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Three Snakes |
| 2021-04-28 |
Three Snakes
At the beginning of the month, I wrote about the Jaculus, and had devised stats for it to include in my setting, the next step was to make a miniature for it.
I am using OpenSCAD to make my minis, bear with me, I am a coder.
My goal is to have a collection of parameterizable miniatures that are easy to print without supports on a FDM printer like a Prusa MK3. I do not paint, I print blue for friend, red for foe. A miniature prints in 20 minutes usually. If it breaks I can reprint, if it breaks too often, I rework the design before reprinting.
We do not spend our time looking at the miniatures, we don't need details, we just need them to look ok and snakes to look like snakes. Allow me to use the "lofi" qualifier.
My first snake attempt used a linear_extrude and, although the effect is nice, it lacks a tail...
I went with a prismatic head, I didn't want to spend too much time on it. The jaculus is a spear-like snake, it should suggest a arrow head or a spear head.
It seems the snake is surging from a pool. I felt unsatisfied with this first snake.
For the next design, I gave up on linear extrusion and went with Bézier curves and hulls, and dropped the snake on its base, and slowly wrapped it around the z axe.
It looks okay. It looks turdesque if you allow me.
One thing that bothers me, is the kinetics. As written above, it's supposed to be a spear snake, that hurls itself at targets. How could I convey the coil and release? Maybe I can't, I am not an artist after all.
For the third snake, I went with a shorter snake (less to hurl), wrapping once on the ground before immediately letting it rise to its occasion.
I like this third iteration, maybe it doesn't look ready enough to hurl itself at its target but it looks menacing enough.
Of course, the head is "insufficient", but I think I'll still keep it as is for the fourth iteration. What I'll work on is adding another curve so to attach the body behind the head and not under the head. That should look better.
For now, second iteration snake.stl and third iteration snake.stl.
