20+ times to compile a successful Kickstarter campaign, lol.

MH: Is there anything unique or special about your workflow when you’re sculpting? Do you listen to odd music, have any rituals that you do, or anything like that?

ESC: If you count procrastinating and scrolling through Facebook for about an hour before I start the workday… Then sure that’s my ritual lol. I am a bit of a procrastinator, but once I start I am very hard to stop.

My music choices while creating may be odd to some people, yet probably not unexpected. I really have to find ambient music that puts me in the mood for what I am sculpting, mostly chill lo-fi or epic theatrical scores. I love me some Hans Zimmer and on the extra odd occasion, I may even listen to calming jungle sounds or something for ambiance, lol. I have found that all of my favorite mainstream music that has words is a little distracting, but I also can’t work in silence.

An interesting plan I have once Goblinz: Mischief and Madness wraps up, is that I plan to get my iPad fixed (my brother rudely broke the screen and did not fix it!). Head down to the local/nearest river, plop in my fishing rod and just sketch my characters as a way to escape the 4 walls of my office and create in a stress-free environment… I don’t really care if I catch a fish or not, lol.

MH: What advice do you have for aspiring artists looking to move forward with their creative careers?

ESC: Oh gosh, there are so many things I could say. If I could give just one piece of advice today, I would say something hopefully smart and philosophical, like…

Becoming an artist is one of the hardest things to do, but if you enjoy it, it is the most rewarding. You will face many adversities and art blocks, but understand as long as keep creating (AND COMPLETING!!) you will overcome every obstacle art has to throw at you (actively reflecting and improving on your work can help speed this process up). So don’t compare your work with others and how far along they are. Art is a skill, and skills are learned not inherited.

A bonus tip just because it follows on from that – Art is an exercise of visual observation. It is a muscle that can be trained and you should always be trying to exercise it.

MH: What can we expect next from Ember Smith Creative?

ESC: Well, one thing about me is that I love to share knowledge of the things I am passionate about. I have always loved helping my artist friends overcome their art blocks.

Currently, my plate is very full, but, I am hoping that sooner rather than later I will open up a workshop and mentoring service for character creation. Targeting beginner to intermediate artists. Covering all pipelines from game development to 3D printing for tabletop, from the anatomy of a polygon to fundamentals of character design.

As for the more immediate future. While I still have a few tabletop miniature collections I am focusing on building, I am really eager to get back to my game development roots and get to work on some ideas for print and play games that I think are going to be incredibly exciting. I certainly feel like the hobby of 3D printing is only growing and it is the future of product delivery. I am incredibly excited to be on the front lines of that.

Artist Spotlight: BlueWyvern

Posted on March 30, 2022May 2, 2022 by jlcox5

It’s that wonderful time of month again. The time for us to sit around with an interesting artist and talk about their work, the wonderful and weird hobby of 3D printing, and life in general. This month, we had a blast chatting with Christopher, the artist behind BlueWyvern. He’s been making his work available on MiniHoarder since he started, and has quite the collection available. He’s also has a Patreon that you can subscribe to, and receive all of his models for a low monthly cost.

Miniature Spotlight: Stinger

For every Artist Spotlight, we have one of the artist’s miniatures professionally painted. This months, we’ve asked our friend Max at MadMax Miniatures. Christopher selected one of the models from his recent “The Hive” collection, Stinger. Max did a phenomenal job bringing this model to life. You can find more work by BlueWyvern on their store here.

MH: We’ve had the pleasure of knowing you for quite awhile now, and remember when you first got started. Can you tell us about what first got you interested in sculpting 3D printable minis, and how you’ve ended up where you are now?

Christopher: I started BlueWyvern at the start of 2021 in February. But, coming up with BlueWyvern was a long and tedious journey. Having been in the 3D sculpting field for many years now I wanted to do something for myself. To set up my own company where I could bring my own original and unique looking fantasy miniatures to the Tabletop market and make a living off of it. That is a dream of mine that keeps me going every day. Creating an environment where I could independently create miniatures so I don’t have to rely on other people. Having to be dependent on other people to make content is something I absolutely despise.

At the beginning, when I started brainstorming about how I want to make my miniatures a reality. I took Character/creature design as a base. That was something I have always been passionate about and I knew I wanted to focus on. But I didn’t have an idea on what my selling point would be. After playing a lot of tabletop games months prior, I noticed that a lot of 3D miniatures looked very similar to one another. I felt like there really wasn’t anything unique going on with any of the miniatures I had seen both in real life and online. To me it felt like if I had seen one miniature, I had seen them all. So, it finally hit me. I could 3D sculpt original and unique looking miniatures that people could 3D print for their own tabletop games. Miniatures you couldn’t find anywhere else. That was a branch of 3D miniature sculpting that I could do completely solo. Perfect for what I was searching for.

I researched the market and found out that I was mostly right about my hypothesis. While you can find unique miniatures here and there, the majority looked and felt very similar. I now knew what I had to do. Though, I was a total newbie with 3D printing, so that was something I had to put time and effort into figuring out. After many weeks of further brainstorming about what kind of miniatures I wanted to make, what sculpting style I wanted to use and what I should call myself. I came across the creator Artisan Guild. I liked their style so much that I used them as inspiration for my own style. They have a very simple stylized sculpting style. And seeing how I’m all about efficiency and simplicity, it only felt natural to me to use them as a base for my own style. A semi-realistic stylized sculpting style.

Now I just needed a name. Being a fan of dinosaurs and dragons since I was a kid, I wanted to incorporate something with either in the name. Wyvern was something that rolled off the tongue very easily. So, I used that as a base, added Blue to the Wyvern and from that moment on BlueWyvern was born. It almost became RedWyvern at first because red is my favourite colour. But that didn’t sound very good. So I stuck with Blue and used that colour as a colour scheme for my entire brand. With that my dream was finally set in motion.

MH: What was it that pulled you into the 3D digital sculpting field in the first place?

Christopher: Like I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been in the creative field for most of my life. Not just doing 3D. I’ve done all sorts of things. Cinematography, photography, YouTube, game development, 2D design, manga’s, etc. I’ve always been curious about all sorts of creative disciplines and I’ve always disliked sticking to just one thing. I was curious about everything, and I wanted to learn as much as I possibly could. A jack of all trades but master of none kind of deal. Yet, out of all the creative disciplines, 3D is the thing I’m most passionate about. Having been a gamer ever since I was a kid and having a preference for 3D games in particular, 3D was something I slowly got interested in. However, I could never figure out where to start. It was only after finding out about how 3D models in video games were made that I really made a serious effort at learning 3D. I was fascinated by it, though, I was a bit overwhelmed. So I started simple, I just picked the first 3D software I came across and started making basic shaped models using poly modelling. At this point I didn’t even know 3D sculpting and miniatures were a thing. I only knew I could make 3D models in general and had video games in mind. Funny enough, my very first 3D model was a model of Kirby. A Nintendo character. It looked horrible. But, I’m a big fan of Nintendo IP’s so I suppose making a basic Nintendo character was a natural starting point.

After becoming somewhat skilled with poly modelling I came across the sculpting side of 3D design. Where, instead of 3D modelling polygon per polygon, I could just make models like I was sculpting something from clay in real life. I immediately felt a sense of freedom from it. A sense of freedom that I didn’t feel with poly modelling. Poly modelling can be very limited. I found out that with sculpting I could fully make anything I could ever dream of. That part immediately hooked me. I dropped poly modelling for sculpting and fully focused on mastering 3D sculpting. But, while 3D sculpting I didn’t feel like I had a specific direction I wanted to follow. I still wanted to do something with video games but I didn’t feel passionate enough to focus on that specific part.

A few years later, my opinion completely changed after I came across tabletop games and 3D miniatures. Both were completely new to me and I loved what I was seeing. I felt like my fiery passion only became bigger when working on 3D miniatures. These 3D miniatures were the answer I was looking for. The direction I wanted to follow. I fully shifted my focus to making 3D miniatures, started working on my own company and from that point on I became a 3D printable miniatures creator.

MH: It’s been a lot of fun watching your style evolve over the past year or so. What were some major influences in your work?

Christopher: I’ve always felt drawn to stylized styles. I wanted to develop my own due to my need for efficiency and simplicity. I never liked working too long on a 3D model and making them too detailed. With everything I do in life I want to do it as quickly, simple and efficiently as possible. That’s why a stylized style was something I’ve always naturally gravitated towards. As a source of inspiration I came across the creator Artisan Guild. I found out that they also have a similar stylized style for their miniatures. So it felt natural for me to use them as inspiration for developing my own sculpting style. My own version of a Semi-realistic stylized sculpting style.

MH: What can we look forward to from your Patreon subs over the next couple of months (if you know already)?

Christopher: People can expect to see all sorts of different creature and character races made into Miniature sets. Both Popular and underrated ones. Also showing more painted miniatures people can look at is something I’m working towards. Though, I really want to bring more spotlight to some lesser known/played tabletop races like Haregons and Loxodons. I’ve seen plenty of Goblins, dragonborn, kenku’s, gnomes, etc around. So it’s time to give the underdogs a moment to shine.

Besides that you can expect me to add some more new Rewards to the different Patreon Tiers when growth goals are reached. For example, I have a growth goal where I want to release Digital lore cards of Miniature design I put out that are also playable. Just some extra bits Patrons can play around and be more immersed with.

I’m always looking for new Miniature themes to design, new rewards to add, etc. Always going for the next new thing that hopefully my Patrons will enjoy. I just added two new merchant Tiers and a Paper miniature reward to my Patreon.

But, at the end of the day my biggest goal for the upcoming year would be to attract more people to my Patreon. I’m at around 28 right now. Yet, I want to at least reach 100 within this year. With another 100 the next. I’m working hard to get people on board my Patreon so that I will be able to work on BlueWyvern full-time as my actual job. I don’t know when I will reach that goal. But, I’m not second guessing myself. As long as I believe in myself, keep working hard and moving forward, I will eventually reach my goal. No matter how long it takes.

Like Sylvester Stallone said in his Rocky movies: “But it ain’t about how hard you hit. It’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward. How much you can take and keep moving forward. That’s how winning is done”. Nothing will keep me from working towards my dream of making BlueWyvern my actual job. So expect to see my determination throughout the upcoming year!

