Making paper minis

[SiuiS]

Just what it says on the tin.

I'm going to draw out my group's characters, scale them down, draw in the back, print 'em, glue the two haves together, and stick slats under the bottom edge to hold 'em up. But...

Well, I need help with sizing. I wanted the edges of the base to coincide with a hexagon (crystal caste I believe, no idea why the DM prefers hexes) but can't find the info I need. They are 1" hexes- one inch corner to corner to corner, or one inch flat to flat?

I also know 1" = ~25mm. Most figurines on the market are 30mm right, to approximate 6 feet? I'm not going to do out the exact height of the character because there isn't enough granularity (or my tools don't measure down that far) but a decent approximation would do wonders. We will be sticking with these guys for a while yet.

Finally... How do I controll printing? Rather, what size in dpi or pixels or what-not will produce one inch, when printed? I can do basic math from there, but I haven't seen a printer allow specific inch measurements in a really long time; worse, all equipment to do this will be borrowed, since all my computer stuff has died (typing from phone).

If the printing and scaling works, I'll put them on scrap foam for bases and thickness and such, but without these numbers (or approximations) I'm dead inthe water. Any help is appreciated, fellow play-grounders.

Until later, Smooth Sailing my friends.

[Savannah]

They are 1" hexes- one inch corner to corner to corner, or one inch flat to flat?

I'm afraid I don't know, as I don't use hexes. However, I've found that making the base slightly smaller than the grid is helpful as it makes it easier to see if the character's on any sort of unusual terrain, so that's something you might want to consider.


I also know 1" = ~25mm. Most figurines on the market are 30mm right, to approximate 6 feet?

I believe that's the case, but when I make paper minis, I just use 1/5 in = 1 ft :smallwink:


Finally... How do I controll printing? Rather, what size in dpi or pixels or what-not will produce one inch, when printed?

What you care about is pixels per inch (which I believe is the same as dpi, but I'm not sure). So if you make something at 200 pixels per inch, then 200 pixels = 1 inch when printed. If you make it at 72 pixels per inch, 72 pixels = 1 inch when printed. I haven't made paper minis in a while, but I believe I was working with 250 pixels per inch, so that 50 pixels = 1/5 inch when printed = 5 feet on the mini, because that printed nicely and made measuring easy.

[SiuiS]

So printers do have pixels/inch, ok. I haven't touched any art stuff (other than pens or pencils) in about 5 years. I knew you could resize the canvas but the printing? Good to know. 250 pixels to an inch sounds perfect- now I just need to look into scaling, so I can draw big and print small, mitigate art mistakes.

Also, found this to be relevant;


Allow me to add my voice to those recommending "do it yourself". My DM made some templates in Photoshop for medium, large, and huge creatures (just a black border of the appropriate size). Then he grabs the artwork from either online or PDF sources, resizes it, and lays down several dozen miniatures onto a page. Cardstock is pretty cheap.

He said he spent about 2 hours on the project and ended up with pretty much every creature in the 3.5 MM templated up.


Not going to jack a bunch of images from other sources, but sounds like a good idea. We shall see how this goes.

[cattoy]

72 dpi is screen resolution. It looks fine on a computer monitor.

it looks like @ss when printed. You want 300 dpi for print use.

[shawnhcorey]

They are 1" hexes- one inch corner to corner to corner, or one inch flat to flat?

One inch from one flat side to its opposite. A one-inch circle will fit into a one-inch hex.

As for your other questions, you have to know the scale.

6 ft = 25 mm is approximately 1/72 scale.
6 ft = 30 mm is approximately 1/85 scale.

For comparison, HO Scale, used in model railroading, is approximately 1/87 scale. (You can use their buildings with your miniatures.)

Once you know the scale, you can calculate your miniatures measurements. For example, a 4 ft. high dwarf would be:

4 ft * 12 in * 1/72 = 0.666666... inches on the paper.

I prefer to use Inkscape (http://inkscape.org/) for my drawings since it uses Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG). With it, the drawings can be re-scaled to any resolution. Draw your miniatures to scale on a standard paper size (Letter or A4) and when you're ready to print, File->Save As... a PDF. Inkscape will save it as PDF vectors, so you don't have to worrying about the dpi. When you print the PDF, the printing software will convert the PDF vectors to pixels and print it.

Also, save your SVG files. You may not be able to change the PDFs. Just use them for printing.

[cattoy]

One inch from one flat side to its opposite. A one-inch circle will fit into a one-inch hex.

As for your other questions, you have to know the scale.

6 ft = 25 mm is approximately 1/72 scale.
6 ft = 30 mm is approximately 1/85 scale.

For comparison, HO Scale, used in model railroading, is approximately 1/87 scale. (You can use their buildings with your miniatures.)

Once you know the scale, you can calculate your miniatures measurements. For example, a 4 ft. high dwarf would be:

4 ft * 12 in * 1/72 = 0.666666... inches on the paper.

I prefer to use Inkscape (http://inkscape.org/) for my drawings since it uses Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG). With it, the drawings can be re-scaled to any resolution. Draw your miniatures to scale on a standard paper size (Letter or A4) and when you're ready to print, File->Save As... a PDF. Inkscape will save it as PDF vectors, so you don't have to worrying about the dpi. When you print the PDF, the printing software will convert the PDF vectors to pixels and print it.

Also, save your SVG files. You may not be able to change the PDFs. Just use them for printing.

Check your math

6 ft = 30 mm is ~1/61 scale.

The larger the figure, the smaller the divisor, not the other way around.

[shawnhcorey]

Check your math

6 ft = 30 mm is ~1/61 scale.

The larger the figure, the smaller the divisor, not the other way around.

Oops. You are correct. Thank you.