I like writing stuff, reading stuff, Bioware games, making stuff, force lightning, react development, CSS3, and YOU. ♥
it’s pretty much all glitter all the time around here. Sparklepalace: dragonsworn.net
wheel of time show should be HUGE on tumblr like. SO much blorbo potential + gay + cool magic + evil milfs + visually appealing. what more do you people want
Today’s dice are a color wheel play with my very favorite technique that I almost never have the patience for: separate and tint different colors of resin and wait as long as it takes for the resin to start to thicken to gel.
I split the resin into the three primary colors of red, yellow, and blue dye rather than alcohol ink, and let it sit for twenty minutes. This is the patience problem: resin casting in this way is kind of like playing chicken, where the resin chemistry is all “I bet I’ll be a gross mess of bubbles!” and I have to dare it not to.
When I can pull it off, this technique turns out these amazing crystal-clear rainbows where every angle is a different color. They’re SO BEAUTIFUL. Look at that green and orange! SO GOOD.
As someone who both makes fancy dice and yet also is not a photographer, I am used to capturing my dice in stills being A Challenge!
However rarely is it so much so as here in Copper Caverns, which has both awesome structural details (quartz crystals!) and a rad multichrome shifty color scheme.
Look at this badass quartz crystals! It’s so good! I mean I think I need to make an upside-down mold so the highest faces will give the best views of the inserts, BUT STILL.
The red-gold multichrome is my very favorite part, especially when combined with the red shimmer on the number gloss.
Today’s dice: the gup asked to design a set of dice for her birthday, and while her usual aesthetic is Goth Sporty Spice, her request here was “Every flower. No, for real, MORE FLOWERS.”
These are clear resin with a sprinkle of silver holo glitter cast in blank molds, then I drew a bunch of teetiny flower vectors and printed them on waterslide decal paper and just absolutely covered the crap out of the blanks in a metric microton of v smol flowers.
Hello, friends! Please join me for another episode of “cool tricks in Blender make awesome dice,” featuring excessive amounts of both sparkle and math!
As previously mentioned, my particular dicemaking niche is Stuff In Dice because I have a very fancy printer and absolutely no restraint, and some time back I was looking at gemstone dice and I thought “you know, geodes would be SUPER COOL.” And because no restraint, I immediately set about figuring out how exactly to do that.
The first step was my trusty Blender, where I used a geometric plugin to procedurally generate a field of fractal quartz crystals with a random number seed, which looked a little like this:
Then I imported my blank masters, which are my dice except without numbers and 1mm smaller, and used a boolean intersect on that fractal quartz field to create this:
Dice on the bottom, crystals on top!
Sending these things to the printer is always interesting because supports are VERY EXCITING, but these inserts turned out AWESOME. My intention was to print several sets to use, rather than prep and mold a set for casting masters, because the sharp points and indents of the generated quartz will be a MESS in silicone.
The awesome thing about printing as needed is that I could use some really cool painting techniques that wouldn’t work in a cast. For this test set, I painted the geode shapes matte black, and then used a nail art technique to polish the crystal tops with a shimmery metallic multichrome greeny-gold dry pigment, for extra sparkle and a cool color-shifting look on the crystals.
SO. SPARKLY.
In order to cast these in dice, I soaked them in resin first and made sure to toothpick all the little crevices to avoid air pockets. Then I filled the molds halfway like I would with any insert, slipped in the geode shapes (the 8 and the 10s are always the worst to fit), and voila:
CRYSTAL MAGIC.
I plan to ink these in a bright spring green, which, with how crystal-clear the top halves are, will make the quartz inside look like soft fuzzy sparkly moss.
Today’s dice are another experiment: I wanted to do a kind of fiery marble pour, because I play a fire genasi forge cleric and frankly I am a little like Homer Simpson in that everything I make is something I would love myself.
You can see here that I definitely got the warmth down, but maybe not enough of the chaos ribbons and stripings that one would expect from a marble pour — and that’s because I am a clever witch, and these dice were made with a secret:
See, I used UV-reactive pigments to make these chaos ribbons, and black light (and very bright sunlight, and a particular flavor of fluorescent light) brings out these amazing greens and yellows and violets all sneakily hidden in that warm burned burgundy.