MH: What are some of the biggest lessons you’ve learned since you’ve started your sculpting journey?

Christopher: Learn by doing. If you want to reach a certain goal. You will never get there by only imagining getting there. Just start doing and don’t wait for something magically to happen that will make you reach said goal. Life is gonna hit you hard. Nobody is gonna do the work for you. You have to do it all by yourself. Stop worrying about failure. Dare to fail. Dare to go beyond your limits. Failure and the drive to learn from said failures will only make you a better creator. Failure is ok and is the key to success. Don’t worry about what might happen. Just do. Dare to see your creative future not as how it appears to be. But, as what it could be. Enjoy your work and the time you put into it. Have fun. Your quality of mind will reflect on the quality of your work. So just breathe and relax. Everything will be fine. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, maybe not next month or next year. But, it will eventually. Never stop dreaming.

Quoting the actor/comedian Jim Carrey: “You can fail at what you don’t want, so you might as well take a chance on doing what you love”. So just go out there, follow your passion and go for it.

When starting out you will probably come across a lot of doubters that will say that your dreams are impossible. That you can’t do it. These are the types of people that also have their own dreams. Dreams they don’t act on due to fear disguised as practicality. Don’t listen to them. You don’t need that kind of negativity in your life. The only person that can decide what you can and can’t do is you. Stay true to yourself no matter what happens and surround yourself with people that make you better.

Artist Spotlight: Imagine Minis

Posted on February 17, 2022March 30, 2022 by jlcox5

Aaaaaaand we’re back after a several month hiatus with another Artist Spotlight! To celebrate our grand return, we had the pleasure of sitting down with Ivo from Imagine Minis. Ivo and his miniatures have had a solid presence with us for quite awhile now, and it been a constant joy for us to see his releases show up on a monthly basis. In addition to individual (and beautifully done) models, Ivo runs a very reasonably priced subscription service through MiniHoarder. If you’re interested in receiving all of his new releases automatically through MiniHoarder, it’s absolutely worth a look!

On top of that, Ivo has generously provided a coupon, valid through March 12, for 30% off of all the models on his store! You can take advantage of this with the coupon code, ImagineTheDiscount30!.

Miniature Spotlight: Felenor Wildleaf

For every Artist Spotlight, we have one of the artist’s miniatures professionally painted. This months, we’ve asked our new friend Max at MadMax Miniatures. Ivo selected one of his newer Defender of the Glades models and the results were incredible. You can find more work by Imagine Minis on their store here.

MH: We have a tradition of starting with the artist’s studio name. How did you come up with Imagine Minis, and what does the name mean to you personally?

Ivo: At first, I started with IvoMG. That is my name but, it did not sound very professional and I could not use it if I started to work with others, so I started thinking about how to create a name that kept IMG in it. I started brainstorming some ideas but did not like any. My wife came and suggested Imagine since it has IMG on it. It was a good suggestion but it did not mean what I was doing. I added the Minis at the end, and it sounded just right and easy to pronounce. It can also be used here in Brazil because the word “Imagine” exists in our language.

Imagine Minis sounded perfect because I am the type of person that even when sculpting I am already imagining the other miniatures I will do. I know that some people Imagine Miniatures differently from others and to appeal to as many people as possible, I like to add some kind of variation or modularity to my models.

MH: I’ve really loved watching your sculpts come a long and seeing your style work evolve over the past several months. What kinds of modeling experience did you have before sculpting specifically for 3D printing?

Ivo: I started around 2015. A friend and I decided to make games in Unity. He would do the programming and I would do the modeling. So I started using Blender and watched a few low-poly YouTube tutorials. Specifically, I started to learn from a YouTuber, Pigart. I finished a few characters for the game but one day my friend gave up. I kept modeling low-poly but not with the same speed or discipline as before. Two years later, I decided to make games solo using Unreal Engine. Programming and modeling at the same time is not an easy task. Doing that while learning is even harder, and after a while without much progress I gave up. But I still wanted to make games.

Prototyping board-games was my initial plan for buying a 3d printer. I finished a 6 players ludo, with different pawns (Knight, Bishop, Archer, and Pawn) and cards. After that, I started learning how to sculpt to make gifts for friends. Since I had a printer “why not give it a shot?”, and that led me to what I am doing today.

MH: What are your current tools of the trade?

Ivo: I mainly use Blender, Pureref, and Krita. For 3d printing Chittubox and Lychee slicer along with Elegoo Mars 2 pro. Also lots and lots of Spotify (Heavy metal), music is essential to keep the flow.

MH: Can you give us a sneak peek of what you’ll be working on next?

Ivo: Right now I’m working on the second part of the Defenders Of The Glade, a Set of Night Elf-inspired units for RPG, Wargame, or Paint. This second part will take more than one month. I am working on a group of Male Druids that can also be used as Barbarians. Each will have two versions, a Bear hat or hair, and 12 hand options.

MH: There are a lot of artists out there doing 3D sculpting work now. How do you approach each set to try and set yourself apart from the others?

Ivo: I always like to hear what people wish to see on their table and, sometimes miniatures are hard to find exactly the way you want. I want to sculpt for people, no matter how rare their request (or popular), so I created a Patreon Commission. Every month I create a request post, and the fastest Patrons to reply can describe their requests that I will place on a poll. The most voted will be sculpted.

Besides the Patreon commission models, I work based on themes selected by my Patreon Community. If a patron has a theme suggestion I can evaluate and even put it on the poll.

I am a person that can’t hold back some intel and when I finish sculpting and test printing I release the miniature. That’s the reason I don’t release miniatures in a batch. That way, people will have something new almost every week.

My welcome pack is also flexible. Every month I will add a previously sculpted miniature to it. That way there is always a reason to come back to Imagine Minis.

MH: Do you have any advice for folks that are interested in doing any 3D mini sculpting of their own?

Ivo: A few things that helped me to start: tutorials, practice, and goals. Without knowing what you are doing you will be hitting your head on a wall. Learn from those that are teaching. YouTube is a great place to start if you are not interested in a paid mentor-ship. Be careful: only watching tutorials will take you nowhere. You will need to practice. Practicing every day will make you faster.

When I was learning I had to search for tutorials all the time. After doing it a few times, it was already on my mind and I no longer had to watch. After more practice I could do things without even thinking much about it.

When I started I had clear goals in my mind. At first, I wanted to do games and later on, I decided to make gifts for friends. I always focused on modeling/sculpture, though. Set achievable goals, because if you fail or don’t see any progress you might give up or lose your motivation.

Always analyze your 3d printed sculpture. There is so much you can learn from it. Because of the scale difference, what you see on screen is not always the same as what you print. For instance, for 32mm sculptures I can zoom really close and do some really tiny little details in the software but, in real life, some of the tiny details will not show (Unless you scale it up). You will have to find a balance to what kind of details you wish to add. If you add too much it will take you time and will not show but, your miniature can be scaled up and still look good.

Don’t waste time make things functional. They only need to look like they are. You could model a nice functional belt buckle but, for a miniature, it does not need to be a belt buckle. Having something that looks like a belt buckle can save you time and will still look good in the end. Remember that all will be scaled down (unless you are making a 75mm or bigger).

MH: What sort of future goals and dreams to you current have?

Ivo: It’s my goal to grow and develop DIY board games. Right now in my free time, I am making a sketch for a free-to-play skirmish game that people can use any miniature they have. Since I don’t have the resources or time to spend, it will be a kind of unpolished manual. Maybe in the future I will run a Crowdfunding campaign to make the manual with a professional look. Even then, it will still be free-to-play.

I love miniatures and like anime, fantasy, and sci-fi miniatures equally. Unfortunately, I cannot sculpt all of those. I am only one person, and they appeal to different groups of people. I started with sci-fi minis but could not get much support so I changed my focus to do only fantasy miniatures. It’s my goal to go back to make anime and sci-fi miniatures when I have more people working with me.

I know that there is a long road ahead for success and I don’t intend to be anyone’s main 3D miniatures supplier yet. The more supporters I have, I will continue to increase the number of sculptures, and will try to continue to keep the prices low. I want to supply the gaming community with affordable awesome miniatures, grow bigger like GW but with much lower pricing. I know it’s a bold statement but it’s my dream.

I am a sculptor, RPG player and always dreamed of being able to create games so that people can have a great time. Let’s Imagine Minis Together.

Artist Spotlight: Aether Studios

Posted on September 29, 2021February 17, 2022 by jlcox5

It’s a special month for us here at MiniHoarder, as we’re celebrating our first anniversary. A special event deserves a special Artist Spotlight, and we’ve certainly brought that to you today with the crew at Aether Studios. Aether Studios has an extensive history, has published hundreds of products, several Kickstarters, and creates incredible terrain pieces (often the form of Dragonbite tiles) and miniatures. Their work spans several genres, including fantasy, sci-fi, and steampunk. It was a joy getting to chat with the Will, Carl, Colin, and Nasos, and learn more about the individuals that make up the unit.

Will and the Aether Studio team have been exceedingly generous to MiniHoarder and our readers this month. They’ve decided to give out their spotlight miniature away for free, and exclusively on MiniHoarder. I’d like to attribute it to my sparkling personality, but really they’re just a great group of folks. We’re truly honored and humbled that they would offer this through our site. For a limited time, you can get the werewolf mini, officially named Sullivan Howle, here, completely free of charge.

Miniature Spotlight: Werewolf

For every Artist Spotlight, we have one of the artist’s miniatures professionally painted by our friend Chris at The Spotted Painter. Will chose their new werewolf model (a MiniHoarder exclusive!!!), and Chris turned out an impressive version of this frightening beastie. Above are the final images. You can find more work by Aether Studios on their store here.

MH: It’s been a tradition for us to start with the name of the artist, and we are not ones to break with tradition. How did you come up with the name Aether Studios?

Will: Colin Christenson, who co-founded the studio with me several decades ago in 2018, came up with the name. We were tossing around ideas when he suggested Aether Studios. We all instantly knew that it was the right one. Nebulous, but mystifying. Hard to describe or define, yet powerful. The discussion immediately ended and we went back to work.

