5 hours ago, Kaashifar said:

These are amazing!

If you don't mind me asking @Villakarvarousku where did you get the stencil for the imperial ships?

Thank you!

I made it myself, using pretty crude methods to be honest: I traced a picture from my laptop screen on a piece of regular printer paper and then cut it out with a hobby knife. Paper gets pretty wobbly when cut so thin, and my cutting wasn't too exact either, so there was a good bit of touching up to do to get it to look right. Honestly, the stencil's main function was to get the overall proportions right, and a lot of the edges and corners I've had to straighten by hand.

I imagine that's probably not the answer you were hoping for. It worked for me, but I can't say it wasn't a bit fiddly.

9 hours ago, Villakarvarousku said:

Thank you!

I made it myself, using pretty crude methods to be honest: I traced a picture from my laptop screen on a piece of regular printer paper and then cut it out with a hobby knife. Paper gets pretty wobbly when cut so thin, and my cutting wasn't too exact either, so there was a good bit of touching up to do to get it to look right. Honestly, the stencil's main function was to get the overall proportions right, and a lot of the edges and corners I've had to straighten by hand.

I imagine that's probably not the answer you were hoping for. It worked for me, but I can't say it wasn't a bit fiddly.

Sweet! thanks for the tip. I was thinking of that too but knowing myself it'll look.. well, not like that haha!

On 12/14/2017 at 11:39 PM, Villakarvarousku said:

They're kind of hard to see properly in my crummy pictures though.

Try sticking a small piece of Scotch tape over your flash. That diffuses the light and helps fill the shadows. If you can add bright white paper/cardstock to the sides and top of your photobox, do that. If possible, set the ships on a white surface, not the blue foam.

See if you can adjust white balance on your phone/camera. A lot of the new-ish phones have controls only found on super-high end SLRs a few years ago. Because it's all basically software, you're seeing it in more and more places now.

Some simple image editing/photo software can fix the color/white balance in your existing photos. There are free apps that have some decent capability. I've been really surprised by how much I've been able to do with Pixlr.

@elbmc1969 Thank you so much! I don't know the first thing about photography, so that's all very helpful advice. I'll give that a go next time.

8 minutes ago, Villakarvarousku said:

@elbmc1969 Thank you so much! I don't know the first thing about photography, so that's all very helpful advice. I'll give that a go next time.

Not to toot my own horn, but these came out vastly better than I expected, shooting them with a Galaxy S8: https://community.fantasyflightgames.com/topic/270134-socal-regional-championship-photo-essay/?do=findComment&comment=3231031

Simply made sure I was shooting Ryan's squadrons on a nearly-white background, keeping my shadow out of the way, with fluorescent lighting from multiple directions (the tournament room was big). The metallics are a little less vibrant than they should be, but overall, you get a good idea of what they look like IRL.

If you're shooting in your office, try using a conference room table (assuming that it's white). Stay away from incandescent lights in generally. Fluorescent should be terrible, but I find that a lot of phones and cameras adapt to it very well, while incandescent stays yellow. You definitely want to select the lighting type, if your phone or camera has that option.

23 minutes ago, elbmc1969 said:

If you're shooting in your office, try using a conference room table (assuming that it's white). Stay away from incandescent lights in generally. Fluorescent should be terrible, but I find that a lot of phones and cameras adapt to it very well, while incandescent stays yellow. You definitely want to select the lighting type, if your phone or camera has that option.

I don't have a white table unfortunately, but I'll see what I can do by laying out some paper or something. Thanks for the tips about the lights, too!

The E-wings kept bothering me so they got a do-over, and I gotta say I like these ones much better.

I tried to follow some of your advice @elbmc1969 , and I think the pictures turned out a lot better, so thanks! I also replaced the old VCX and Lancer pictures (previous page) with better ones.

On 2/19/2018 at 2:58 PM, Villakarvarousku said:

Back to the Rebels! Some of the pictures seem to be particularly rubbish this time, so sorry about that. Not sure what I'm doing wrong. I need to watch some Youtube videos or something.

First up, Squadrons II. I really enjoy the design of both the Ghost and the Shadow Caster, so I just copied them and did slight variations for the other two.

I quite like how the Z's turned out, but I'm not sure how I feel about the E-wings. They just look a bit funny and cartoonish. I might redo them at some point (edit: I did! See page 3) – probably try replacing the green with a more neutral colour first and see if that does the trick, or if not, I need to figure out something completely different. Luckily they were pretty easy and fun to paint, so that's not a horrible prospect.