What inspired you to write Young Wizards? A relative, a dream you had? Did the story come to you as you were writing it, or was it hammered from bits and pieces of thoughts made plain on text? Were there parts you struggled with, parts that came easier than others? (Have you already answered these questions in an interview you can link to?)
What inspired me to write So You Want To Be A Wizard?
Partly humor. Partly rage. (More about both under the cut...)
The subject's come up in interviews every now and then, but let's tl:dr; it here.
The humor: Often enough while I was nursing, and seeing the bizarre things people would do to their own bodies, I wished out loud to other fellow professionals that human beings came with some kind of instruction manual. Now, I'd known the "So You Want To Be A…" series of (US-published) career books from my childhood. One day when I was thinking about them—and for no reason I can understand at this end of time—the word "…Wizard" plugged itself onto the end of the title template.
Instead of a simple instruction manual for people, I found myself considering what a wizard's manual would look like. Where would it come from? Who would it have come from? Might it, itself, be an entirely bigger manual than the one I'd been joking about—but the full instructions and background material you'd need for (maybe) understanding life, but (definitely) doing magic? A book as big or as small as you needed for the work in hand, and full of the answers to questions you never thought you'd get answers to? ...
From that basic concept, the wider concept of wizardly culture built itself up over the next couple of years. ...Naturally I'd read Le Guin's "Earthsea" books years before, and I'd noted (but decided to pass on) the concept of a school-for-wizards. While it was interesting enough, it'd already been done by a writer far more skilled. What interested me more was a DIY-ish approach, where you learn by yourself, do things that interest you, and join up with other like-minded practitioners when the mood moves you or circumstances require.
Anyway, now comes the rage. While all this was percolating in the background, I was finishing up a YA series by another writer. When I hit the end of it, I was profoundly upset by the events of the series’s closure. They seemed to me to have treated strong and resilient young characters as helpless creatures without agency, subjecting them “for their own good” to an amnesic end-state they absolutely didn’t deserve. I got mad about this. I dove into the writing of the first Young Wizards book with the intention of treating my young characters a whole lot better—since if there was anything I knew about kids from my nursing, it was that a lot of them were tougher than many of the adults around them.
Once I was started, the writing went straightforwardly from book’s beginning to book’s end (because as I was already a screenwriter, and screenwriters outline, the novel was naturally outlined too). The writing took about six months, as right then I was also writing for Scooby and Scrappy-Doo to pay the rent. I turned in the book and didn’t think much more about what might happen next (though I knew there was quite a lot more story to tell) until I ran into Madeleine L’Engle at some event of my publisher’s. She took me aside and said, “I read your last one. I liked it a lot! When’s the next?”
That was when I realized I had a problem... so I got busy. :) ...And I’ve been busy with the Young Wizards universe ever since. I’m busy with that universe right now, though it may not look like it. And I expect to be busy with it for years to come.
Their stuff is cheap, they don’t really uphold their obligations for their productions; they’ve cheated numerous people out of their dice pledges and produced foggy, low quality dice — the dice making game has gotten so much better over the years and I have a list ( as a dice maker myself ) that you can support more independent and amazing dice makers!
DISPEL ( more bigger and mainstream but they have nice high quality dice with their own store opening late May 2022 )
GAMETEE ( they have all sorts of lovely stuff for table top in general, but a lot of beautiful themed, sharp edge and gemstone dice too! )
EVERYTHING DICE ( they’re about to have a Kickstarter for dice boxes and they have very beautiful sharp edge dice! )
JUICE BOX
KHOPPER DICE
SPELLCASTER DICE
ARTYDICE
THE DICE DJINN
DREAMYDICE
SLEIGHT OF HANDCRAFT ( they have dice commissions )
YANIIR ( less frequent updates, and more Patreon exclusive sales, but very beautiful high quality dice, jewelry, and tabletop accessories )
ALKONOST DICE
HELLA STRANGE DICE
DRUIDIC DICE
HADRIANS STALLAU
XOLOTL DICE
ASTRALNAUT DICE ( my dice work! I take requests in small batches and plan to make sets for sale soon! )
Please support more indie and small business tabletop stores!✨ You can find so much love, quality and care put into these dice makers beyond Kraken’s cheap sets and abhorrent customer care and support.