MH: You happen to be the first traditional “team” that we’ve interviewed so far. Can you tell us a bit about how you all came together to start this adventure?

Will: Often It is hard to condense a question like “how you all came together” into a short answer or even a medium answer and have it be fully correct. However, in the case of Aether Studios it is quite easy to answer with the name of one person: Tom Tullis. Tom created the Dragonbite clip system and Dragonlock terrain. Originally Colin Christenson and I (Will Walker) were a part of a small group working on user requests from the old FDG Forums. The forum was a relic of the days when Fat Dragon Games was focused on Papercraft rather than 3d printing. Requests would come in for remixes of existing tiles, The Ruined Floor from Set 3 mixed with a Cracked Wall from Set 4 and a tentacle from Set 9, or some other mix and match remix work. Tom was very gracious in allowing us to chop up and rework things as requests came in. He also personally encouraged me to find quality people to work with. These were just the two most influential acts of kindness that helped form Aether Studios, but there were dozens of other smaller acts on his part that helped move us on our path.

Eventually we started working on original designs: Egyptian, sci-fi, and steampunk themed terrain. We added more team members and we found that we were able to work together very well. Our team has continued to grow over time and we agreed on a few core tenants, long term projects and goals, and set ourselves to see their completion.

MH: You and your team have been making some incredible looking terrain pieces and miniatures for quite awhile now. One of the most impressive things to me is the breadth of themes that you cover. How do you and the team come up with these different sets?

Will: We explore almost every idea we are given by our team of patrons, backers, fans, and supporters. Their ideas and inspirations allow us to deliver mountains of content for their games. We must because they are the most amazing and encouraging cohort of supporters that anyone could ever hope share a fellowship with. There has never been a limit to the imagination of D&D players and our art is without boundaries. The horizon has no end and the mountain no peak.

Carl: Be a player. Where would you like to play? Which setting can be made and can look amazing? What situations can the DM (Dungeon Master) toss at the poor unfortunate souls? What can work in tile system? What can work on scatter? Will I play on that terrain? Simply put: Brainstorm as a DM or player.

MH: What are some things you wish you had known when you first started sculpting? Is there anything you would pass on to individuals who are interested in sculpting, but might not know where to start?

Nasos: I wish I knew that I should be treating sculpting like drawing on paper from the beginning – ie, turn a hand around and focus each time on that side as if it was 2d, that way you achieve very good silhouette of something as well as detail. Also, I wish I knew there is no right or wrong way, there is my way, so not to try to copy another’s techniques. From Colin: I think setting your scale to inches if you are doing tiles and such would have been helpful when i started. Also write down your steps for sculpting something so if you want to come back later and make more you can remember how you made it.

Carl: Always start in low polycount, and build up from there. In lower polycount you can lay down the forms and bigger details much more easily. Big details, medium details, high details. Remember the order, or you’ll gonna have more trouble later. Start with DynaMesh, go as far as you can with the polycount you have. When you’re happy and on the detailing phase, ZRemesh, project details, divide. Never give up and always (!) ask for feedback. From more experienced artist, ask for real feedback. That is the only way to improve. If you don’t ask for feedback, you’re not going to improve, just doing the same shit over and over again.

MH: Let’s talk setup for just a second. What applications and hardware do you use personally for sculpting?

Nasos: ZBrush for software. Hardware is: XP-Pen Artist 22 Pro monitor, Razer Tartarus v2 keypad and HP Omen 15 laptop (Ryzen 7 4k series, Nvidia GTX2660 6gb, 18gb RAM)

Will: Meshmixer for Assembly, Zbrush for sculpting. Hardware is a custom tower (Ryzen Threadripper 1950, GTX 1060 6gb, 32gb of Ram).

Colin: I use Tinkercad to start building a model and for constructing the final piece. I transfer parts to Blender to do sculpting and texturing. Plus a few other programs for error fixing and such.

MH: Has the popularity of resin printers changed how you and your team approached your designs? With higher resolution and bigger build plates, it seems like FDM might not be the only option for terrain anymore.

Will: Yes, it has. We’ve begun to explore new resin friendly options for terrain tiles, and we’ve added additional monthly production capacity for resin related requests by our patrons. However, we still expect FDM to be the go-to choice for several more years. If resin does become the primary option, we’re prepared for it.

MH: Your team has covered so much terrain (see what I did there?) already with your massive sets and multitude of genres. Where can we expect to see you delve next?

Will: Atlantis Undersea Terrain is going to be one of our big pushes for 2022 with sunken ships and hidden temples. We’re also going to be launching a campaign for Roqom the Dragon Hellplane, a very evil mix of undead, lava, and dragon temple ruins. We’re also thinking about doing a few dozen other projects, but those are two that I am most excited about for 2022. For the next few months we have a pretty full schedule mapped out. October will feature a lot of Halloween themed terrain plus our Clip-On Nano Dungeons. November the Artists pick whichever set they want; the one they feel deserves an additional release this year. December is always space ships/sci-fi related. This year we are going to be finishing a Scout type Bird of Prey with playable interior and other projects cut short due to illness. We’re very excited for the rest of the year!

The Grande Finale

We’d like to thank you for joining us on another wonderful ride with our friends at Aether Studios. If you have any questions you’d like to toss their way, feel free to let them know in the comments below! If they’re better questions than what I’ve here, send us a message and lets get you involved in the next round!

As always, we’d also like to give a huge thanks to Chris Spotts for doing such a fantastic job on painting the intimidating Werewolf. Chris is the painter behind The Spotted Painter, runs a YouTube channel, and can be found via his FaceBook page.

If you’re an artist and would like to be featured in our Artist Spotlight, give us a shout at [email protected].

Artist Spotlight: NovaMinis

Posted on August 31, 2021October 4, 2021 by jlcox5

This month’s Artist Spotlight brings us another fantastic artist as well as some beautifully sculpted (and painted) minis. This time, we had the wonderful opportunity to spend some time with our friends at NovaMinis. NovaMinis is a husband and wife duo that not only puts out some very interesting theme based Patreon releases, but does so with a focus on tabletop gaming and usability. Walt is another artist with a varied and unique background, and we really enjoyed getting to hear more about his work, his process, and how he wound up in our special little corner of the gaming world.

NovaMinis has a store right here on MiniHoarder, as well as a monthly subscription through Patreon that is well worth the value.

Miniature Spotlight: Orc Pirate Captain

For every Artist Spotlight, we have one of the artist’s miniatures professionally painted by our friend Chris at The Spotted Painter. Walt chose his Orc Pirate Captain, and Chris went to town. Above are the final images. You can find more work by Walt on his store here.

MH: It’s been our tradition to kick things off by asking about the creator’s studio name, and we’re certainly not one’s to break with tradition. Can you tell us why you chose NovaMinis and what it means to you?

Walt: My wife, Katia, and I started a company a couple of years ago. After much thought, we chose the name Nova Mentis (Nova meaning new and Mentis meaning mind). We wanted a name that would reflect the beginnings of a new way, a new approach of thinking and working. It was only natural to continue with attaching the prefix “Nova” to all our projects, hence “NovaMinis”. Additionally, we also liked the simplicity of the name and felt it carried the spirit of our intentions and work ethics.

MH: Before you jumped into sculpting, we have it on good authority that you spent some time writing for the video game industry. Can you give us a bit of that experience, and how you transitioned from that to sculpting?

Walt: Yes, that is correct, I worked as a video game journalist for a couple of decades. I was involved with some prominent publications and learned a lot as well as had a lot of fun in the process. I mean, who doesn’t want to play video games for a living! In 2009 Katia and I pooled our skills together and started our own video gaming and tech digi-magazine, called Gamecca. Sadly, after almost 10 years, we decided to retire the magazine in 2018 as the video game industry was changing, and we had to adapt. With this decision we decided to follow other passions…

Sculpture was always part of our lives. I was fortunate to meet my wife Katia in the National School of the Arts, where we both trained in fine arts. I have sculpted on and off over the years but in around 2016 I started dabbling with 3D sculpting software. It started evolving into mini sculpts (something that I was keen on even as a kid, back in the early ‘80s) and so we started exploring online options.

MH: Your sculpts definitely have a certain feel and aesthetic to them. How has your style evolved and changed over the past year or so, and what would you say are your hallmarks?

Walt: In terms of evolution, I think that the minis have become far more expressive. We’ve been putting a lot of work into posing and expression, as well as into the humor that sometimes makes its way into our minis.

As far as hallmarks go, I think I would definitely define what we create as… versatile. When it comes to designing a mini, becoming very specific with that mini doesn’t really work for me; personally I feel that any particular mini needs to be able to fill a number of roles for it to be truly useful to a gaming group. There are some that are more specific than others, of course, but some degree of adaptability is very important. I believe it also comes into play when you look at how the minis interact with other items on the table-top. They need to be able to ‘fit in’ with whatever else is happening on the table, and to that end we try and fit into a style that blends well with other products that are out there.

MH: There are a ton of artists doing sculpts now. How have you adjusted your style and content to stand out among some of the others?

Walt: Yes, there are a great many amazing artists out there. We have chosen to focus on the table-top. While some folks have sized some of our minis up and painted some of them as display pieces, we are about gaming minis, primarily, and while our intention is always to create something that works in a 28mm or 32mm environment.

We have also chosen to look at strong themes and ideas for each release. I like to think of each release as a play-set… whenever possible, the elements all need to work together, and hopefully inspire great stories for those that use them. Those packs form part of larger themes, too, some of which have more defined ideas, and others being a bit looser… ultimately, it’s a world that we are crafting, and those themes and pack ideas all tie into it.

Lastly, maybe most importantly, is the idea of print-in-place objects. When I first started designing for print, I did what I tend to do with new projects… jump and build my wings on the way down. When I first started printing with my trusty Elegoo Mars (which is still churning out test prints) I wanted to see what parts could be made movable. I knew that some folks were doing it with FDM, but I wanted those results in resin. It took a hell of a lot of trial and error, but we got there eventually. Being new to the industry, I believed that this was more common, but I was quite surprised to find that it is not. We like to strive to have at least one print-in-place piece in every pack, even if it is just something simple. But I really enjoy the more complex pieces, like the cages and wagons, because they add a fun logical challenge to the creation process for me.

