Community Update/Check-In (Patreon)

Hey Everyone!   

It's been a bit and I've kind of just had my head down in the art mines working on a few things and I wanted to take some time to put together a little update post letting everyone know what I've been working on, why I seem so obsessed with humans with spears, and just generally give a little look behind the scenes.  

Modular Minis

A few months ago I started seriously looking back into developing a modular system for some miniatures.  

What do I mean by, "modular"? Essentially it's designing the art in such a way that elements can be, "swapped out", simple example would be keeping the main pose for a warrior and swapping out their sword for an axe, but you can get much more complex and have multiple different arm poses or leg stances, or head + hair combinations. I've always done a bit of this with my minis here and there, but nothing super complex or implemented in any structured/systematic way. Those of you who have been following my work for awhile might recall my previous modular experimentation with the Dragonborn (what was it, like 5 years ago? crazy).

Anyhow, here's a breakdown example of one of the new Human Militia to demonstrate the multiple "modular" elements that make up a miniature's front view, followed up with a line up of possible further variations based on a modular system.

The benefits of a system like that is it enables a single artist like me to cover far more ground; suddenly instead of designing a new Soldier mini for every single race+gender+weapon combo I can start to swap torsos, or heads, or weapons etc, and recycle existing poses/elements.

This approach works easier for somethings than it does for others, for example swapping in an elf head (pointy ears) is easier then swapping in a tiefling (new horned head + new legs element with tail hole + tail, front and back) which is in turn is easier than swapping in a tabaxi (entirely new leg structure + tail + head, front and back) or for example a Minotaur is so bulky as to require an entirely different set of modular pieces/pose compared to a standard human.

But ideally this gets more of the specific miniatures you're looking for into your hands faster. More representation, more options for your players and DMs to choose from, etc etc
  
Things to Consider

Sounds great right? It is! In theory anyways. There's are few issues on my radar though that need to be solved for:
- Primarily there's a quality risk. Anytime you're designing modularly there's a risk of things looking, "patched-together"; you get too focused on the individual pieces and start to loose sight on how well they all fit/work together. There's a risk of poses getting less dynamic/interesting if the art bends too much to serve the modularity. I see this as more of a challenge then a concern, but it's something to be mindful of.
- Another issue with modular approach and that's the sheer amount of art you need to create before you really start to benefit form the process. Designing a bunch of pieces (front & back) that all need to fit together and swap out just takes much more time then designing one singular mini.  I'm no stranger to steadily creating a massive library of art, so as long as you all continue to enjoy/find my work useful I'll just keep chipping away at it ;)
- And finally for me a massive issue is the backend strain it puts on processing all of the art. Instead of just two pieces of art (the front and back) for a mini you now have tens if not hundreds of pieces of art all with fronts and backs that all have to be aligned, sorted, and recolored (oh god the recolors). This is what killed the dragonborn modular experimentation for me; recoloring all of the fronts/backs of all the little pieces manually was just too many mouse-clicks and absolutely destroyed my hand/wrist for weeks.   

So, what's changed, why am I looking back into modular stuff?   Biggest reason is I just want to make more stuff/cover more ground. I spent years managing other artists (at the cost of not doing my own art) so it's still very much a priority/focus for me to be creating art myself (as opposed to outsourcing art to other artists) and there's only so much one person can do without getting creative.   

The big unresolved issue for me had been the backend strain of processing all of the art, the whole reason I gave up on modular stuff 5 years ago (RIP dragonborn). To help resolve this glaring concern I hired a badass programmer (shoutout to Galaad Moutoz!) to build an editor of sorts to help me manage the organization, swapping, recoloring, and exporting of art elements.

Now, this is all fairly new and I'm very much still learning how to best incorporate the editor into my workflow and there's still lots of little backend formatting issues I still need to resolve, but you've already gotten to see some of the results of this new process.  The Shield Guardian, Wood Woad, latest round of Human Militia, and the Human Scouts were all designed to leverage (in some compacity) this new editor tool.

Speaking of the Human Militia, why so many g-d humans with spears? Part of it goes back to building up that library of art assets that I mentioned before. Starting with a generic humanoid pose is a good base for testing out a new system and specifically with militia/soldiers it has the added benefit of allowing me to stress test a large assortment of color variations (uniforms) in conjunction with multiple different ethnicities; essentially it simplifies on one end (relatively straight forward design) and that allows me to focus on the complexities  of having multiple male & female heads for multiple ethnicities and multiple uniforms which all have to be created and formatted for release somehow. As I continue to get art imported/setup in the editor you'll start to see more variants and other weapon combinations released.

With the new Human Scouts you get to see me playing with a bit more interesting pose and starting to play around with covering more ground; the cloak and bow variants present opportunities to cover the ranger archetype. You can also see how I'm trying out new ways of bundling/parsing them on the catalog (compared to the Human Militia). Anyhow, like everything it's a learning process and I'm sure I'll continue to experiment and hopefully fine tune as I go.

Wait, Does This Mean You'll Only Be Doing Boring Humanoids?
Not at all! I'm only just getting started, and these are just my first baby steps into this process and I wanted to start out with something fairly simple (trust me, I'm bored by generic spear gents/ladies too). While it doesn't always make sense to do modular setups for unique miniatures the sky is the effin' limit with this stuff and I cannot wait until I'm more comfortable with the tools and can really start to sink my teeth into stuff.

Wait, Does This Mean You're Only Doing Modular Stuff?
Not at all! As I mentioned early it just doesn't make sense to force some stuff into a modular system and frankly there are going to be (lots of) times when I just want to draw something cool, draw the backview for it and release it without doin' all mental gymnastics of dissecting it for a modular system.

Closing Thoughts
So yeah, that's pretty much what I've been buried in the last couple months and now that the editor is fully operational I'll be continuing to learn/adapt it into my workflow and if everything goes well we'll start seeing more variations of things getting released in between the new miniatures.

Some of you might have noticed I've been getting into Frostgrave a bit (looking forward to getting my first game around a physical table here soon), so you'll likely see more miniatures that have cross-use between D&D and Frostgrave along side more D&D monsters.

If you have any questions/thoughts please let me know in the comments and/or flag me down in the Discord server. If you're not on the Discord server I highly recommend it as the community is quite active and I'm almost always available on there during work hours. Oh, also, check out the Trello Board if you wanna see what stuff is in the works (i need to update a few things, but still the best overview of what I'm working on at any give point in time).

Anyhow, cheers everyone, thanks for bearing with me on this excessively long post XD
-Marshall