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The Next Five Months

Thanks to a combination of advice that I have received from some old friends, as well as new ideas that I came up with on my own, I can now accurately predict what will become of my miniature shop in the foreseeable future.  For starters, nothing at all will change for the next five months, because I’m busy with a programming boot camp which started three days ago.  I should have posted this before the course started, but it completely slipped my mind.  I’m taking a short break right now to share a quick update.

The introductory lessons are easy, so far, but I expect, much like my ventures into the hardware side of electronics, that this will become extremely complicated extremely quickly.  What that means is that I won’t have any time to put toward reorganising the miniature shop, and of course, a certain autumn chore kept me away since the first of October.

Anyway, once that course is over, I will resume work on the catalogue, and the first step will be to change everything around, since I finally wrote up my first set of rules for a tabletop game, and it has nothing to do with WWII!  Tentatively, the project is called “Necromancer Wars,” and will be played on a hex tile board.  I have ten pages of rules (including unit stats), and over twenty different mini figures that I designed using Hero Forge.  I’ve already started working on a virtual version of the tabletop game, and as it so happens, I may have the opportunity to program a computer to play the game, which means I’ll be able to test it before printing a single miniature, but I’ll cross that bridge when I get there.  Until then, I will print and paint some Hero Forge minis and see how they come out:

Of course, I won’t stop making tanks, but if recent events have taught me anything, it’s that customers would much rather continue to order them through Shapeways (I keep getting orders for IS-2 variants, and I had to double-check that the product pages here were linked to the corresponding product pages on Shapeways – they were).  Therefore, I will focus on adding my own designs, and put expanding the historical catalogue on the proverbial back burner once I am able to start rendering vehicles and ships again.  How, precisely, I will organise the catalogue to include historical ships and maybe even aeroplanes as well as fictional tanks, ships, aeroplanes, and figurines, I don’t know yet.  I will also add video content to this site, since I am no longer able to upload high-resolution videos longer than about ten minutes to BitChute.  Here is one such example, which my fellow Hivers have seen before in medium resolution (hopefully VideoPress doesn’t pixelate it too much):

 

 

 

That’s about all for now. By the way, I will not be selling sailing ships any time soon, since they take way too long to process (though, as I get quicker at it, that may change).  Files for some of them are available on Wargaming3D (visit “about” v “resources”), just not for the two ships depicted in the video – yet.

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Old Miniatures for Sale / Старые Миниатюры на Продажу

Before I begin, I would like to acknowledge the pointlessness of publishing this post in Russian as well as English.  Thanks to my government being stupid (as usual), I am prevented from doing business with my own countrymen, not that I expect many orders from either Russia or Ukraine, given that 600 roubles is a bit stiff for a piece of plastic that’s barely larger than only one:

Прежде чем я начну, я хотел бы признать бессмысленность публикации этого поста как на русском, так и на английском языках.  Из-за того, что моё государство глупо (как обычно), мне не дают вести дела с моими земляками, не то чтобы я ожидал много заказов ни из России, ни из Украины, учитывая, что 600 рублей – это немного жестокого для куска пластика, который едва больше одного:

1:285 scale KV-2 on top of 1-Rouble coin

 

Anyway, in the interest of both expanding my brand and clearing out my old inventory, I will offer old miniatures printed at Shapeways on my Etsy shop.  As I mentioned a very long time ago, sometimes I had to validate models using the “print it anyway” option, available only to designers.  This has left me with a fairly large collection of tanks and sailing ships that I have no use for, so if you are interested, keep an eye out for them, as they aren’t all listed yet, but will be in a day or two.  Since these models were all printed under the old pricing system, they will be much less expensive than if you order the same models from Shapeways now.  Here is almost everything laid out on a table:

В любом случае, в интересах как расширения моего бренда, так и очистки моего старого инвентаря, я буду предлагать старые миниатюры, напечатанные в Шейпвейз в моем магазине Эци.  Как я уже упоминал очень давно, иногда мне приходилось проверять модели, используя опцию “печатать это в любом случае”, доступную только дизайнерам.  Это оставило меня с довольно большой сборник танков и парусников, которые мне не нужны, так что, если вам интересно, следите за ними, так как они ещё не все перечислены, но будут через день или два.  Поскольку все эти модели были напечатаны по старой системе ценообразования, они будут намного дешевле, чем если бы вы заказали те же модели у Шейпвейз сейчас.  Здесь почти все разложено на столе:

Here are some of the items I will offer for sale, or more precisely, models that I’m trying to get rid of:

Вот некоторые из предметов, которые я предложу на продажу, или, точнее, модели, от которых я пытаюсь избавиться:

Flying Dutchman in Green Laser-Sintered Nylon
Flying Dutchman in White Laser-Sintered Nylon
1:285 Object 279 (2 Available) in Translucent Fine-Detail Plastic
1:285 Valentine Bridgelayer (3 Available) in Translucent Fine-Detail Plastic
1:285 Object 220 (5 Available) in Translucent Fine-Detail Plastic
1:285 M6 Heavy Tank Variant T1E1 (7 Available) in Translucent Fine-Detail Plastic
1:285 M6A2 (7 Available) in Translucent Fine-Detail Plastic
1:285 Old WoT KV-4 based on Project Strukov (5 Available) in Translucent Fine-Detail Plastic
1:285 KV-3 (5 Available) in Translucent Fine-Detail Plastic
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The First Re-Organisation

This is the first major update to the website since it went public over two years ago.  The blog is no longer a collection of featured images with each main model that I offer, and will no longer be the focus of this website.  The new focus of this website will be the shop, and in the near future, its appearance will change as well, since I plan to change how products are sold.  Currently, I am playing around with a test page for this very purpose:

If you visit the shop, you may see a preview right next to the KV-2-152 model (the most common variant).  This page is password-protected, since it is a test of a new ecommerce setup.  I hope to consolidate as many products as possible, reducing the number of product pages from 48 to 30.  This will further make the website easier to navigate.  Meanwhile, all blog posts made prior to this one will be re-purposed to be more informative.  The red “Read more?” text on the product page will direct to the repurposed blog posts, for those who are interested in the history and technical aspects of the original war machine.  New blog posts, on the other hand, will include new product announcements and website updates, and not simply information pages for tanks or warships (when I start expanding my catalogue, that is).

Finally, since this is the first blog post I’ve made on this website since installing SteemPress, this post itself is something of a test.  If you are reading this on my website, you may have noticed the unusual tags #print3d and #creativecoin.  On Hive, tags and community names must begin with a letter, though it is possible to add a tag that begins with a number if a user is using the PeakD interface to create a post.  Creativecoin, meanwhile, is a Hive Engine token that artists and other creatives use.  Other Hive Engine tokens include MEME, Archon, Foodie, and STEM.

Finally, if you are reading this on Hive, here is a link to the original.  I wish I could make side-by-side bilingual posts on my website, but I suppose I could use the up-and-down format that, for instance, @andrianna uses for her own bilingual posts.