MH: I have to say, your latest set was reeeeeally impressive. Especially the ship! We can’t wait to print that beast out. You also have several characters that really caught our eye. Can you tell us a bit about the set, and about the captain in general?

Walt: Thank you! That ship was a great challenge for me, being the biggest piece we’ve released to date. And it needed things that open and close and swing and wobble (because that’s how we roll, right?), so there was a lot of tinkering that went into it.

As for the captain, well… there’s a bit of a process to this, so bear with me!

The first decision was to make the ship which, because we like to present the themed packs, needed a crew. And because we do monsters exclusively (except for the odd slave here and there so far) the crew needed to be some kind of creature. I think orcs were the obvious choice here.

So we set about designing them and decided that we needed options for people who do, and do not, use black powder in their campaigns. Because versatility…

While researching various cannons and flintlock pistols, I started looking at the dress from the high age of piracy…. Tri-corn hats, long coats, that sort of thing. The idea of orcs wearing tri-corn hats was great, and I kind of ran with a very traditional pirate wardrobe for the orcs.

The captain was the last design, and he needed his long coat, epaulettes, hat and beard to really be worthy of the title. He’s around ten percent bigger, too…

We tend towards an organic fluidity when we put together our packs, and that really was the case here. While there are plenty of ideas and concepts at the outset of our design phase, nothing is set in stone; the original ideas were quite different from our final product with this set, and the captain is a good example of that process.

MH: It’s been a huge privilege of ours to know you since you started, and the progress you have made over the past year has wonderful to see. Any tips, tricks, or general advice you have for other artists who are just getting started with trying to sculpt 3D printable models?

Walt: Quite simply, do your research and don’t let anyone tell you what can and cannot be done. Be prepared to try and retry ideas often, and always put in the effort to tweak a good idea into a workable form, rather than getting disheartened.

If you have a good understanding of the tools and techniques involved, along with imagination and ambition, you will get some pretty incredible results.

MH: If you could only listen to three bands for the rest of your life, who would they be, and why?

Walt: When I first read this question I though “only three?” but then I realized that, yeah, I could do that.

The first would be Tool, because they never cease to amaze me with their complexity and excellent musicianship.

The second – still sticking with the prog thing – would be Porcupine Tree. Once again, this band is thrilling to me, because they push boundaries and do things that are normally not done, particularly in their last few albums… I wish they would reform!

Lastly, Pink Floyd (before Roger Waters left…) Part nostalgia and part emotion here. Pink Floyd has always been a band capable of moving me. And their guitar work is simply sublime! If it isn’t cheating, I would include some of Roger Waters’ solo stuff, but that might be pushing my luck, right?

The Grande Finale

As always, we really enjoyed the opportunity to sit down with an artist and hear more of the story that inspires their work and how they got where they are. We really appreciate Walt taking the time to answer our questions and share his experiences with us. If you have any questions you’d like to ask NovaMinis, feel free to let them know in the comments below!

We’d also like to give a huge thanks to Chris Spotts for doing such a fantastic job on painting the Orc Pirate Captain. Chris is the painter behind The Spotted Painter, and runs a YouTube channel and can be found via his FaceBook page.

If you’re an artist and would like to be featured in our Artist Spotlight, give us a shout at [email protected].

Artist Spotlight: VoidRealm Minis

Posted on July 25, 2021August 31, 2021 by jlcox5

This month in our artist spotlight, we had the chance to sit down with the man behind VoidRealm Minis, Kent Caldwell. If you follow any of the FaceBook groups centered around 3D printable minis, you’ve likely run across his work. He has a very distinct (and often creepy) style centered around cosmic horror. With an extensive background that spans through everything from acrobatics to dioramas, we really enjoyed our time getting to know Kent, and his work a bit more. In addition to selling his work on MiniHoarder, he also runs a Patreon account. We encourage everyone to give them both a look.

Miniature Spotlight: Moon Beast (Priest/Mage)

For every Artist Spotlight, we have one of the artist’s miniatures professionally painted by our friend Chris at The Spotted Painter. Kent chose his new moon beasts, and Chris did a phenomenal job painting it. Above are the final images. If you’d love to print this beasty out and give it a paint job of your own, you can find it here.

MH: Last week we started of with a question about the origin of the studio name. It seems only fitting to start there again. Where did you get the inspiration for VoidRealm Minis?

Kent: The pandemic in 2020 changed my life overnight; I went from performing nightly with Cirque du Soleil in Las Vegas (I’m an acrobat) to finding myself unemployed and my industry decimated in what seemed like the blink of an eye. I always knew one day my career would move away from performing, but I never expected it to happen so suddenly, nor that the entire live theater industry – where I had my professional network – would essentially disappear. I felt, quite literally, thrown into some Void or alternate dimension. In Spring of 2020, I was starting to realize that I could channel my decades of experience as a Fine Artist into a creative practice that was potentially sustainable for me, while also allowing for a large degree of creative freedom. In trying to brand something from the ground up, I liked “VoidRealms” because it implies a landscape or cosmos that is unknown and mysterious. It’s also a subtle tip of the hat to my workflow, since I sculpt in Virtual Reality (VR… VoidRealms… get it?!).

MH: You have a very unique style to your sculpts. What inspires your designs and creatures?

Kent: I get this question a lot, and I think there are several driving forces that give my sculpts their style and flavor:

Firstly, sculpting in VR gives my work (ironically) a very handmade feel in a way that Zbrush does not. I still use Zbrush for surface refinement and tooling, but I do most of my sculpting in VR. Being able to “hold” the object in your hands, spin it around, and extrude / carve digital clay in 3D space is incredible. When I want to make a curving tail or a nasty tongue, I’ll stand up and make a sweeping gesture with my shoulder to draw out the curve.

Also, my Fine Art (dioramas) are all about world building but in a way that is very suggestive, almost poetic; I like to imply deeper narratives without spoon feeding it to the viewer. I adore video games like Hyper Light Drifter and Blasphemous, which both do this quite well. I love creating characters and monsters that have these rich narratives implied in their design.

When I work, I like to surprise myself and let the sculpture “speak to me” in a way as it takes shape. I have a lot of traditional fine art training and have studied anatomy a fair amount, but I do not come from the concept art / movie art / character design fields. I’ve been designing concepts for myself for years without answering to art directors or using that traditional industry pipeline. I treat the initial sculpting phases as part of the sketching / design process and do very little sketching. I’m constantly looking for opportunities to take the sculpt in new directions that I wasn’t expecting while I’m building it.

A good example of this is the model “Vol’Shorm” from my current Patreon bundle. Vol’Shorm was designed almost entirely in 3D. I originally had him flying / elevated and balanced by a tail, but felt he worked better grounded, like a lot of the old 60s Kaiju from Japanese series like Ultraman. The “head” of the strange serpentine thing in his belly also went through several iterations and the silhouette changed until I landed on the final form. This keeps the process exciting and fresh for me, but without a clear sketch or direction, you have to rein yourself in from time to time and be willing to make decisions and nix elements that you may have initially liked a lot – definitely a balancing act.

MH: Just as unique is your method for doing sculpts. You’re one of the few artists we know to work almost solely with VR. Can you tell us more about your setup, and how you got into that as opposed to a more traditional work flow?

Kent: I use an old Oculus Rift CV1 (first generation!) that I got back in 2016, tethered to a PC with a strong graphics card in my home studio. I downloaded a couple of games, but took pretty quickly to the software “Medium,” which I still use to sculpt to this day. Using Medium was like discovering drawing as a child; suddenly I was putting on the headset and “sketch-sculpting” every day, ravenously. I couldn’t get enough – I didn’t have to motivate or discipline myself or force myself to create daily habits, it just flowed so naturally to sculpt in VR and brought me so much joy. My output became quite prolific, if unrefined.

MH: It should be noted that you’re an artist of many different formats, and that you are trained as a Cirque Du Soleil performer. How did you make the jump from that to digital sculpting, and has it had any sort of impact on your art?

Kent: When I went to the University of Michigan (2010), I competed on the varsity NCAA gymnastics team and earned a BFA in Fine Art. I’ve been a gymnast my whole life, as well as a visual artist. It was really the pandemic and the job layoff that pushed me to consider how I could monetize my skills as a sculptor in a field that would give me a lot of creative freedom.

MH: We are so thrilled to be able to celebrate your one year anniversary with you. What are some of the biggest takeaways or lessons you’ve learned over the past year as a digital sculptor?

Kent: I still get so much joy when people discover my work and are excited by it. Nothing is more thrilling in this field than when a happy Patron takes the time to print one of my pieces and personalize it by painting it in their own style. This is a really humbling lesson in reminding me that I am sharing my work with many other people, and inspires me to constantly push myself and my sculpts to new levels.

Probably the biggest lesson I’ve learned through the VoidRealm Minis endeavor is the strength and importance of consistency and iteration. The more you sculpt in a particular format (like mini sculpting) the more you find ways to push the technical execution and aesthetic quality of the sculpts. My sculpts 1 year ago for VoidRealm Minis are almost embarrassing for me to look at now… my current stuff is much more refined, smartly designed, and visually stronger. However, my skill level and knowledge as a sculptor really hasn’t changed at all in the past year. The difference is that I now understand how to really push my sculpts merely from the act of having made dozens (hundreds?) of them for people over the past year.

MH: This past month has included some really incredible looking sculpts. Would you mind describing these a little more, and telling us about your inspiration for them?

Kent: I decided to create a bit of a mixed-bag for the lineup in July with several gargantuan monsters as well as some smaller creations. I decided to pull directly from the Cthulhu Mythos a bit, settling on the “Dreamlands” as a theme and do a take on Moon Beasts and the Hound of Tindalos. Both are statted in Sandy Petersen’s “Cthulhu 5e” book – a wonderful 5e sourcebook that’s so much more than a mere monster manual.