Those photos are much improved! Some more fill lighting to eliminate the shadows and you're set. There are still slight color casts, but their really minor. Don't know if you're shooting in natural light, but if you can manage that on a white background, you should be set. Even shooting outside at the right time of day, if possible, with white bouncing the light to get really good all-around fill.

I would have loved to see good photos of the E-Wings so that I could judge their color schemes. I rather like the general approach and they very much have a Red Army of Workers and Peasants feel. The differing color scheme are so useful for picking out (and keeping track of) individual squadrons. The new version is ... too subtle.

I'm looking forward to seeing the Liberty rephotographed!

Anyhow, nice work. The VCXs and Lancers look good. Always remember that when you play on the tabletop, you and your opponent are too far away too see the fine detailing on the fighters, and that may small details may blend together into a single, unattractive, color. Set them out 4 feet away every so often to check that they don't just look terrible!

Oh, and let's see the Zs rephotographed. I might have some constructive suggestions, but not until I can really see them.

2 hours ago, elbmc1969 said:

There are still slight color casts, but their really minor.

Can you clarify what you mean by this? Sorry, I'm not too familiar with the terminology.

2 hours ago, elbmc1969 said:

Don't know if you're shooting in natural light, but if you can manage that on a white background, you should be set. Even shooting outside at the right time of day, if possible, with white bouncing the light to get really good all-around fill.

I did take them next to a window in an attempt to have some natural light, but that's pretty limited in Finland this time of year. I also don't have many lamps that are easy to move around, but I'll see what I can do.

2 hours ago, elbmc1969 said:

I would have loved to see good photos of the E-Wings so that I could judge their color schemes. I rather like the general approach and they very much have a Red Army of Workers and Peasants feel.

That's kind of part of what was bothering me about them. I like that shade of green generally, but in this context it had too much of an army-like feel for my taste. Also, following the edges of the model so closely wasn't working for me – made it look like a Lego thing or something, especially with those colours.

2 hours ago, elbmc1969 said:

The differing color scheme are so useful for picking out (and keeping track of) individual squadrons. The new version is ... too subtle.

...

Always remember that when you play on the tabletop, you and your opponent are too far away too see the fine detailing on the fighters, and that may small details may blend together into a single, unattractive, color. Set them out 4 feet away every so often to check that they don't just look terrible!

I'm aware that I have a habit of doing that – focusing on how they look close up and under a painting lamp rather than at playing distance in normal room lighting – so I've thought about it a lot, and honestly, I prefer the more subtle approach. They've looked fine to me on the table so far, and the flipside is that if I try to make the colours or highlights really pop at playing distance, it looks bad to me from closer up. I'd much rather go too subtle than too stark.

2 hours ago, elbmc1969 said:

Oh, and let's see the Zs rephotographed. I might have some constructive suggestions, but not until I can really see them.

I did snap a quick picture of the Z's while I was at it, but decided not to post it since it seemed to me that the older picture looks closer to the real-life colours. Here it is anyway:

The Imperials are really fantastic!

A color cast just means that the whole picture is just a little too blue,nor a little too red, or what have you. You can see it in the new photos when you look at the white background: it's not really white (but so far improved over earlier photos that this seems like nit-picking).

Not enough natural light in Finland? OK, I'll let you get away with this excuse this time, but I expect a minimum of 20 photos a day in summer.

8 hours ago, Villakarvarousku said:

The E-wings kept bothering me so they got a do-over, and I gotta say I like these ones much better.

I tried to follow some of your advice @elbmc1969 , and I think the pictures turned out a lot better, so thanks! I also replaced the old VCX and Lancer pictures (previous page) with better ones.

Those are beautiful! The shading and the color choices work very well together. Excellent work.

Finally got myself a Pelta! This is easily my favourite ship model in the game, so I was a bit nervous about doing it justice, but honestly I'm rather happy with how it turned out. I just realised that I totally forgot to do the windows at the very front though, so I'll probably fix that later at some point. On the other hand I kind of like them dark, so maybe I'll just black out the tower one too. Anyway, can't wait to get it on the table in a couple of days!

I also bought a second CR90 a month or two back, pictured here on the right with the old one on the left:

yaaa! Vilkes'back with some awesome painting!

Pelta is really an awesome mini, too bad it's such a waste in the game...

16 hours ago, gounour said:

Snip

Pelta is really an awesome mini, too bad it's such a waste in the game...

https://goo.gl/images/jdcbpo

Goddam people crapping on the pelta ( )