Returning to a hobby

It has been almost 5 year since I last held a paint brush.  I am a little ashamed to say that the time I should have been devoting painting, I had spent playing video  games.  But I have an urge to return to the hobby.

So the first step was to set up my space.  Even though I moved in many months ago, I have been putting off unpacking my modelling supplies.  

First, I need to unpack the items for the display case:

Then  organize the desk a bit:

Now, I am ready to start painting.  The question is what to paint.  There are a few Tamiya models, but those are major projects.  

Tamiya Zero (great quality casting and parts)

Tamiya Desertised Challenger 2 MBT.  Note the water damage to the box.  Mold will be a problem.

I would need to invest serious effort into those.  No, I want something to ease me into the hobby.  Plus all of my glue dried up, so I would have to buy some more glue.

Maybe one of the 40k crisis suits. 

I bought this almost 10 years ago

Yes, these are good ones to start with... but still this one looks to be a bit more work then I want to put in right now.  I don't want to spend a great deal of time finding my modelling supplies;  I just want to paint something quickly... something I can get into quickly and finish quickly to boost my confidence...

Well what do we have here:

A few of my Vespid Stingwings

The Krootox rider. The casting/forging quality is shamefully poor.

These are great to start with.  I can do these in several stages.  And call it quits at the end of almost any of the sages.

XV88-2

My XV88-2 ended very badly. Although I was happy with some of the modifications I had made, I think my reach was greater than my grasp.

I wanted to make the missile racks on the back of the model less like the SkyRay and more like a rail. The original SkyRay design was not great, but in retrospect my idea was no better.

I wanted to make a magazine for the rail gun. That was a good idea but I simply couldn't build something that looked nice.

And lastly, the colors I choose were too dark in tone and didn't quite fit right. I wanted to avoid the standard 'Eavy Metal paint scheme, and go for something realistic. So I thought dark tones would be more realistic but the model looked bad. I choose Brown as my primary color and Cyan as the accent but the application was too jarring (lacked harmony). I've since learnt from SandWyrm's entry on theback40k blog.

I may leave the model as is, or re-paint it in the future.

Right now I am concentrating on my XV9. The original paint scheme was ok, but suffered from the same harmony issue as the XV88-2.

XV88-2 Part-2

I finally sat down for a few hours and got some modeling done. I didn't actually build anything, but I spent some time gluing things together. It's a start, I guess. I have some additional motivation; I signed up for a painting competition and the submission is next weekend. So I have to finish everything by then.

Here are some pictures I took after I finished today:

The torso finished, with the missile pods on the back. There is a trick to gluing things; slowly and carefully. I didn't quite follow that. The missile pods are tilted incorrectly.

I bought the base from Secret Weapon Miniatures. I'm planning on adding some more markings to the base. The head on the model is wrong, but I haven't glued it in yet. Basically that is what the final pose is going to be.

Snow Leopard Update

I want to provide an update on my hackintosh experience.

Almost everything is working as a normal Mac, except sound and sleep. The problem with sound is this: When booting in 64bit mode, the volume controls stop working. Not a big deal, I just use 32bit mode. From what I have read, there is no difference in booting in 64/32 bit modes. I can still run 64bit apps just fine. There are drivers that make the sound card work when booted in 64bit mode, but they were introducing a lot of additional noise. Not worth the effort. Maybe at a later date I'll look into the problem.

Sleep is a different story. At first I wasn't too bothered by the lack of working sleep, but now after almost 3 months I want to get it working. I had to set up Windows 7 to finish my taxes, and sleep just works on that OS. So I have to get at least parity with Windows.

My plan is as follows:

1. clone Snow Leopard onto another HDD (I bought SuperDuper!)
2. install experimental kext and test out sleep on that.

Updates to follow.

XV88-2

I recently ordered an XV88-2 Broadside kit from ForgeWorld.

This is a resin kit, not plastic, but really the only difference is that the material is softer. Otherwise they are the same material.

The reason I got the kit was because it looked much more dramatic than the standard XV88 kit from GamesWorkshop. The original GamesWorkshop kit is essentially the XV9 suit but with two rail guns on the shoulders and missiles for hands. The model looks very similar to the XV9.

When the FW kit arrived the first thing I noticed was a bunch of casting problems. The upper arm plates were warped along with a few other parts. FW was kind enough to UPS replacements for them, but I had to pay for customs. I wished they had just used standard post. But it was still nice of them to put that effort in. I did them a favor myself; along with my order the post office had shipped me someone else's order. I sent that order to the intended destination at my cost and time.