Rather than simply reposing the moon beasts to make variations, I decided to use some of the same components – heads, hands, etc., but to re-morph the bodies between varieties since, in the Lore, they have shapeshifting abilities. With the Hound, I wanted to do something a bit more enigmatic as it technically lives “in the angles of time” – whatever that means! There have been several great Tindalos hounds done by other designers before, so I settled on a simple design that would be easy to print, recognizable, but somewhat unique.

I absolutely love “Kaiju” in all of their strange, bizarre forms. There’s nothing like a bizarre titan to really spark that feeling of childhood joy for me, and so I had a lot of fun sculpting the larger guys. “Vol’Shorm” is inspired directly from the Kaiju in old Japanese action series like “Ultraman.” You almost get the feeling that he could be played by a human wearing a costume on one of those sets. I needed to create a Guardian or counterpart to Vol’Shorm, so I conceived “Batan Hisnu,” an original concept as a protector of death. I had fun in my head playing with the idea of this angelic figure residing over death as an essential part of Universal harmony, while Vol’Shorm – being very other and destroying matter via “obliteration” – was the “real threat” so to speak.

The Corrupted Purple Worm was a collaboration with Chris Sigler from the 5eMagic.shop. In designing the tail, I thought it would be fun to make it its own, sentient entity with the ability to spawn these flying demon serpents – this is an example of me riffing while I sculpt to try and come up with something novel for the tabletop.

I also had to throw in an Astral Dreadnought because, you know, how can you NOT sculpt something so iconic when doing a series of inter-dimensional Kaiju?

Overall, I felt it was fun to celebrate my anniversary month with more of a “random” variety of beasts rather than linking them so closely together. Hopefully this will be well received, as it could be the start of a fun annual tradition for VoidRealm Minis!

MH: Do you have any advice or folks who might be just starting out with digital sculpting?

Kent: I could probably write a novel answering this question, but here are some quick tips:

Study the figure – figure drawing AND figure sculpture. Get books by George Bridgeman and Phillipe Faraut.
Level up your ZBrush skills (watch Michael Pavlovich on YouTube, take a class from Scott Eaton)
Constantly assess a sculpt from all angles (not just a turntable – look at it from high and low angles as well)
Sculpt prolifically, experiment, iterate. Quantity always trumps quality.

I also live-stream sculpting sessions on YouTube where I chat about techniques and design.

The Grande Finale

We had a fantastic time talking to Kent and really appreciate him taking the time to chat with us. We’d also like to give a well deserved shout out to Chris Spotts for doing such a fantastic job on painting the Moon Beast. More of Kent’s incredible work can be found here on MiniHoarder, and for those who want access to his monthly sculpts for a single low price, you can do so via his Patreon.

Chris is the painter behind The Spotted Painter, and runs a YouTube channel and can be found via his FaceBook page.

If you’re an artist and would like to be featured in our Artist Spotlight, give us a shout at [email protected].

Artist Spotlight: Zandoria Studios

Posted on June 28, 2021August 13, 2021 by jlcox5

Welcome to our first ever Artist Spotlight! Here, we take a moment to get to know some of the artists behind the sculpts and models that have changed our hobbies and game tables so dramatically over the past few years. We’ll laugh, we’ll cry, it will be an all around great time. We’re going to kick off this parade of grand artistry with Will Sutton, the artist for and owner of Zandoria Studios. For those that might not know, Will is the master of all things gnome related, though he also makes a lot of terrain using his PuzzleLock system and branches out into other minis as well.

Miniature Spotlight: The Mountain Troll

For every Artist Spotlight, we have one of the artist’s miniatures professionally painted by our friend Chris at The Spotted Painter. Will chose one of his new troll miniatures, and we are were blown away at how it turned out. Above are the final images. If you’d love to print this beasty out and give it a paint job of your own, you can find it here.

MH: It’s always interesting to hear where artist’s come up with their studio names. Where did Zandoria come from?

Will: “Zandoria” was a name in a shared campaign world that my friends and I used for our D&D games years ago… We took turns DMing and had a different part of the world that our game took place in. Part of the map, I noted “the lost kingdom of Zandoria”… In 1999 I started using Zandoria Studios for a business name. Because it is a unique name, it doesn’t get lost on the world wide web!

I also used the name/setting for my story of a wandering hippopotamus Barbarian named TAR. This was a character that I created in Animation:Master with the plan of making a series of animated shorts.

It is a kind of Zatoichi/Conan character in an anthropomorphic world… I only made one short before I realized that my story would take me a hundred years to finish as an animation! When you watch the credits in any Hollywood animated movie, you will not only see hundreds of artists involved, but it also take a lot of computers to render all of those frames! I started thinking that I should make it a graphic novel instead.

MH: I feel like it would be negligent not to dive into your bread and butter, gnomes. You have some fantastic pieces, and by far the widest variety of gnome characters that I’ve ever seen. How did you get into this niche?

Will: After I had created PuzzleLock, which was designed for FDM printing, I wanted to do miniatures too! Everyone was starting a Patreon, and I already had one – so I retooled it to add 3dprintable miniatures. But since most of the things that I had sculpted were not for D&D, It was hardly a success – given that the early adopters on this space were Dungeon Masters! I needed something besides anthropomorphic animals to appeal to them…

I had this idea for sculpting Gnomes like garden gnomes, but outfitted like gnome adventurers in Dungeons & Dragons.

The gnomes turned out to be pretty adorable, and I got a lot of likes on Instagram and Facebook. What I didn’t realize until then is that Gnome enthusiasts are a much bigger niche than Dungeon Masters with 3Dprinters! I keep making more gnomes and am even getting knocked-off by fake companies on the internet pretending to be selling mass-produced ones! At last count I have had to issue DMCA takedowns against 15 different domain names!

MH: Are there any sneak peaks or anything that you can provide that might give us a clue as to what you’ll be releasing next?

Will: I started reading more about Gnomes, their place in folktales and mythology, and branching out to some other things like Trolls. So I started creating some trolls too. My influence was the fairytale artwork of John Bauer.

Continuing to read about lost civilizations, I have run into a theory of a lost antediluvian “golden age” that was lost beneath the floods at the end of the last Ice Age, when the changing climate flooded large areas of the Continental shelves, forcing survivors to higher ground to start over… This is the setting that I am exploring now – and of course, gnomes are involved! Maybe this will finally reveal the Lost kingdom of Zandoria!

MH: Let’s talk about these trolls for a moment. I have to say, the first time I ran into them I thought they were someone else’s work, just because I didn’t realize you had branched out from the gnomes (or hobbits… let’s not forget your hobbits). I really love the look and feel of these models. Was there anything about your process that you had to change when switching from a small humanoid that’s wearing fur and armor to a larger monster that’s mostly covered in fur?

Will: I had made a poll on Patreon about what other kinds of model would they like. Items from the Pathfinder Bestiary made the top of the list! I started to sculpt the Troll from the first Bestiary, as painted by Wayne Reynolds. Because Pathfinder is a spin-off from D&D using the open Gaming License, I didn’t think they would care – and it was just for Patreon…

But Jim Butler from Paizo Inc. (who I am friends with on Facebook) sent me a message saying NO to that idea! I could do it, but it can not be behind a paywall like Patreon. I totally respect that, and stopped working on it. But it gave me an idea… The thing that is the IP of Pathfinder is really just the artwork and stories – what they did was to create a unique interpretation of those OGL monsters. Games themselves – the rules and methods of play – are not protected by copyright. That is why Wizards of the Coast and Games Workshop put so much art and story into the games!

I decided to do a little research on Trolls, as well as gnomes, to did a little deeper into folktales and mythology, in order to inform my own interpretations. This would let me create my own IP within this fantasy world, and give everything my own spin.

I discovered the works of the Swedish illustrator, John Bauer. He brought these tales to life in the early part of the 20th century. He is also an influence on later artists such as Paul Bonner and Brian Froud. Since he died in 1918 and his work is in the public domain, I knew I would be OK to take some inspiration there.

My first troll is carrying a bronze age Scandinavian sword, and using a door for a shield. If you look at the design of the hinges on the door, you will see it is a dragon-like monster from Scandinavian mythology, called a Lindwurm – the design of it was inspired by a Mountain troll’s door in the background of one of Bauer’s paintings!

My Trolls are hairy and shaggy – reading the stories, I felt that the Trolls might be like the Neanderthals displaced by the arrival of men–maybe the origin of Yeti and Bigfoot and trolls. In some of the fairy tails, the trolls would tuck their tails in their belt, and try to disguise themselves as men…They would venture near the farms and villages and take things. that gave me the idea for the Troll Thief.

The 3rd troll that I sculpted was a Mountain Troll. For this I wanted him to be a little bigger, maybe the same thing as a Frost Giant or jotun. Some of Paul Bonner’s paintings of Frost Giants and trolls for Trudvang have big horns. So looking at some mountain goats, I picked a big shaggy goat for my inspiration for his fur and horns!

Because Trolls are not crafty like gnomes, I figure that their weapons -especially for a giant – would need to be stone-age hafted weapons. I watched some videos on YouTube to learn how to haft an arrow head, and how to wrap the sinew to hold it. It was very fascinating! Then when I looked at photos of artifacts of stone age weapons and even some bronze age axes, I could understand better what I was looking at, and how it really worked. I even have a paleolithic axe head in my personal collection of stuff!

The fur was a lot of work! I didn’t want it to look cartoony or too stylized. I had done some miniatures with fur, but this was a step beyond my comfort zone, for sure! I took it eave further when I had the idea for the Ice Age Gnome, LOL! That mini has the sabretooth rabbit, the fur cap and cloak, and the gnomes beard and hair – that was a big challenge!

MH: Can you describe your process for us a little bit? Any favorite tools of the trade or specific steps you take when deciding what to sculpt?

Will: Because I have a background with CAD, a lot of times I will design something in Rhino. This is what I used to design PuzzleLock. I can work out the tolerances there and later export it to ZBrush for sculpting details. I think this design for manufacturing background give me an advantage when it comes to designing for 3Dprinting.

