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.

Imperial Guard army -- Preliminary

I have recently started a IG army. The army was actually bought for my fiancee but she wasn't doing anything with the army. Also I was getting bored with my Tau.

The difference between the Tau and IG (modeling wise) is that there is more options in with IG. More options for models, posing, colour schemes, and for painting. The IG models are more detailed, and I can do more with them. Conversely, it takes more effort to produce an IG model than say a Fire Warrior.

For now I've decided to stick to the standard Cadian colour schemes. I've produced 1 Leman Russ tank, 2 test soldiers and a Sentinel walker.

I'll try and take some pictures of the test pieces today.

Painting Hints 1

This is my first post about painting.

I recently saw a thread in the Yahoo [mini-painter] group regarding the use of Gesso as a Primer for miniatures.

Jenn bought me some Liqidtex white Gesso. I wanted the white because it lets me prime whatever colour I want. If I want to prime black, I just add some black paint to the Gesso.

The application is pretty simple. I watered it down by about 3/5 and then covered the model with it. The model being a Kroot Shaper from Warhammer 40,000.

Once dried I found a number of places the metal was still showing through and some places were bare. So I applied a second coat and everything covered up consistently. I didn't notice any loss of detail.

The second test was an already painted Tau gun drone. The paint on it was pretty thick so I wasn't holding up much hope for it. I used a slightly thicker concentration this time, about 1/2 concentration. It came out okay. All of the panel lines were still visible but a little shallower, also the antennae had some Gesso fall off it onto the top of the model, creating a stalactite. But I can't complain too much.

The big advantage to using Gesso over an aerosol primer is that it doesn't require you to go outdoors to apply it, and you don't have to worry about a spray getting onto something else. Essentially there are fewer precautions you have to take in using this.

When I started using it I thought that if I had a lot of models I wanted primed, this probably wouldn't be ideal, and in the case of models that had large flat areas (such as vehicles) Gesso is not the way to go. After using it, the above opinion, hasn't changed.

I'm going to use Gesso for all of my individual models from now on. Especially the metal ones. It gives a lot of control to where the primer is applied.

I will try and add some pictures of my work.

What's with that name?

What is up with that name, LumoColour? Many months ago, I was creating a new identity for a game called Dawn of War. It seemed that all of the good anmes were taken. Fustrated, I grabbed a pen in front of me, it was a Stratadler LumoColor CD-R Pen. I wish I still had that pen so I could have posted a picture of it. Alas, it's back in Halifax.

An introduction to me

The purpose of these posts is to help me reason things in my life. I can just as easily write a journal, but a web log is open to everyone. I want to share my reasoning with other people. Hopefully people who don't know me.

With that let me begin. A little about me. I live in Canada. I have lived here most of my life. I grew up in Halifax; that's on the East Coast of the country. I still consider Halifax home. Recently I have moved to Canada's big city, Toronto. For anyone who doesn't know Toronto, think of it as Canada's New York city. Oh,.. I work in IT and find my job rewarding.

I live alone in a wonderful condo that is right next to my work. It takes me longer to go down the elevator than to get to work. My work is in downtown Toronto, so the rent is sky high, but I thought since I was new to the city, I'd save myself the hassle of commuting.

Yup, that's me.