Category Archives: Science Fiction

Posts Infinity by Corvus Belli, and about Stargrunt II, Dirtside II, and Full Thrust II by Ground Zero Games.

Infinity Ad: A Bit Off-Colour

Yeah, so this one is based on a very, very juvenile joke. I’d apologize but I wouldn’t mean it!

It’s also smaller than some of my other recent graphics, designed to print at roughly business card size (2.25″ x 3.25″) to go over the backing cards used in the Infinity blister packs, which I’ve been reusing as billboard surfaces.

Enjoy!

Uranus Wreckers & Salvage. They'll fix your pressure vessel, all right! Click through to grab the full-size image from Imgur!
Uranus Wreckers & Salvage. They’ll fix your pressure vessel, all right! Click through to grab the full-size image from Imgur!

Infinity Ad: Making Better Worlds

Everyone’s favourite terraforming/engineering/evilevilevil megacorp needs a giant billboard ad too! Third and (for now) last of my big 3″ wide by 5″ tall 300dpi ads. This one is also released under a Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License.

WY Recruit
Weyland-Yutani looking for recruits to some place called LV-426. What can go wrong? Click on image to grab the full-sized image from Imgur!

Mars image via Wikipedia, released under a CC-BY License. Weyland-Yutani image redrawn in Inkscape from various images found online.

Infinity Ad: Blue Sun

Borrowing from another popular science fiction universe to provide some graphical fodder for Infinity terrain, here’s another big (5″ high by 3″ wide, as designed) advertisement. This one is being released under the CC-BY-SA License for reuse as you please.

Blue Sun ad
Blue Sun Corporation ad, designed to be printed at 300dpi, 3″ wide and 5″ tall. Click through to get the full-sized, much more detailed image from my Imgur account.

Background graphic from monaeberhardt on Flickr, CC-BY-SA. Blue Sun graphic redrawn in Inkscape by me from smaller images found on the web; original is copyright Josh Wheadon or whichever studio produced Firefly.

Another Infinity Ad: Travel to Varuna

I’m home with a stubborn cold that won’t go away, so decided to kick GIMP and Inkscape to life and create another couple of billboard-sized ads for my Infinity terrain. Here’s one advertising the PanO ocean world of Varuna as a travel destination. It’s available under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA License for (limited) reuse.

Travel to Varuna
Travel To Varuna – click through to my Imgur account to see the full-size PNG file. Designed to print at 3″ wide by 5″ tall at 300 DPI, hence the size.

Sources: Tropic water background via Flickr user tahitipix, CC-BY-NC-ND Licensed. Turtle Clipart via the OpenClipArt Project, Public Domain Licensed. PanO logo by Vyo from his awesome Infinity Logos in Vector Format project.

An Easy Arc Measuring Widget

Infinity has, for most troops, a 180° front arc for Line of Fire and almost all actions. Other games have similar arc requirements – Full Thrust uses six 60° arcs on it’s starships, for example. To help me do the 180° arcs on my Infinity bases, I’ve whipped up a simple little measuring widget in Inkscape.

The two PDFs below (one Letter, one A4) are designed to be printed out to help with marking arcs on the bases of figures; there’s four quadrants for 90° or 180° marks and Full Thrust/hex-side 60° lines as well. The rings are to help centre your bases accurately; they start at 20mm and go up by 5mm then 10mm all the way to 60mm; the rings are 20mm, 25mm, 30mm, 35mm, 40mm, 50mm, and finally 60mm.

Arc Measuring Sheet PDF — Letter

Arc Measuring Sheet PDF — A4

Use should be fairly obvious – centre your bases on the marker, put small marks with a pencil or fine paintbrush at the arcs you need to specify,

Arc Marking Tool - grab this graphic or the PDFs linked to above.
Arc Marking Tool – grab this graphic or the PDFs linked to above.

In Which Things Get Primered

We have an Infinity weekend event coming up in just over a month (Facebook event link, if you’re in the area and interested) and I want to have both all my current buildings basically finished and the Haqqislam/Hassassin Bahram force I field fully painted.

I’ve been concentrating on the buildings for the last week or so, just to get them done and out of the way – they take up a lot more space on my workbench than the figures will!

Here’s the warehouse finally complete and primed, as well as the antenna. I’ve also been working on more graphics for various things, including new ads & signs as well as hazard labels and such.

thing
28mm warehouse for Infinity gaming, six antenna, and the box of LEDs.

Also, the LEDs I ordered off EBay a while back, waiting for me to break out the soldering iron and add lights to the objective room I built recently, which is currently out in the sun room with fresh spray primer on it. More on that soon.