For pure sculpting, like for miniatures and figurines, I will start in ZBrush with a ZSphere armature to create the basemesh for sculpting:

ZBrush is indispensable for an artist in this space. I am lucky that I bought it when it was only $299—They have continued to improve and update it at no cost to their users. It is just fantastic! I never jump right in to the computer with an idea. I always start with a sketchbook. This is a habit that I also encouraged with my designers at SMP. It is faster to iterate and work out the design on paper first. Sometimes I will only have a doodle for inspiration, and sometime I will do a lot more on the concept before I start sculpting.

MH: While your work with gnomes is some of the most popular, you do a very broad variety of art, from comics to, of course, sculpting. How did you break into sculpting for 3D printing?

Will: I was a traditional artist long before I got my first computer. drawing, painting, sculpture, airbrush art… I got a job doing Design for point-of-purchase displays, and learned how to model in 3D, and make renderings for presentations. I work for SMP Instore Marketing for about 15 years, starting as a designer and then Creative Director.

Even so, I was fascinated with the technology and the whole idea of it. By the time Makerbot had the Replicator2 available, I bought one for the Design and Engineering department at SMP. That was my first experience printing myself, and learning about it. I had ZBrush at this time, and I could see the potential, though the quality was not good for miniatures and the only Resin printer was the Form1, and it was over $3000… so I couldn’t buy one.

During those years I was also learning computer animation on the side and pursuing that. When 3Dprinting was first available it as only for prototyping parts which would later be injection molded. The machines were so expensive that you had to send to a service bureau to get them printed.

Around 2014, I started freelancing from home. I had a Printrbot Simple Metal that I used for printing my own stuff. One of my freelance clients was Shapeways. They had a designer-for-hire program that I was a part of, and later a Design with Shapeways program. I learned all of the limitations and constraints for their machines and materials and picked up a lot of modeling gigs through their forum, and also on Reddit. the cost for prints on Shapeways kept getting ridiculously higher every year, and at the same time the project managers that had come on board kept trying to get us to lower our quotes and would pitch things to different artists and take the cheapest – so I eventually stopped responding to quote requests from them.

I started getting into designing my own STL files for sale, because I could see that the cost of printers was dropping each year, so it was not going to be long before home users started to adopt the technology. It made sense to me that there would be a market for the patterns, in the same way that you might go to a fabric store like Joanne’s and buy materials and a patttern to make something. I joined Cults3D.com when it was a NEW website! I have a good relationship with Pierre who is the founder.

When I was able to get my own resin printer, it was a SparkmakerFHD that I pledged for on Kickstarter! It was only $249 at the time and Form2 was the other I was looking at, and it was $3,000. Once I could print things myself, I could see that the machines could print much finer than Shapeways would allow, and my cost was a tenth of theirs.

MH: Do you have any tips for folks that are interested in pursuing digital sculpting or art in general and are just getting started? Any major pitfalls to avoid that you had wished someone would have warned you about?

Will: Don’t go on Artstation and get bummed out and depressed that you will never get there! Everyone starts at the beginning – I am embarrassed by my old work that my mom will bring out to show her friends! It takes years to master the craft – whether drawing, painting, sculpting, etc. But whatever you create, it was only you who would have done it. We are all unique, and the vision we have is unique to us. Don’t rush past those beginner exercises. Every stroke that you make is practice. Be mindful and give every piece of art your best.

Never do a rush crap job, because you are in a hurry, or the budget is low – give it your best. It will stay out there in the world with your name on it! So be proud of what you do and be true to your art. If you remain true to your vision, then your true fans will respond to your work, and they will find you. And though I am not taking STL subscriptions on my Pateon, I am still looking to connect to my fans there!

MH: Speaking of Patreon, you recently made a drastic change in your subscription model… and by drastic, I mean you pretty much cut it off all together. Could you tell us a bit about how you came to make those changes and the direction your future plans are taking you with regard to your art?

Will: Like many artists, I hoped that I could use Patreon to connect with my fans, and with their combined support I would be able to just make art all day! I’ve had a Patreon for several years, but only had a few fans on it, and I really didn’t have an idea of how to use it… As you have seen in the past couple of years, Everyone is jumping into it – especially after the exponential growth of the market after Artisan Guild launched their Patreon a couple of years ago. I like to take my time on a sculpture, because it is a timeless medium and I want my work to last. I can’t create at the frantic pace that is burning out even the younger artist in our group, so I decided to take an approach that was all-inclusive. I would make ALL of my work available to print, without a fear of missing-out! I thought of it like Netflix – binge print everything! My hope was that people would join if their was a theme that they were interested in, like the Trolls. I knew that people would come and go, but I had a hope that I could get my number of subscribers to at least 100 – which if I had a good ratio between $10 Adventurers and $20 Merchants, I might actually make Minimum Wage!

During the pandemic, we saw Raging Heroes and Titan Forge enter the Patreon market – maybe others that I’m not thinking of – which I believe were companies who had previously manufactured minis. Now they were pulling from back catalogs of models which they had purchased as work-for-hire and dumping them into Patreon and just swamping it! 20 or more models for $10, and 10 years worth of back catalog to pull from! So it was the beginning of the end for smaller patreons in this space… Patreon “Samplers” is another get rich quick scheme flooding the space.

It isn’t just that it is a crowded field. I don’t see myself and my fellow artists as competitors. While we are all wanting to sell our models, everyone is going to have their own interpretation of a particular thing – whether Orcs or Dragons or trolls or gnomes. No one else’s work will be the same as your own. So in theory, even Titan Forge should help the “market” in a rising-tide lifts all boats kind of way…

But even though this is an expensive hobby, and people buy the latest and greatest 3Dprinters – sometimes owning multiple! There is an idea that they can spend thousands of dollars for printers, but they aren’t going to pay more than a few dollars for STL files! The Kickstarter and Patreon markets both contribute to this idea that the STL has no dollar value – because there is no shortage of models available.

Compounding this is the ease of Piracy… Even though I had let patrons have access to my entire library of models for a very low price, as a reward for their subscription, my models still end up on Telegram channels and pirate sites such as The Trove… There is no respect for the artist in a community that turns a blind eye to this problem… A prominent moderator from our 3dprintiong community, tells me that it is OK because they were never going to be your customer anyway…But this same person is a member of those file-sharing groups! (which really makes my head spin)

My future plan is to re-evaluate the entire way that I have been thinking about 3Dprinting. I will still put up STL sets on Cults3D. But instead of just selling the STL files, I want to print and hand-paint as collectibles. I keep getting requests for the gnomes from fans who are not a part of this hobby. They just want the sculptures! So I will look at using the printer as a tool of production, not as just prototyping.

The Grande Finale

We’re very grateful to both Will for taking the time to chat with us, as well as Chris Spotts for doing such a fantastic job on painting the Mountain Troll. Will’s work can be found here on MiniHoarder, and for those who just want to support his art, you can do so via his Patreon.

Chris is the painter behind The Spotted Painter, and runs a YouTube channel and can be found via his FaceBook page.

If you’re an artist and would like to be featured in our Artist Spotlight, give us a shout at [email protected].

MiniHoarder’s Patreon Integration For Profit And Glory

Posted on May 10, 2021July 14, 2021 by jlcox5

When you have a hoard of screaming fans waiting to be able to access your work, it’s important to be able to deliver it to them on time and in a way that is easy for them to access. MiniHoarder has always strived to provide a service that enables creators and artists to easily and reliably share and distribute their work to their patrons, Kickstarter backers, and the gaming community at large. Today we are thrilled to announce one more piece to that pie: Patreon Integration.

How Patreon Integration Can Help

Now before we jump into the setup, let’s take a moment to go through how this integration works and what it will let you do. What we’ve done is take advantage of Patreon’s REST API to allow you to connect to your account from the MiniHoarder website. From there, we can pull down a list of your current Patreon backers. We can then use this list to work such magic as granting them access to special coupons (and restricting it to everyone else). Even better, you can just straight out give them a product. Sound intriguing? We thought so too.

We should mention that there are a few limits to the capability. While there is absolutely no need to manually grab email addresses or keep track of any sort of lists, currently these operations are not automatic. This means that if you get a new patron in the middle of the month, they will not be automatically granted access to any specific products or coupons. However, you can grant them access to whatever they need with the click of a button. With that out of the way, let’s cover basic setup and usage.

Getting Started

Getting setup is pretty simple, but there are a couple of steps that we need to go through before we can start giving your products to your faithful patrons. First, head to your social profile under your store settings from your MiniHoarder vendor dashboard. You should be able to see that we’ve added few new fields. We’ll get to the Client ID and Client Secret in just a minute, but for now, let’s grab the Redirect URI. This is needed by Patreon to tell it where to send you after you’ve authenticated your account.

With the Redirect URI in hand, it’s time to head over to Patreon and create the client. Patreon is no longer actively developing this aspect of their service, so it’s not actually that easy to find where to do this. Fortunately, we’ve done the digging, and you can access that page here. You will want to make sure that the title of the page says, “Clients & API Keys”, and that there’s a blue button on the left side that says, “Create Client”.

When you click on “Create Client” button, a modal window will open that asks for a bunch of information. For most of it, you can put what you like. However, there are three fields that we really care about. For the field labeled “Company Domain”, you’ll need to enter www.www.minihoarder.com. For field labeled, “Redirct URIs”, you will need to add the URL that you copied from the social profile settings from your vendor dashboard. Finally, you will want to make sure the “Client API Version” field is set to 2.

When you finally hit, “Create Client” at the bottom, you’ll be redirected to the client list, which should now show the one you just created. Click the down caret icon on the right side of the client to show the details. This is where we’ll find the needed Client ID and Client Secret. Copy both of those values, and paste them into their respective fields under the social profile page of your store settings, located on your vendor dashboard. Now that the basic setup is complete, we’re free to start adding our patrons to coupons and giving them products.

Giving Products to Patrons

Now that we have our client set up, let’s go through the steps needed to give a product to your backers. First, pick a product (pretty obvious, we know), and go to its product edit screen. This can be reached from the Products tab of your vendor dashboard.

From here, scroll down to the bottom of the product edit screen. Here you should see the “Give Product” section. It will have two buttons labeled, “Give Product”, and “Add Patrons to List”. First you will want to click on the “Add Patrons To List” button.

