I dropped in my first “painted” miniature today. Unlike the dwarf and the ogre miniatures, this one isn’t a copy of a Ral Partha miniature. It’s an original sculpt.
It’s really hammered home the need to open up the hood and author new shaders. I’ll be nice and say that the default Unity shaders are “unsatisfactory.” I’ve taken a look at the shader syntax and it’s a variation on cg-fx, so the authoring shouldn’t be much of a stretch. I am, however, a little rusty with shaders and Unity has stirred just enough of their own flavor into the sauce that it will take me a little while to sort it out.
You can see the archer in chain-mail and his pals, the dwarf with broken torch and the angry ogre with club. Right away you may have noticed that this is the first time you’ve seen a party of miniatures, rather than a solo piece.
Those of you paying extra close attention might also notice that we’re seeing an underlying map being shown in areas that are outside of the player’s line-of-sight.
Okay, back to it. I have an idea about polyhedral dice rolling.
Color sells, but I think it is over rated. I never painted my miniatures because they looked like shit when I was done. I think you can afford to put colored mini pretty far down on the to do list.
I prefer unpainted miniatures, as well. Some of that is aesthetic and so of it is that painting miniatures is hard. However, I can’t really do a virtual tabletop without painted miniatures. It’s important for me to squeeze in different types of work as I’m going along. Not just to break up the tedium, but you don’t want beta-level code with alpha-level art. All things improve with repetition.