Paper Minis
                          by Andy Skinner

Many (most?) miniatures gamers seem to like the diorama aspect of playing
miniatures games.  One game I own describes a battlefield as a "visual
spectacle".  I, on the other hand, am mostly attracted to them as games.  I
don't have to fool with hexes or set terrain.  I'd probably be happy playing
some games with counters on felt terrain.  On the other hand, if I had more
time and money to devote to the hobby, it wouldn't do anything but help to
have figures and nice terrain.

I thought it would be a good first step to see if I could find a way to
provide some simple miniatures that were interesting to look at and very
cheap.  Thus Paper Minis, which can be printed out on a PostScript printer
and copied, cut out, folded, and glued to create models of approximately
6mm scale.  [Warning: I have not played many miniatures games, and am not
familiar with miniatures or military terminology.  These models have not
been measured to that scale, but purely eye-balled, next to some Games
Workshop Epic scale figures (which I'm not sure are exactly 6mm, either).
I'm hoping they'll be close enough to use with Dirtside II.  Any help on
scaling these things would be appreciated.]

The first version of this system created a tank chassis with very complicated
folding instructions.  The wheels were separate pieces, the tracks were
separate pieces, etc.  It was about 5 inches long.  When I decided I'd
try playing either GW's Space Marine or Dirtside II, I had to rescale, and
pick a different method of making detail.  I began with the plotting code
that can be printed on (older) UN*X computers, but then switched to PostScript,
with a vast increase in capabilities.  I've been refining my libraries to
cut down the size of the output files and to make models as easy to make
as possible.

PostScript is a registered trademark of Adobe Systems, Inc.  I'm not a
PostScript expert at all, but have learned about it as I worked on the
plotlib library.

The current system consists of several layers:
* A program that produces a sheet of one part of a model, like a chassis or a
turret.  The parts are intended to be mixed and matched.
* fold_lib, which allows me to specify a group of 3D points and their
  connections, and unfolds the shape onto a plane (the paper) automatically.
  Also has other 3D and 2D geometry routines
* plot_lib, which contains functions that output PostScript commands.  Will
  do line drawing, filling, circles, etc.  This, by the way, was inspired by
  (and was originally a wrapper around) the very nice, flexible, and much
  more robust pslib, which is a part of the GMT plotting package developed
  by Paul Wessel (at University of Hawaii, I think).
* PostScript
  interprets the files on the printer (or display on screen)

Each page will have multiple copies of each piece.  One will be a guide copy,
which has no decorations, just solid lines (cut lines) and dashed lines (fold
lines).  So far, all folds are ridges (crease towards you), but I don't
promise that will stay that way.  Figure out how to put together the piece
by the guide copy, then work on the decorated copies.  If putting slots
together seems too hard, try glue.

The current figures are:
4 varying tracked tank chassis (minor variations with wheels and tracks)
2 hover tank chassis
some pieces to go on the above:
1 gun turret
1 missile/rocket launcher
1 artillery piece
1 grav speeder (a small, enclosed land speeder kinda thing)

I've got a couple ideas for other things.  I work on this during my lunch
breaks at work, and it takes 2 or 3 lunches to make a new figure if it
isn't too different from another one.

Suggestions for new shapes are welcome, as are comments about scale (I've
been guessing so far) or decorations.  I'll probably update a lot of these,
by putting more detail on (especially the fake 3D shaded look).  I do not
currently have a site for these, and I do not want to become a mail server
for sending them out.  So I'll be posting them to the net once, and maybe
later (if Bill likes them), they'll show up on the highly-recommended
Miniatures Page (file://biochem.dental.upenn.edu/Mosaic/bill/tmp.html).  I'll
probably send stuff to people that ask, but if I get lots of requests for
them, I may shut down that.

I'd also like comments on whether miniatures people care about this kind of
thing.  I don't think they'll paint that nicely--I plan to either copy them
in black (gray) on 2 different colors of paper or copy them in 2 different
colors onto white.

Finally, please leave my name on these figures.  I'm pretty proud of both
my system and how these figures look.  But feel free to freely distribute
them.  Don't sell them.

andy
askinner@avs.com    www.avs.com/~askinner