Stream Upgrades, Sexy TMM, and More! BTS #78 (Patreon)

What up, mini family?! This past week involved lots of upfront work on the stream. I remember this last time I streamed a lot: there was a decent amount of upfront work, and then a little bit of maintenance here and there once it's all set up. The first stream upgrade I wanted to create was this lower third banner. Streamlabs, a 3rd party tool for alerts (and a whole bunch of other things) has this utility to advertise various sponsors with banners/logos that run on a interval that you set. So, I created a banner for my own stuff that tells the viewers how to find my merch. You can't see it at the end because it's white, but the command is "!goodies" to get a link to the merch in chat. This will run once every 30 minutes. I'd like to make another one to advertise the Duchess and the digital course for it as well now that I've figured out the process of making a transparent gif. Admittedly, there are much easier ways to advertise your stuff, but I like going over the top :D

I also made a pre-stream screen which featured an endlessly looping swirling water cup which was a lot of fun to make, and a post-stream screen. You can check out those bits on the VOD or during my next stream! I also upgraded my work area with some more cable management which is quickly becoming a second hobby of mine.

I have power in my ceiling, but what I don't have is HDMI/XLR. What that means is if I want to run an HDMI cable from a camera to a monitor, or an XLR cable to my audio recorder, the cables often dangled down from my overhead rig. It felt a little bad so I finally routed them along the wall and ceiling. While doing this, I learned a very hard lesson: not all HDMI cables are bi-directional. 

The particular HDMI cables I had were from a previous job I did where I was live streaming an event. I suppose I just got lucky when I did that event because I routed all of these cables nice and cleanly only to figure out that one of my cameras wasn't working because I had the wrong end. That was super rough! Got it all fixed in the end though! You might've noticed that I've started to put up some of the art that used to be on my old set. 

That is courtesy of my lovely wife Amber. This wall is typically the backdrop for the podcast, so might as well make it look a little more interesting! Still in the world of streams, I upgraded my streaming PC with 2 additional capture cards, the Black Magic Decklink Mini Recorder. 

Now what I can do is use all fancy cameras for my main painting camera, my palette camera, and also my face cam. No more garbage webcams for me! I made a lot of other quality of life improvements like running ethernet around the trim of my basement instead of on the floor, moving my airbrush/hair drier to the right side of my desk because I'm right handed and didn't think of it in the first place, and creating little shelves for various gear inside my desk like my audio recorder/vortex mixer so the top of my desk can stay nice and clean. This is the kind of stuff that builds up and is super annoying to do but feels SO GOOD once it's done. I feel like my desk is a COMMAND STATION, it's awesome. 

In other news, I started work on 2 different videos.

This is a buttload of terrain. I'm making a video about converting your normal friends into miniature war gamers which is something I feel like we're all familiar with. We have this cool, niche hobby, we have friends that we made in other walks of life, and we want to introduce them to the hobby and get them hooked. What's the best way to go about that? Well, I started with inviting them all over for snacks and a brief explanation of what WH40K Kill Team is, the universe of 40k, the factions, etc. and then we had a bunch of fun making terrain and adding on fun extra details. This terrain will be used for our games (there is 6 of us). Next meeting will involve us building and priming our squads which will lead into some hobby nights painting them, and then finally playing the game. Hopefully by the end of this, I will have 5 new miniature war gaming buds, but we'll see how it goes! It's quite an epic video that involves a lot of stuff that could be separated into other videos (painting a shitload of terrain, making my own personal KT), but I like the idea of one epic video. Let me know what you think! 

This next video is about taking a paint scheme for your army and spicing it up for your characters. This is going to be my undercoat and will eventually be covered in translucent red. I started with a volumetric undercoat, or what one might refer to as "NMM style, but with TMM paints".  I gotta pump up the jams some more, and give it a scratchy look still, but we're on our way. 

That's all for now. PAINT MORE MINIS! 

Scott