This will either ask you to give MiniHoarder access to your Patreon account information, or ask you to log into Patreon. If it simply asks for permission to access your Patreon information, then once you agree, you will be redirected back to the product page. If you scroll back down to the “Give Product” section, you will notice that the “Email Addresses” field has been filled with your patron emails.

At this point, you can hit the button labeled, “Give Product”. This will schedule a job on the server to create an order for every email listed that is associated with a MiniHoarder account and doesn’t already own the product. This means that if you give out your patron rewards, and then get an influx of new patrons, you can just click the button again. The new followers will get the product, and the old ones will not get any duplicate orders. Processing should be fairly quick, but might take a few hours, depending on how many emails are submitted.

If you’re asked to click on an email link during after logging into Patreon, note that you will not be redirected back to the product page, and will have to manually navigate back to it. From there, you will want to re-click the “Add Patrons To List” button. Also note that you can add any email to that list. It doesn’t strictly need to be patrons.

Restricting Products to Patrons

Fortunately, restricting coupons to patrons is just as easy as it is to give them products. First, navigate to the Coupons tab under your vendor dashboard. Then, either click on the “Add New Coupon” button, or the edit link for an existing coupon.

Scroll down a bit down the page, and find the “Email Restrictions” field that is sandwiched between the Amount and the Total Usage Limit. On the far right of that field, you will find a button labeled “Add Patrons”. Clicking on it will have you go through the same authentication process that’s outlined above for giving products to your patrons, but it will add the email list to the “Email Restrictions” field. After you see them listed, simply save the coupon, and your patrons will enjoy all of the coupon bliss they can stand.

Note that if you’ve already added all of your patrons to the email restrictions list, and then get additional patrons, you can update the list by simply clicking on the button again. Emails that are already on the list won’t be added again, and only the new emails will be appended to the end of the list.

Wrapping Up

That’s really all there is to it! Please don’t hesitate to let us know if you have any questions or issues with this aspect of the site, or any other. You can comment below, or email us directly at [email protected]. We take a lot of pride in providing services and tools that are meaningful and valuable to our creators, hoarders, and gamers. Happy hoarding!

How to Use Tags to Organize and Search for Your 3D Printable Files

Posted on April 20, 2021May 7, 2021 by jlcox5

Keeping up with thousands of 3D printable miniatures and terrain pieces can be a nightmare. Looking for a specific skeleton from your collection can feel an awful lot like looking for an undead needle in a haystack. Fortunately, we heard your cries of agony, and are here to help. MiniHoarder’s storage and organizational system can help keep your minis organized and, more importantly, searchable. Today we’re going to hone in on one particular feature: tags.

Expand Your Hoard

Looking for that perfect 3D printable miniature or terrain piece to add to your collection? Our marketplace has an incredible selection of 3D printable models that will be perfect for your game table.

Tags for Profit and Glory

Tags are probably a familiar concept for many folks, but just to keep everyone on the same page, let’s take a minute to discuss what they are and how they can be helpful. A tag is a word or phrase that is used to both describe and group files together. On MiniHoarder, tags can be assigned to individual files, or to several files at the same time. Additionally, you can assign tags to files as you upload them to our cloud storage service. More on the details later.

Tags can be used to group your 3D printable files in just about any way you can image.

Want to mark certain models as being part of a campaign for your tabletop adventures, or even a specific encounter? Add a descriptive tag to lump them all together. Want to be able to quickly find every goblin from all of the 50 artists you back on Patreon? Slap a goblin tag on there, and you can find them all with the click of a button. It’s also useful to group several files that are part of the same model. While sticking them in the same folder is also a great way to go, being able to pull them all up on a moment’s notice is a pretty great feeling.

Combined with our advanced search capabilities (more on this in an upcoming article), your ability to both group sets and subsets of models together, as well as the ability to pull them up quickly, helps to ensure that you’ll never loose, or get lost in, your 3d printable hoard again.

Ork14

$4.00

Add to cart

Simple Wooden Table

$1.00

Add to cart

The Saurian Empire - Complete Set B (Modular)

$34.99

Add to cart

Vendor Subscription - All Models

$20.00 now, and $20.00 on the 1st of each month and a $2.00 sign-up fee

Selachian - Sawfish Swashbuckler

$4.99

Add to cart

Epic Heresy: Emperors choir

$0.00

Add to cart

Weapon Racks

$3.90

Add to cart

The Rubellite Clan - Elder Nokotan (Modular)

$4.99

Add to cart

Adding Tags to Your 3D Printable Files

Using tags to find files is all well and good, but if it’s a pain to add them, then what’s the point? We’ve added several ways to add tags to your files, and continue to refine the process to make it as easy as possible. As we mentioned above, there’s currently three ways that you can add tags to files. One important note that we should mention is that tags are not case sensitive. This means that if you add the tag “goblin”, “Goblin”, and “GobLIN”, it will all register as the same tag. We did this both to minimize the chance that folks accidentally create separate tags when they intended for files to be grouped together, and also to more efficiently track tags on our end.

During File Upload

The first chance you’ll get to add tags to your 3D printable files is during the upload process itself. If you happen to be bulk loading a bunch of files that you’d like to be grouped together, but that don’t necessarily fit into the same folder, then this is the way to go. To do this, just type your tags into the text field with the text “Add, tags, to, new, files”.

To add multiple tags to the files, separate them in the text field with a comma or by using the enter key. You’ll see them added as a button next to the input field with a big “X” next to the tag name. To remove the tags listed, just give that “X” a friendly tap, and it should disappear. Any tags that are entered will apply to all of the files that are being uploaded.

Add to Files In Bulk

If you want to add tags to files that have already been uploaded, you’re in luck. The fastest way to do this is to navigate to the folder that includes the files you want to tag and check the box next to each file you want to add the tag to (or check the box next to the title, “Current Directory” to add everything in the folder).

Once you’ve selected all the files, enter the tags you want to add to the selected models in the text field labeled “Tags”. You can add multiple tags by separating them with commas or by hitting return. To remove any tags you’ve entered accidentally (or realized you misspelled, like me), just hit the “X” on the tag button that’s created as they are entered.

Finally, when you’re satisfied with both the tags and the selected files, hit the button labeled, “Update Tags”. Voila! You’ll also notice that the tags listed under the quick search area automatically update with your new entries.

Add to Individual Files

If you’re looking to make several changes to a single file, it’s possible to add (and remove) tags from them individually. To do so, navigate to the file that you want to modify, and then hit the down arrow next to the file name. This will expand an area to show any additional details you’ve entered about the file, the full file path, the file size, when it was originally uploaded, and of course, any tags that are already associated with it.

To modify these tags, click on the pencil icon in the top right corner of the file details panel. This will change the editable fields to become inputs. Adding tags here is much like adding them from the other available methods. Type new tags into the field on the right with the placeholder text, “Add, tags, to, this, file”. New tags should be separated by commas or by hitting the return key. To remove a tag, hit the “X” listed to the existing tag, and it will be removed from the list.

When you’re done editing the tags and happy with how they are, hit the button labeled, “Update” on the bottom right of the file’s details pane.

Using Tags to Find Your 3D Printable Files

Now that your file have all the tags, it’s actually time to put them to use. MiniHoarder currently offers two ways to search for files based on tags. Let’s take a look.

Quick Tags

The first is to simply click on the tag listed under the heading, “Quick Search Your Tags”. Clicking on this will, surprise surprise, quick search your files using the tag that you clicked on. If you click on another quick tag button, a new search will be preformed and will replace the current search results with items containing the tag you just clicked.

The results will only show files with the selected tag, and not items with the tag in the name or description. For example, let’s say you have a file named BigDragonOfAwesomeness.stl. If doesn’t have the tag “dragon” (but you have several others that do), when you click on the “dragon” tag, this file will not show up. This provides with a quick an easy way to get access to a specific group of files without having to remember where they all live.

Search Bar

There are times you might want to combine a search to use multiple tags. The search bar above the quick tag section will let you do exactly that. When you start typing in the search bar above the quick tag list, you’ll notice that we conveniently suggest your tags as an autocomplete option. You can add as many tags as you’d like to search on by hitting enter or comma to separate them. Just like with the other tag text fields, these tags will be added to a list to the side of the search bar where you can remove them if you make any sort of mistake.

The search bar functionality is pretty extensive, and we will cover it in greater detail in a separate article, but there is two points that we need to make here. The first is that make sure the “Tags” radio button is selected if you want to search models tags with you entered values. This is pretty straight forward.

The second point is that MiniHoarder currently offers different Boolean operations for searching. Currently, it’s only “AND” and “OR”. Selecting “AND” will only show models that have all of the tags that are entered. For example, if you’re looking for skeletons with bows, and have tagged your models by type and equipment, then you can enter the tag “skeleton” and “bow”, make sure that “AND” is selected, and hit “Search Files”. This will return all models that have both of the tags, “skeleton” and “bow”.

Selecting “OR” will show any models that have either of the tags. Using our previous example, you would find any skeletons using any weapon, as well as any other models using a bow.

Editing Existing Tags

So you had a late night, busy… adventuring. Of course the first thing you do when you get back is to start adding tags to your expanding hoarding. In the morning, you realized you spelled “dragon” as “dragonzes”, and now have two separate tags that you’d like to combine into one that is properly spelled (or not, we don’t judge). MiniHoarder’s will let you remove, edit, or combine tags at your leisure. The power is yours to wield with reckless abandon.

To make changes to the tags themselves, click on the pencil icon next to the quick tag list next to the title, “Quick Search Your Tags”. This will place your tag list in edit mode, and will put a dotted border around all of your tags. To edit them, click on the offending tag, and the tag will change to an editable input with a couple of icons next to it.

Enter your new tag in the input field. To save it, click on the check icon. To cancel the edit and keep your original tag, click on the “X”. If you’d like to remove the tag and its references entirely, click on the trash can icon. Note that if you rename the tag to one that already exists, the two will merge. That’s it!

The Grande Finale

With that, you’re well on your way to mastering your printable hoard. It can definitely be overwhelming, but don’t let your massive collection of 3D printable files get the better of you. With file tagging, your ability to organize and search the exact miniature or terrain piece you need is at hand. We’re constantly adding new features to our 3d printable file storage service and organizational tools. If you have a feature you’d like to see, let us know in the comments below, or send us an email directly to [email protected].