Post-Labour Day Update

Last post was in June, I’m getting really lousy at keeping this poor blog from getting dusty and neglected. It’s been a busy summer for things like bike holidays and being out in the real world, not so much on the gaming front although our Blood Bowl league season is drawing to a close (my poor Rodents of Unusual Size got blown out of the playoffs in the first round) and some good games of Infinity.

On the modelling front, about all I’ve gotten done is a some progress on the various Infinity buildings I’ve started this year. We’ve got an Infinity tournament coming up on October 24th weekend, so I’m pushing to get the current group of buildings done and finished before then, as well as having my entire Haqqislam force painted and finished to field that weekend!

Recently I’ve been pushing on the mosque (shrine?) seen previously here. I’ve put a few of the recent pictures of that building up below! Click on any of them for full size, and enjoy.

Taking The Summer Off?

Apparently I’ve basically taken most of the summer off from blogging and doing wargame-related things I felt the need to blog about… last post was June 10th!

I’ve been playing a lot of Infinity and Blood Bowl, but doing basically no painting or terrain building at all until this weekend, when I’ve finally cleaned up my workbench and gotten a tiny bit of progress on the mosque roof for my Infinity terrain.

Drum dome on mosque roof. Click for larger, as usual.
Drum dome on mosque roof. Click for larger, as usual.

I’ve run with the “bright hexagonal future” jokes about Infinity with the one, and tried to incorporate some Islamic themes as well because I run Haqqislam forces in Infinity. The main footprint is a hexagon, there’s a hexagonal tower as part of the cupola/minaret on the roof, and I’ll probably use some hex-patterned origami paper I bought recently as part of the decoration scheme as it looks a lot like some Islamic tile patterns.

What else have I been up to this summer, anyway? Riding my bike over mountains, for one, and lots of other bike riding and other good warm weather activities!

Antennas for Infinity

A number of the stock scenarios in Infinity need some sort of antenna or console for the troops to interact with/hack/seize/blow up/etc. You can use basic tokens on the tabletop, but real scenery looks better!

Antenna and consoles in Inf are supposed to be on a 40mm base, so I had a go at cutting 40mm circles with my circle cutter. The stubby blade won’t go all the way through the mattboard I build with, though, so I wound up basically scoring circles and then finishing them as carefully as possible with a new Xacto blade. It’s not an ideal way to cut circles, and for larger and more visible ones like a round roof I’ve started since building these antennas I’ve gone with multiple layers of light card, which the circle cutter handles very nicely, and glued them together in layers.

in-ant
Six antennas for Infinity on 40mm bases. Each is roughly 4″ high. Click for larger.

The antenna themselves are more mattboard, generally offcuts from other recent projects. No particular design ethic to these, beyond “angular and futuristic”, which is easy to achieve.

Even for scenarios that don’t require antenna on the table these are likely to put in an appearance as general futuristic clutter, which is always in high demand on an Infinity tabletop!

Billboard Ads for Infinity

While building another piece of scenery for our Infinity tables I built a roof that didn’t turn out; it just wasn’t working out physically the way I’d pictured it in my head. Turning the partially completed piece on one edge, though, I realized that what I’d created would work quite well as a display board for two big billboards – presumably video or holographic displays, this being a bright hexagonal future!

Here’s the basic structure, front and back views.

bb front
Front of the billboard. The whole thing is 6″ tall and 4″ wide.
bb back
Rear of the billboard. There’s enough space to balance a figure on the very top, if you’re so inclined…

To get something colourful on the two displays, I fired up GIMP and then went looking through Flickr and Google Image Search for source materials. It’s easy to just rip things off when you see them around the web, and far too many people do that. Both Flickr and GIS allow you to search for images that people have specifically licensed to allow free reuse of, though, and generally you have to pass on your graphics made using their images as sources – what is known as a Creative Commons Share-Alike license.

Haqqislam billboard - Kufic Arabic for Bismallah (God Bless) and various hexes, because Infinity...
Haqqislam billboard – Kufic Arabic for Bismallah (God Bless) and various hexes, because Infinity…
Tyrell Corp - one of everyone's favourite (evil) megacorps!
Tyrell Corp – one of everyone’s favourite evil megacorps!

For the full size, high quality, and uncompressed images, please use these two links:
Arabic billboard – 2.7Mb
Tyrell Corp billboard – 2.7Mb

Creative Commons License
These works by Brian Burger/Wirelizard Design are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Basically, this means that you can use these images as you see fit on the web or printed for use, including commercial use, but if you modify them further you have to share your version too.

Creative Commons sources:
Neon on Ferrari
Chevy grille
star twist origami
Blade Runner screenshot
Tyrell Corp logo

I didn’t wind up using either of these two (yet!) but they’re too cool not to share: 2nd Life cyber-art, and another by the same artist.