Saturday, 21 July 2012

Magnets and stuff!


So heres some of the things i've been working on recently when i've not been programming, working on pygmy hogs rescue stuff and not helping establish a fledgling games studio, if you've not seen it yet then please check out www.pricklyproductions.co.uk, follow us on twitter, like us on facebook etc etc!

So my magnets arrived and i've been working out the best way to use them, mainly for the support platform / war walker weapons as they use the same spuce so having a bigger pool of interchangable weapons made a lot of sense! I have 2 different sizes of magnets 2mm x 1mm and 3mm x 1mm. The slightly bigger ones I will be using on the weapon mounts, arm sockets, general joints etc and the smaller ones will fit on the actual arms and the underside of the weapons.

I had originally tried out the idea of having a small cut to shape piece of paperclip on the mount and only using the magnets on the weapons themselves,

This did work to some extent but the strength of the magnet - clip is no where near as strong as I would have liked.

Here's my support weapon platform that is part of the first 10 man squad i'm painting, its not finished but it'll help to illustrate what I mean. you can see the mount at the back has the bit of paperclip in and here's the practice weapon I have magnetised.

The hold on this is very weak, to put it into perspective here is the same weapon mounted on a war walker, the hold here is magnet to magnet and I can actually hold the model by the weapon and lift it off the ground, which I cant do with the weapon platform which is considerably lighter.

Heres the magnet placing on the model itself, you could add greenstuff etc to it in order to blend it in if your particularly focused on the details but to be honest its not noticable when you have the weapons on it anyway.

I think these images give you an idea of what to do with these magnets however I will put a guide up on what i've done, how to do it if theres enough interest. It's very very simple, straightforward and very very cheap. I think I paid maybe £5 total for 300 magnets which includes shipping.