Wednesday 16 December 2015

Imperial Knight - in manufactorum pt 3

The fires of the Ferron forges glow hot as I return to the Knight that started it all. The original plan was to build this and the Cerastus at the same time, reach certain milestones together and end up with two knights at the end. However, I had quite a number of other projects on the go at the same time so when I began to focus my efforts the Paladin fell by the wayside. Annoyingly the only real reason it was abandoned was the basing of the model and potentially repositioning the legs. I wanted something a little different but I didn’t think I was prepared to cut the legs up just yet. But when I revisited it, having completed the Cerastus, the planets aligned for me to overcome that stumbling block. The solution was just one cut, albeit quite an awkward one - I had to remove the hip joint pipes. This would have been so much easier if I’d done it before joining the two parts together but y’know hindsight. Anyway, I managed it and still have all my fingers and eyes.


With the pipework removed I can now rotate it around the groin. It locks into the leg with a hexagonal plug and socket, obviously those could have been cut off but I’m already reducing the structural integrity by slicing the joint off.


This way I could rotate the joint so although the leg is still in a similar position as before because the pipework is not pointing downwards and more forwards it'll at least gives the impression it’s advancing. If I point the body the other way it'd be more apparent I think, but it's removable anyway so that's not a problem.


I had another spare Termagant, again missing a head so a bit of judicious pruning, some spare bits of Genestealer node tentacles and lashing of poly cement and I managed to squish the two under it’s foot. My kit-bashing is always a bit slap-dash, I could probably do a better job but I’m all for using just glue and spare bits of sprue to fill in gaps and for the most part I get away with it.


I’m going to struggle a bit with putting the basing material on but I’d done a fair bit that night, it’d had got to midnight and then I had a second wind and think I went on for another hour or more because I knew that if I cracked this there was only magnetising the weaponry that could slow me down. So I glued everything together - Superglued the other foot to the slate, which had been hot glued to the base. I'm a little anxious there are no screws fixing it but there isn't quite the surface to drill into and I think a plastic weld is pretty strong and the model is much lighter than the Cerastus so will be under less stress.


I think this picture shows best how the rotation of the hip joint can be subtley effective. to be honest I only realised above that although it was rotated the leg was essentially in the same postion. It is tilted a bit because of the gaunts underfoot and the fact the joint was separated it made it easier to position, it only needed the torso to be in place to add a bit of weight to ensure the joint and waist lined up correctly.


The only thing that annoyed me was I just realised I'd planned to try out the Paladin Torso on the Cerastus and vice versa, just to see what they looked like but forgot all about it and now it's too late. I have had them stood together and there is still a small part of me that regrets that the braced pose of the Cerastus loses a lot of height that differentiates it from the Paladin. It's still bigger it's just not as big, not to worry the dynamism of the pose more than makes up for it. Anyway, the Paladin needs basing yet and then I need to follow Alex's magnetising a Knight tutorial so I'm not beset by further hurdles to overcome.

Parts: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 |

5 comments:

  1. Recently and after your post the other day I have only just come to terms with how addicted to this hobby (and how it has escalated quickly over 2 years) to this hobby I have become.

    How many more knights of plastic crack shame do you have hidden away in that shed Dave?

    Are you knee deep in knights like some giant Imperator overlord?

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    1. The first step is to recognise the problem, on the face of it it's a harmless addiction but when I looked it up apparently any addiction is not without some form of harm. It really depends on balance and support of those around you, if you've no balance then it's a bad thing and if folk aren't supportive or find the hobby intrusive then it'll no doubt create a wedge between you.

      For me moving into the shed has removed a lot of conflict, where I used to nip into the back room at any oportunity 'just to glue a model' or shadow wash something now it's usually fixed between 10pm and midnight. The structure has helped but it's not without other side effects - like last night I was literally buzzing with a sense of achievement having based the above knight. I can run it through my head repeatedly and get a little kick of 'achievement' which is both pleasurable and just a little worrying!

      Ultimately you could be on hard drugs, booze or hookers so playing with toy soldiers is a better past time for everyone ;)

      I only have the two Knights, I can envisage another Warden/Paladin at least because I want more House Raven to make sense of my fluff. Liam has five apparently, but I've yet to see any of them. I do love them as I like giant walkers from all my Adeptus Titanicus days. Your Warlords and Reavers are just too big and costly though so I'm happy with Knights. I'd love a Warhound, they were my favourite from Epic but Liam's scratchbuilt one is awesome so I would struggle to get past that being made from nothing to getting the actual model.

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  2. Hey,

    This is Yulan and I recently started working on Warhammer 40K! :)

    However I am not working on playing it but on building a speech recognition system to recognize the speech of players while playing the game. We recorded some such data in the past three years (see our paper in 2013 here: http://staffwww.dcs.shef.ac.uk/people/Y.Liu/publications/pdf/Fox2013.pdf). 

    We have never built such a system for 'Warhammer' speech recognition before. You know there are some speaking style and vocabulary issues there. I found your blog really brilliant. It would be great if you don't mind me using your blog articles (actually written words only) to train our system to learn what words will be used while playing warhammer. I can provide more detailed information. Here is my email address: acp12yl@sheffield.ac.uk   

    Look forward to your reply, and enjoy the games! :)

    Best 
    Yulan

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    1. Hi Yulan, if you honestly think my blog can be of any use in your research then please feel free to use it, I never expected this blog would be of benefit to science, I was just hoping my body would be when it was left to it - so, early Christmas for me ;)

      Seriously, good luck with everything and I hope it helps, although I wonder if some of my vernacular [and my random mis-spelling] won't just confuse your speech recognition. I'm guessing the 40k angle is to help it search for particular consistent elements but does it take into account regional words and phrases, it sounds fascinating.

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    2. Hi Dave,

      Thank you so much! That definitely helps a lot! :)

      You probably have not experienced the dramatic speech recognition performance degradation caused by "out of domain" training data. Say, if we train a system with the speech data from BBC news, and try to recognize it with telephone interview recordings, or the other way, it will just work not-that-well.

      We had done this "Sheffield Wargame Corpus" recording to encourage the speech recognition for natural, daily and oral spontaneous speech, particularly when the speakers are moving. Actually among the different categories of speech, gaming is probably one the most difficult so far. I am sure it is also one of the commercial interests of many companies who want to join the revived fashion of AI (not only gaming companies I am sure). So we definitely want an "in domain" model to start with. (life is hard enough for a PhD student :P )

      The warhammer 40K is selected originally because people keep talking and moving during the game. What's more important, the game provides a perfect platform that people would forget the fact that they are listened by 96 microphones and watched by 4 cameras from every angle, and could keep talking from 9am to 9pm without feeling embarrassed or exhausted, which is an achievement itself in collecting natural speech data. :P

      Don't worry about the misspelling, speech recognition is built statistically but not grammar-ly. Occasional spelling errors will be filtered out during the process. :)

      As for the regional differences, yes of course that is an issue. But that is more of an issue in the way people speak compared to the way people blog. :P Blog data is perfect to us because it contains large quantity of word samples, is oral enough, while is not as fragile as forum discussion (which is also full of strange symbols). Due to the individual difference in "blogging style", honestly I am requesting several bloggers. Hopefully in the end I could get a statistically representative data collection. :)

      We are planning to release the blog data in the research if you are happy with that, and we will sure promote your blog website as well in the acknowledgement. :) I might contact you later with some official documents for ethical approval from you. It would be great if we could carry on our discussion in email (acp12yl@sheffield.ac.uk). I will keep you updated about how your blog helped to push machine learning technology. :)

      Thank you so much again! :)

      Merry Christmas
      Yulan



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