Accurate Miniature Equivalents for Custom Painting your 1940 E&P

Sorry only just saw this

So step one would be finding the right image editing program for what you’re trying to achieve. TripleA uses raster graphics images (basically png) and is not suitable for printing. Upscaling the largest relief I’ve made in tripleA and trying to print it at 600 dpi the filesize gets quite beefy. Basically an image that’s like 50mb for use in tripleA is going to climb way up by orders of magnitude into the many gigabytes. It will also tax the RAM pretty hard if you’re trying to edit an image that large (in actual dimensions) like trying to use multiple layers at once. I have a pretty high end gaming laptop and I topped out around 8000p before GIMP started giving me headaches and slowing to a crawl.

What you probably want is an image that you can manipulate as SVG rather than PNG. A vector so you can upscale the image to any dimensions that way (basically the same way font works.) I would try Inkscape or Adobe, and try to get a pull of the image as a vector graphic.

You can start the same as you would in tripleA by creating a baseline image of the basic world map, the continent contours or world warp you want and the territory or sea zone divisions, showing just the basic borderlines in 100% black at 1px width at the desired dimensions for the digital thing.

A physical print would be much larger, so imagine that on your screen you got 72p per inch, on paper that needs to be 600 dpi. You can go lower say 300 dots per inch if it’s very graphic, but a photo quality print is basically like 600p, which is pretty hefty. In a program like inkscape or illustrator etc you can translate a raster image into something that works for stuff like signage, you know, so like making a giant banner image to put on the side of a truck or hang outside a building - same sorta deal here for the scale of the image you’d want to make. Probably the size of a 6 or 8 foot banquet table, possibly larger depending, on what you’re trying to pull off.

If you have the map drawn out at scale, you can scan in sections at A3 or A4 size with a flat scanner and then reassemble the image, to pull it at the highest resolution you can before bringing that image into inkscape to create a vector of it.

ps. here are some youtube tutorial videos on inkscape just to see what sort of stuff I mean. You can probably find more just pulling at those threads. Once you have a map design you can put in tripleA to playtest it by creating a baseline from your svg, exporting the image as a bitmap or png where the borderlines are just solid black ideally at 1px width for those lines, or as close as you can get. For a map image something that’s like 2000-4000p tall and about twice as wide or larger works well for digital sculpts which are png images at 48-54px tall up to 125% currently in tripleA. The map size in tripleA is sorta limited by the unit graphics sizes and the windows in the UI. In inkscape you can make it larger, like for whatever makes sense to have the print look decent. Anyhow, just a quick example you can skip around to see

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Ns028ihACs&list=PL_NagE_y_IhIBNAzw3nFBiF01OKnaltmJ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnqtnSTe6qM

https://youtu.be/kS2nrXuR128?t=2611

for tripleA you can use GIMP to make the relief images in png. Here’s an example of similar videos in that program

https://youtu.be/HLmOpEETjEo?t=646

Hey All,

I’ve got some custom resin 4-figure and single figure .stl files available on wargame3d here:

https://www.wargaming3d.com/?product_cat=&s=ritterkrieg&post_type=product&apbct_visible_fields={"0"%3A{"visible_fields"%3A"product_cat+s"%2C"visible_fields_count"%3A2%2C"invisible_fields"%3A"post_type"%2C"invisible_fields_count"%3A1}}

Just search Ritterkrieg or click on the link above.

@Noble:

I love that you touch your pinky to your other hand. I do the same when painting and it’s the best way to stay steady. Keep up the great work!

LOL, that’s funny you noticed! Thanks for the comment!

@Dafyd:

or the little “IG JOES”

:lol: :lol: :lol:

@Duff:

I tried to post photos for you but this forum won’t let me post links for some reason.

Because of the forum’s anti-spam software, you need to have a certain minimum of posts (I think it’s 10 but I’m not sure) before the forum gives you the option to post attachments.

@Young:

Thanks CWO Marc, really appreciate your comments… do you play often? I understand there is a lot of players in Montreal, do you have a game group?

For many years I’ve had too much going on in my life, professionally and otherwise, to have had time to do much of anything other than collecting the A&A games.  And, to be honest, I have too many issues with many of the features of the various A&A games that I’ll probably never play anything other than what I’m hoping to create at some distant point in the future when I do have the time for it, which is a completely personalized version of the Global game that, for all intents and purposes, keeps the sculpts and the map board but throws out the entire rulebook and reconceptualizes the game from scratch.  And it’s not even fully correct to say “keeps the sculpts and the map board” either.  I’ll be expanding the number of nations and the number of unit types by making use of the very large pool of A&A sculpts I’ve acquired over the years, for instance the ones from the early-edition games and the ones from 1941 and 1914.  And as I’ve noted in the thread where I’ve posted pictures of my custom table, one of the first things I did to the Global 1940 map was to rework its “under-the-plexiglass” roundel allocations to better reflect the structure of the world as it existed prior to the invasion of Manchuria in 1931, as a starting point from which I can then modify the map (by placing roundels on top of the plexiglass) to represent any subsequent starting date from 1931 onward.  A related project that I worked on to create the infrastructure for this eventual new game was the Global 1940 map inventory, a copy of which I posted over here last September:

http://www.axisandallies.org/forums/index.php?topic=36590.0

But at this point I don’t have an actual plan for what this reconceptualization will look like.  Nor am I likely to do so until I have the time to work on this project solidly for months at a time…so this may have to wait until retirement (which isn’t for tomorrow by a long shot) before this idea translates into anything concrete.

If you go to a local printer, make sure they do everything in house… if they outsource it and problems arise, it will be a headache getting your money back from that middle man because they can’t absorb the cost the way they would if it was their own print.

@Albert:

@Spitfire38:

I have looked at I-94’s decals and thought about it… the only ones I have trouble with are the Russian stars. I enjoy hand painting the insignia and I feel like it makes it look more uniform when it’s all paint, but like you said, it would definitely save some time  :lol:

Well you could save some effort there as Moscow ordered upper wing stars to be painted out on the eve of the German invasion……plain green was also changed to green with a black disruptive camo pattern   http://mig3.sovietwarplanes.com/index.html

I didn’t know that they painted over the top-wing stars. Thanks for sharing! If I were to paint them again, I’d probably leave them on or use decals, just for easy recognition on the game board, but I like knowing what was historically accurate.