@hopper1999 I’ve access to both resin and PLA printers, and while resin has a couple of extra steps compared to PLA, I wouldn’t consider it painful. I’ve come to appreciate resin’s ability to show detail even in very small scale. For me its worth the extra steps to clean and cure, for those results. What’s great is there are so many free units available, with some simple editing/converting you can quickly build cool armies.
As for casting, while I haven’t casted any A&A parts yet (still building my unit library), I have casted a lot of 3.75 action figure parts. I’ve gotten best results using a syringe and pressure pot. (I converted a old paint pressure tank). You inject your mold, and then put it under pressure, I’d do around 30psi, to help the resin into the thinner parts of the mold and prevent bubbles. It also helps, when making your mold to put it under pressure as well. I’ve found it helps prevents bubbles in the silicone and between the silicone and the part being cast.
I plan on using casting to duplicate units I already have, that I can’t find stl files for.
How do you make your own custom control Markers?
-
Hey guys! Finally decided to make an account after peeking around all the strategy discussions and avid AnA player posts. After playing AnA almost nonstop for months, I thought it would be cool to make new countries in custom games. I could just spraypaint extra units that I have (I intend on spraypainting a good amount of my Japanese pieces blue so I can make a Korean army. I was also intending on getting a light green spraypaint to convert some American units to Chinese). But for the final touch, I need to know how to make those awesome control markers. I know I could print them out on normal paper, but it doesnt have the same feel as the original cardboard markers. So, I just wanted to know if anyone here knew how to make their own control markers.
-
I think Imperious Leader has a template somewhere on the board which you can use to print markers onto round sticky Avery labels.
I don’t have a colour printer at home, so I used the following alternate method to produce the custom markers I wanted for my game:
-
I started by collecting (from the web) and/or making the various roundel designs I needed. In some cases this involved fairly simple editing using the Paint program that comes with Windows. (I’m not much of an artist, so a more sophisticated drawing program would be wasted on me.)
-
Once I was happy with each design, I used PrintKey to grab a colour image of it and paste it into a Word document. After doing this with each roundel design, I slightly adjusted each image size in Word as needed to make the roundels (in the final printed form) about 3/4" in diameter.
-
I copied and pasted the properly-sized roundels into a fresh Word document, cramming as many as I could into a page as space would allow (leaving a bit of white space around each one for cutting purposes). Major nations would have multiple copies of their roundel on the page, while smaller nations would have fewer.
-
I saved the Word document to disc, took it to a local photocopy / printing shop and had them print the document (in as many copies as I needed) in colour on full-size sticky-label paper (8 1/2 x 11 in size).
-
I cut the individual roundels from the printed sheets (using old-fashioned scissors and lots of patience), removed the sticky label backing, then attached the roundels to 7/8" diameter bingo chips (which can be purchased in large bulk qualities for very reasonable prices, in the range of a thousand chips for 25 bucks). Some of the chips required a tiny bit of sanding with an emery board to remove a rough edge at one point on their circumference before the roundel was attached. You can buy chips in a variety of colours (I used plain white for all of mine), and they come in either transparent or opaque versions (I opted for the opaque kind).
-
-
I have them formatted to avery .75 round labels. see house rules ( pieces and where to get them)