No idea what we’re talking about? Man, we’ve been there. If you’re a fan of 3D printing and have a massive amount of 3D printable files that have started to overwhelm you, checkout out our hoarding plans. We can keep your files safe and manageable, regardless how large your hoard has become.

Where to Find 3D Printable Files & How to Organize Them with Slice Print Rolepay

Posted on March 11, 2021July 14, 2021 by jlcox5

Just Dipping Your Toes Into 3D Printing? It All Starts With the Files.

If you’re just hopping into the 3D printing scene, one of the first things you’ll need to do before you start cranking out stunning printable miniatures and epic terrain pieces is to… actually find the 3D printable files for those miniatures and terrain pieces in the first place.

Now, if you’re reading this article and in need of said printable models, I’d encourage you to hit the menu item labeled Marketplace up at the top of this window. There you will find thousands of choices to satisfy just about every gamer’s fancy. And this brings us to our second problem. Printing miniatures and terrain is a lot like opening a can of Pringles. Once you pop, you can’t stop.

But what to do with all of those files? Once you get going, it can feel like they multiply faster than rabbits. Unless you want to spend your nights looking for “Intimidating Orc #57”, planning ahead is key. Fortunately for us, our friends at Slice Print Roleplay recently made a video that addresses both the problems of where to find printable files, as well as what to do with them once you start to amass a small hoard.

From GIPHY

Organizing Your 3D Printable Files is Key

From GIPHY

Now you might be thinking to yourself, “What’s the big deal? I’ve been messing with files since I could reach a keyboard!” Now, that is probably true and you might be one of the few savants out there that can actually remember every file you’ve ever cut, copied, or pasted. If that’s true, this might not be for you.

However, keep in mind that once you get rolling, it’s not uncommon for individuals to end up collecting terabytes worth of files. While some models can get pretty heavy in the size department, I’m looking at you massive and incredibly detailed epic bosses, that is still thousands and thousands of files. Not to mention that you’ll likely have them coming in from different sources and by different artists over months, and possibly (hopefully!) years.

The organizational scheme outlined by Print Slice Roleplay in the video above is a great way to stay on top of your collection.

Level Up Your Organization with MiniHoarder

Now, if you see yourself with thousands of files wishing for a better way to track, organize, and store your 3d printable files, our cloud storage and organizational tools might be the ale to quench your dwarven thirst. Not only do we provide a cloud based storage solution to keep your files safe no matter what happens to your hard drive, we also provide a way to tag them, search them, view them in the browser, and add detailed notes, such as the artist or where you go the model.

Just in case you missed it, Slice Print Roleplay also shared a coupon code near the beginning of the video for a free month of the storage service. Give it a shot and let us know what you think!

Wrapping Up

Getting started with 3D printing miniatures and terrain is a fantastic hobby, but can also be a bit difficult to break into. Figuring out the best place to get your models, and then knowing what to do with them once you have them is all part of the fun. For more tips and information on getting started with 3D printing, we can’t recommend Slice Print Roleplay’s videos enough. We’ll certainly be doing more posts on them, but if you can’t wait (and we couldn’t blame you!), you can find more at their YouTube channel.

Author: jlcox5

Miniature Spotlight: Goblin Pirate

MH: We almost always start with a name related question… that seems like a good spot to begin with today. Where did you come up with the name Ember Smith Creative?

MH: How did you get your launch into the world of digital model sculpting?

MH: Can you tell us a bit about your creative process? Where do you get inspiration from, and what tools do you usually use to get the job done?

MH: Is there anything unique or special about your workflow when you’re sculpting? Do you listen to odd music, have any rituals that you do, or anything like that?

MH: What advice do you have for aspiring artists looking to move forward with their creative careers?

MH: What can we expect next from Ember Smith Creative?

Miniature Spotlight: Stinger

MH: We’ve had the pleasure of knowing you for quite awhile now, and remember when you first got started. Can you tell us about what first got you interested in sculpting 3D printable minis, and how you’ve ended up where you are now?

MH: What was it that pulled you into the 3D digital sculpting field in the first place?

Fellswarm – Shrieking Flyer B (Modular)

Titans of Namura – AKU-001 D (Modular)

Fellswarm – Bases

Blackfang Goblin – Gunner

Avian – Wanderer

The Nahua Tribe – Kitbash Weapon Pack

MH: It’s been a lot of fun watching your style evolve over the past year or so. What were some major influences in your work?

MH: What can we look forward to from your Patreon subs over the next couple of months (if you know already)?

MH: What are some of the biggest lessons you’ve learned since you’ve started your sculpting journey?

MH: We have a tradition of starting with the artist’s studio name. How did you come up with Imagine Minis, and what does the name mean to you personally?

MH: I’ve really loved watching your sculpts come a long and seeing your style work evolve over the past several months. What kinds of modeling experience did you have before sculpting specifically for 3D printing?

Defenders Of The Glade – Kerissa Autumnfire

Defenders of the Glade – Night Elf Sentinel – Unmounted B

MH: What are your current tools of the trade?

MH: Can you give us a sneak peek of what you’ll be working on next?

MH: There are a lot of artists out there doing 3D sculpting work now. How do you approach each set to try and set yourself apart from the others?

Defenders of the Glade – Night Elf Sentinel – Pose 2

Defenders Of The Glade – Kerissa Autumnfire

Defenders Of The Glade – Urza Fairbreeze

Kaila – Mage Apprentice

MH: Do you have any advice for folks that are interested in doing any 3D mini sculpting of their own?

MH: What sort of future goals and dreams to you current have?

MH: It’s been a tradition for us to start with the name of the artist, and we are not ones to break with tradition. How did you come up with the name Aether Studios?

MH: You happen to be the first traditional “team” that we’ve interviewed so far. Can you tell us a bit about how you all came together to start this adventure?

MH: You and your team have been making some incredible looking terrain pieces and miniatures for quite awhile now. One of the most impressive things to me is the breadth of themes that you cover. How do you and the team come up with these different sets?

MH: What are some things you wish you had known when you first started sculpting? Is there anything you would pass on to individuals who are interested in sculpting, but might not know where to start?

AEHDGE03 – Hedge Maze Horror

KS4PNK9 – Zerlocke Logistics Barge

KS4PNK2 – Pankhurst Zerlocke Aster Cabriolet

AEDMLD02 – Dreamland Items

MH: Let’s talk setup for just a second. What applications and hardware do you use personally for sculpting?

MH: Has the popularity of resin printers changed how you and your team approached your designs? With higher resolution and bigger build plates, it seems like FDM might not be the only option for terrain anymore.

MH: Your team has covered so much terrain (see what I did there?) already with your massive sets and multitude of genres. Where can we expect to see you delve next?

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Miniature Spotlight: Orc Pirate Captain

MH: It’s been our tradition to kick things off by asking about the creator’s studio name, and we’re certainly not one’s to break with tradition. Can you tell us why you chose NovaMinis and what it means to you?

MH: Before you jumped into sculpting, we have it on good authority that you spent some time writing for the video game industry. Can you give us a bit of that experience, and how you transitioned from that to sculpting?

MH: Your sculpts definitely have a certain feel and aesthetic to them. How has your style evolved and changed over the past year or so, and what would you say are your hallmarks?

MH: There are a ton of artists doing sculpts now. How have you adjusted your style and content to stand out among some of the others?

MH: I have to say, your latest set was reeeeeally impressive. Especially the ship! We can’t wait to print that beast out. You also have several characters that really caught our eye. Can you tell us a bit about the set, and about the captain in general?

MH: It’s been a huge privilege of ours to know you since you started, and the progress you have made over the past year has wonderful to see. Any tips, tricks, or general advice you have for other artists who are just getting started with trying to sculpt 3D printable models?

MH: If you could only listen to three bands for the rest of your life, who would they be, and why?

Hobgoblin Smuggler 04

Ogre Worker 01

Leafy Bush 01

Goblin Archer 02

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MH: Last week we started of with a question about the origin of the studio name. It seems only fitting to start there again. Where did you get the inspiration for VoidRealm Minis?

MH: You have a very unique style to your sculpts. What inspires your designs and creatures?

MH: Just as unique is your method for doing sculpts. You’re one of the few artists we know to work almost solely with VR. Can you tell us more about your setup, and how you got into that as opposed to a more traditional work flow?

MH: It should be noted that you’re an artist of many different formats, and that you are trained as a Cirque Du Soleil performer. How did you make the jump from that to digital sculpting, and has it had any sort of impact on your art?

MH: We are so thrilled to be able to celebrate your one year anniversary with you. What are some of the biggest takeaways or lessons you’ve learned over the past year as a digital sculptor?

MH: This past month has included some really incredible looking sculpts. Would you mind describing these a little more, and telling us about your inspiration for them?

Ambulator

Oracle of Bezerret

Calamity Cockatrice

Arachnant

Mligleth: Threshold of Corruption (Cosmic Horror)

Minglers (Trio)

MH: Do you have any advice or folks who might be just starting out with digital sculpting?

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MH: It’s always interesting to hear where artist’s come up with their studio names. Where did Zandoria come from?

MH: I feel like it would be negligent not to dive into your bread and butter, gnomes. You have some fantastic pieces, and by far the widest variety of gnome characters that I’ve ever seen. How did you get into this niche?

MH: Are there any sneak peaks or anything that you can provide that might give us a clue as to what you’ll be releasing next?

MH: Can you describe your process for us a little bit? Any favorite tools of the trade or specific steps you take when deciding what to sculpt?

MH: While your work with gnomes is some of the most popular, you do a very broad variety of art, from comics to, of course, sculpting. How did you break into sculpting for 3D printing?

MH: Do you have any tips for folks that are interested in pursuing digital sculpting or art in general and are just getting started? Any major pitfalls to avoid that you had wished someone would have warned you about?

MH: Speaking of Patreon, you recently made a drastic change in your subscription model… and by drastic, I mean you pretty much cut it off all together. Could you tell us a bit about how you came to make those changes and the direction your future plans are taking you with regard to your art?

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