Here is what the final pieces looked like:

Assembly was a little bit troublesome because of the spacing in the knee joint. A little more friction there would have made it easier to pose and glue together. Anyways, I put it together in a day and started painting it:

But that look just didn't pop for me. It wasn't impressive enough. I had recently seen District 9, and wondered if I could do something similar, particularly the rail gun.

So I decided to try two things. One was to add additional supports for the rail cannon, along with an exposed magazine rack for the ammunition. Second was to improve the back of the model.

I thought about this for a long time. Originally I wanted to have a wing like structure of the SkyRay gunship, but I think that was outside of my skill level, and it was a little too Anime'esque. In the end I decided to go with a rail that each missile pod sat on top of and would come up and down so that it could be stowed away to reduce profile/reload or whatever.

Stay tuned for pictures of the above setup. I'm going to force myself to take some pictures

Snow Leopard on x86

It has been a while since I wrote about my experience the 'hackintosh'. I suppose I should first identify the hardware that I have:

• Asus P5K SE/EPU
• Intel Q6600 CPU
• ATI 4870
• SATA DVD

I think the above is the most relevant information. The motherboard contains the LAN, Sound Card and HDD controller, so in a way it is specifying a hardware set.

In order to get Snow Leopard working I had to get Leopard working. Leopard install is a bit easier than getting Snow Leopard because there are a number of pre-packaged Leopard install DVDs available. Snow Leopard is harder because of the DSDT modifications needed.

Fortunately for me JD Apolo from the InsanelyMac forums had almost the exact same hardware and wrote a wonderful tutorial about installing Snow Leopard. His tutorial is available at: http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=185838

I should note that I had to perform the install a number of times to get it to work, but finally it did work and without any problems.

What I am missing right now is Sleep. The computer can't go to sleep; rather, it can, but it can't recover from sleep. Also, I have a feeling that my Graphics card is running hotter under Snow Leopard because the drivers aren't the greatest. The drivers should be getting the GPU to power down when not actively doing anything (like SpeedStep on the CPU).

I haven't had any Kernel Panics and I have kept the machine running for a few weeks non-stop. Although lately my Finder crashes, but it's fairly easy to restart it.

All of the programs I have run fine, unlike Leopard which caused Kernel Panics when I ran any google software.

Imperial Guard

I am nearly finished my 3rd Plattoon of IG. Each plattoon is composed of 3 Infintry squads and a Command Squad. Each Infintry squad has 1 Seargent, 1 Vox Caster, 5 Regular Guardsmen with Lasguns, 1 Special Weapons, and a Heavy Weapons Team usually made up of a Auto Cannon. The Command Squad consists of a Junior Officer, a Vox Caster, Heavy Weapons Team and a Special Weapons.

Right now the Heavy Weapons Team in the Command Squad is being painted. After they are painted, I'll apply decals and the 3rd and last plattoon will be finished. There are pictures at:

http://picasaweb.google.com/atreya.basu/IGPlattoon3

I am still missing about 6 infintry from my 2nd Plattoon, but I'm currently not motivated enough to finish them. Although I did prime 2 Special Weapons infintry.

OS X update

I had to stop running Leopard back in late 2008 because of a faulty video card. The replacement card, an ATI 4870 did not have drivers for Leopard. That is untill 10.5.5 was released.

So a few months ago I went back to OS X. This time I installed from a retail copy.

I installed 10.5.5 and it appeared stable. Unfortunately somewhere along the way I upgraded to 10.5.6 and now I can't use Picasa or iPhoto because they cause a Kernel Panic. I could not figure out the cause of the Panic but if I didn't use Picasa or iPhoto everything worked. Lightroom worked fine too.

Right now I'm not using Leopard. Instead I am using Windows 7, which is a big improvement over Vista. I also am playing video games, so OS X is out of the question. Switching back and forth recently I discovered that the fonts are a bit smaller on Windows 7 and I like that. Although the UI in OS X is still superior.

Leopard

I finally got Leopard installed.

My first attempt at installing it was a mixed bag. It installed fine but configuring it was terrible. I couldn't get the windows sharing to work. The hostname couldn't be configured, and I couldn't configure Terminal to be transparent.

This time around, I purchased a new external hard drive. And gave Leopard the entire volume and it worked. Install was slightly faster and everything configured correctly.

I think that my original problem was that I tried to import system settings from my old account and that might have killed things.

Will update as I get more experience.

Edit:

I returned this morning to see that VMWare wasn't running. I had left it running last night. I started it, and then clicked run on the VM I wanted, and voila; It was already running.

There appears to be a problem with the Dock. It showed VMWare as not running. Troubling. I'll update on this.

Pictures of IG are to come soon.