Cult Character Designer 3 (internal codename: Hero Forge)

[ysignal]

Okay, I'll get started on that.

Something I just read is that Substance Painter files can be anywhere from a few hundred megabytes to gigabytes in size depending on how they're put together. He might find that a pain to upload, plus it won't be suitable for sharing. So maybe it's better just to accept the type of asset bundle he's already sent us. It should be just as good as our own Hero Forge exports anyway.

[ChevRage]

I have the models just about ready to go, however I need to know what we are going to do with the bases. As you can see some characters have bases, and some don't.

[icycalm]

Damn good-looking.

Can't we have both versions in the archive? One with a base, and one without, for every mini.

[icycalm]

Remind me for a second the procedure of removing the bases?

If Hero Forge gives you the files with the bases, then we keep the bases. And people can later remove them if they want, once they have our archive.

Our principle is: give the purest files exported from Hero Forge and other such programs/services. Do no modifications to them. The archive needs to be as pure as possible. Modifications come after.

[icycalm]

Or does Hero Forge have an option to remove the bases?

If so, that would be the cleanest way to remove the bases, so we go with that.

[ChevRage]

Hero Forge gives you what you design, and you can remove the base in your design. They are on by default, and you can remove them through the program.

The bases can be removed in Blender after exporting too, but I don't know the process for it. The guys in the Discord said it was easy though.

At any rate, yeah it does sound like the cleanest way to remove the bases is through Hero Forge.

[ChevRage]

Here are all the minis with the bases removed:



RIP Giovanni's base, it had a cool skull resting on it.

I'm ready to export them now, just waiting on the final go-ahead.

[icycalm]

How about Archonus give you his Hero Forge password so you can log in and do the same thing with his three minis, plus Robo's? I prefer you to do it, for consistency.

Then zip everything up, and DM me the link on Discord.

We're finally getting somewhere. I can't wait to get this archive to massive size.

[icycalm]

Include any test minis that Hero Forge gives for free.

[ChevRage]

I've just imported their models, and it looks like Archonus and Robomoo have already removed the bases on their minis. Same thing I did too, so it's consistent with the others.



I'll export my allotted 5 characters now, and let Archonus do the same with his and Robo's.

[icycalm]

Okay, I just want confirmation from Robo and Archonus that they removed their bases from within Hero Forge.

[ysignal]

I already got Archonus to send me his models for testing, so I sent them to Chev. I opened them up in Asset Studio and confirmed that the bases have been removed.

[icycalm]

So we only need Robo's now, and it must be bought through Archonus's account.

Make sure that the files Chev sends me are the originals straight from Hero Forge. Just in case Asset Studio does anything to files opened in it.

Yes, I am OCD about this sort of thing.

[ysignal]

I redownloaded the files Archonus sent me and compared them with the ones I sent to Chev and the contents are exactly the same.

[Archonus]

I downloaded Robo's mini of Ivan and sent the file to Chev.

[ChevRage]

I've sent icy the pack.

Also I've included some of these free minis that seem to be available every month:



There aren't any packs of the previous months available, so maybe we can find them elsewhere if people have uploaded them. Might be worth checking back every so often in the future and downloading the free stuff.

[icycalm]

Great find.

I am sending our current mini archive to the guy. The next step is to ask him for his files in the original format. Then we bundle those in our zip, and then ysignal tries to import them all in TaleSpire for a cool group shot, which I can then use to entice more people to exchange with us, and it just escalates from there.

Oh, and before ysignal takes the cool shot, we have to generate also our remaining players' minis to include them. And I think we should try Eldritch Foundry for them just so we can get different face types and generally different types of minis, so our whole group doesn't look inbred. Plus they're apparently cheaper, which doesn't hurt.

[ysignal]

Eldritch Foundry doesn't have any functionality for painting the minis, so we'd have to paint them ourselves in Substance Painter, which is a lot more work than painting the Hero Forge minis the way we've done it so far.

[icycalm]

So that’s why the dude was painting them. It seemed like needless effort when I saw him say it on Twitter.

And if you scroll to the top of the thread you’ll see that Hero Forge 2.0 was launched at some point touting color minis. So all these services started out mimicking tabletop minis that are usually sold unpainted and then some genius at Hero Forge realized that most players just wanna play a fuckin’ game and not start an arts and crafts side-job, so they upgraded their stupid program.

I’ve always despised the arts and craft aspect of these games.

[icycalm]

Official TaleSpire integration coming soon, maybe within days: https://bouncyrock.com/news/articles/ta ... ev-log-310

I wonder if it can be hacked to semi-officially integrate Eldritch Foundry too, and other 3D models.

Now would be a good time to try to get that 2 GB 5E monster archive, and also get all the characters and especially monsters from Owlcat’s videogames. I will be able to make our West Marches campaign so much richer if I have all this. We won’t be using any paper minis for it, it will have cutting-edge everything: terrain, buildings and minis. I want it to be the supreme showcase of what TaleSpire can do, starting off small and gradually building up to thousands of units fighting multiple-front wars with full wargaming mechanics across vast and diverse areas. This means we’ll have to solve the problem that no one has tackled before: how to switch smoothly from D&D/PF mechanics to wargaming ones and back again. I think I have a very elegant solution.

All this is a metric ton of work though on top of my four regular campaigns so I could use some help to lighten the workload. If someone could take care of acquiring the 2 GB 5E archive and extracting the Owlcat models from the Kingmaker and Wrath of the Righteous videogames, I would appreciate it.

I don’t need all this stuff imported into TaleSpire, I just need to have it secure in one of our hard drives so that when I ask for a model, we have it right away without having to search for it online.

[ysignal]

I've already downloaded 300 GB of models from this guy that Chev mentioned earlier:

https://www.patreon.com/mz4250/posts

He's adding new models every few days. The 2 GB Lord Ashes put together appears to be a subset of what I've downloaded, but I've saved that anyway just in case. The reason the 300 GB collection is so much bigger is that the models are more detailed and have multiple versions. Note that these are all untextured.

[icycalm]

Amazing. Thank you.

Let me know if there’s anything you can do about Owlcat’s models. Hanged Man had started on that at some point.

[icycalm]

Btw Some guy posted a link where that guy was SELLING models for like 5-10 bucks a pop. Are the ones he sells different from the ones you downloaded?

[ysignal]

I'll try unpacking the Kingmaker assets using Asset Studio. Here's the link Some guy posted on Patreon: https://www.shapeways.com/designer/mz4250/creations

I tried looking for a few of these in the collections I've downloaded and didn't find them.

[ysignal]

I've imported a model from Kingmaker into TaleSpire:



Unfortunately, they only seem to come with the base color map and even that has a pretty low resolution. They also need to be posed before use, but I haven't tried that yet. If we want an archive then the best thing to do is probably to just save all of the asset bundles as installed with the game. We can then extract them as we need them.