Today I have finished the basics of my WDhex Housetiles: the functional doors.
It took me months to make these. For some part because of life in general; work was busy at times, I got sick, went to Castlefest, and so on. But most of all it took so long because I had some very specific ideas about my functional doors and how they should function. And I did not make my 3d design life easy on myself.
Let me start by stating that I am most definitely not a 3d designer. I am a software test engineer, that is how I make my money and designing 3d things is a hobby. I do not consider myself to be ‘good’ at it. I enjoy fumbling around in blender and fusion360. Whenever I think of something I would like to make I need at least 3 youtube tutorials to talk me through the process of making what I want to make.
But I do enjoy it a lot and I have absolutely no ambition in becoming anything more than a 3d fumbler.
Well, I might if I did not have to spent most of my week working, but I enjoy my job too since it pays for all my hobbies, and I like all my hobbies.
So yeah, sometimes it just takes me forever to make my 3d stuff.
Now, back to the housetiles because I am flippin’proud of them.
The idea started with printing little tabletop houses. I like those things a lot and I have a lot of them in my files-stash. A rather impressive collection that is the result of hoarding tabletop related crowdfunding campaigns. The number of houses I actually printed and painted can be counted on 1 hand. Maybe two. And I gave too many away so I have even less in my stash. This will change some day, because I have plans for that. The magical component ‘time’ is, as always, a bit hard to find.
I do not use many houses in my game, for 1 very simple reason: the ready-to-print houses almost always have the wrong size and shape.
Most of the houses you will visit and have encounters in are not little peasant huts. Or one-room village cottages. I do have bigger houses, which I do want to print and use, but I have yet to encounter one that matches a map.
Well, there are some. The Yawning Portal tavern has been made several times, but I could not name another one.
When I was setting up a terrain bit with my stone-wall dungeon tiles it struck me: I can make wood floors and wood walls and stuff so I can set-up any house I need in my adventure!
So, I started making wood planks, which was a bit challenging. After that was done I made floors and walls and wall-corners. I also made windows, that was a lot of fun to do. And then came the moment I had to start working on the doors.
I knew what I wanted: functional doors, with hinges on just one side.
I am always wondering: why do so many of these medieval like doors have hinges on both sides? Or if they only have them om one side, why is it the outside? It is a lot easier to break a door open when you can sabotage the hinges, so you do not want to have those on the outside.
And while I am at it, why are so many of the functional doors that you can download for tabletop almost revolving doors? You can flap them open to both sides and with the kind of hinges that are punt on them, with the long bars over the door, that does not make any sense at all!
Am I really seriously upset about this? Well…. yeah, a bit… but now that my functional, hinge on one side, opening to one side, doors are done, I do not feel the need to endlessly rant about this subject and I am happy.
The doors were just uploaded to Printables and MyMiniFactory and can be downloaded there for free (MMF needs 1 or 2 days to approve files). I even got a badge from Printables for uploading enough stuff!
And with these doors I have finished creating all the basic tiles for the housetiles set.
This does not mean that I won’t be making more housetile variations. I still want to make stone, sturdy outer walls and I have some vague idea for wood walls with painting-frames. I also have big plans for making a 2nd floor possible for the housetiles, though that is going to take a lot of time to create because I am not going to make this easy on myself.
It does mean that I can also start thinking about making cave tiles, because those are high on my list as well.
And river tiles, swamp tiles, and so much more tiles!
I have more ideas than I have time, but I enjoy what I am doing and that is what it is all about.