Long weekend and I’m recovering from yet another foot injury, so I’m spending some time on Monkey Business. Which means so far a lot of admin catch-up. I have projects going for Devil Monkey and Murphy Tech Services, and I can only do so much on breaks at work. On the upside, I can do a lot of planning and educational stuff at the robot factory, so that helps; I usually have classes going in my headphones and a notebook handy while I’m working.
Part of the admin end is writing up some 3D model guidelines for my dedicated team of 3D artists. You know: me, Stacie, and Cindy. Because I’m a tabletop wargamer, a lot of my terrain design process is just a slight modification of how I’ve been making scenery and terrain for 20-odd years now. I just work in math and pixels instead of foamcore and paint now. My tabletop wargame experience largely consists of working in 28mm scale (Warhammer, Warhammer 40K, Mordheim, and Necromunda), a bit of 10mm scale (Dropzone Commander, Warmaster, and close enough for Car Wars), and the weird-ass mixed scale BattleTech uses (1/787 ground scale, 1/285 miniature scale, and you have to make the two work together).
A good chunk of that process, as any tabletop wargamer knows, is repurposing common household objects. Back in the day, nothing was safe — including scrap from the plastic factories where I worked — from being thrown into the scenery factory, and I got some pretty wild results. Most of which got left behind when I left South Dakota; I had a hard limit of “whatever we could cram into the old man’s pickup,” and they fell victim to priorities.
So I’ve spent a good chunk of today coming up with a list of common household objects (mostly containers) and other stuff I’d pillage for use as scenery parts, then converting their real-world size to what they’d translate into in 10mm and 28mm scale using an Excel spreadsheet I slapped together to do the conversions into a variety of common wargame scales. Which means I now know that when you use a soup can as the basis of a small building in 28mm scale, it’s the equivalent of a 12m diameter, 18m tall tower. A tuna can? 15.55m diameter, 7.3m tall building in 10mm scale. The runners from model kits (excellent for use as broken brick rubble if you have some good snips, patience, a bottle of CA glue, and plenty of black and gray wash handy) are anywhere from 20cm to 1.2m in diameter depending on the particular runner and the scale. Those plastic bulkheads that came with the original Necromunda boxed set (the basis of a lot of wargame buildings on Pinterest) are almost exactly 5m square in 28mm scale.
Why would I do this, you ask? It isn’t like I’m going to make a 3D model of a sports drink bottle and plunk it down into a video game. That’s true, but they’re easy to visualize and if necessary hold a mini up to in the real world. So someone could block out an idea on the table in front of them, then translate that into Blender pretty quickly by consulting the notes, and they’re good to go. There’s also nothing stopping them from thinking “that soup can is pretty good, but it could stand to be a little bigger,” then using the scale tools in Blender. These are baselines, not carved in stone never to be deviated from.
As baselines, there’s a lot that can be done with them. Most of these are simple cylinders or cubes with the dimensions stretched into the appropriate sizes. Making something out of one is easy: create a cylinder in Blender, adjust the dimensions, and tweak the origin point so it works right when it gets ported to Unity. From there, do whatever you want. Chop chunks off, add pieces, distort parts, knock holes in it for doors and windows, you name it. In fact, if someone submitted a perfectly-scaled tuna can with no modifications except a coat of paint, I’d probably have some choice words for them.
Once I finish this admin stuff, I get to move into the “research” part of the Monkey Business. Playing vidgames. I have a list of games I have to play through again to see how they did certain things and “inspiration.” Which means breaking out It’s an arduous, time-consuming ordeal, but someone has to do it.