FUN FACT: Kraken’s first miserable Kickstarter, where my pledge of twelve distinct-in-order-photos sets ended up being so hideously ill-made that I had to send photos to Kraken support to identify which sets were which and whether or not I actually received what I’d ordered, is why I got into dicemaking in the first place. “SURELY,” I thought, “SURELY there is a way to get the dice I THOUGHT I was buying.”
Turns out that sure enough there was! What Vampire Vapor SHOULD have been:
Today’s dice: purple, pink, and gold stained glass in holo-sparkly frames.
Behind the scenes: sticker paper is GENIUS MAGIC WIZARDRY. I designed the stained glass pattern and printed it in several different background colors, because vector shapes are easy to fill and straight-edge.
Then I used my desktop cutter to make two-dimensional coverage for three-dimensional shapes.
I treated these like my other blank inserts and it worked AMAZINGLY.
Is there a download link for the resin-print snowglobe dice models? Even if its costs money I am willing to buy!!
Alas there is not, because they are my own design (and perhaps you have noticed my nontraditional shapes, lol). If you have a passing familiarity with Blender or another modeling program, you can use my method with any dice STLs — just shrink them, wipe them, and hollow them (you can even use something like ChituBox or Formware 3D to hollow them rather than render hollow models yourself).
Today’s dice: Sakura Bloom, incredibly delicate stenciled cherry blossoms, leaves, and branches on pearl-white blanks, with a tiny sprinkle of holo pink glitter in the frames for extra sparkle.
The macro shots are SO GOOD! I love the way the stencils turned out; repurposing nail art is my FAVORITE trick.
These will be inked in bright green as soon as they finish curing, I think, to make those leaves really pop (and also pink and green is bad ass).
Today’s dice: Bathtime Fun, rubber duckies in glittery snowglobes.
I am a terrible masochist and it’s important to me that my snowglobes have excellent movement, so that means I make all my inclusions myself to hit particular measurements. In this case, that meant using magnifiers to painstakingly paint 8mm rubber duckies.
SO WORTH IT, they turned out COMPLETELY ADORABLE.
Unfortunately I had the epiphany after I demolded them that I should have used bubble beads instead of chunky glitter and now I’m mad about it. XD
From afar, pale blue and chunky glitters! V pretty!
Up close, the masochism that can only come from a dicemaker with access to a very fancy printer and ABSOLUTELY NO RESTRAINT.
Why yes, yes I did abuse a 000 brush to paint “10/6” on a 10mm top hat and “DRINK ME” on an 8mm bottle.
This is what happens when you get a 3D printer, friends. You become ABSOLUTELY MAD WITH POWER. Don’t do it. This way lies madness, and appropriately we are all mad here.
….And in case you were wondering, they’re also snowglobes. :D
Making snowglobe dice is very fun and they are very beautiful, but I have always been bothered by the unbalanced aesthetic of round beads in square cases (especially with my rectangular d4).
An additional challenge is that the beads I use for cores have teeeeeny tiny openings because they’re designed for jewelry, so I could only use very fine glitters and not anything else cool.
So, how to solve this problem? Obviously I needed to find something that fits better than round glass beads, and I also needed to have a larger opening to fit a broader variety of filler. Alas, for months of searching I couldn’t find anything that existed that checked all my boxes. Things that worked for the d20 didn’t work for the d4, and not being able to make a full set was just not on.
The solution: Blender, endless tedium of teeny tiny measurements, and loading up clear resin in the printer.
I took my dice models, unextruded all the numbers, deleted the top face, and then solidified it with a 1mm wall, making a hollow die exactly as much smaller than my regular dice as the depth of the number wells so they’d center automatically. I also modeled that deleted face on its own as a cap with beveled edges so I could seal everything up nice and tight with UV resin in a syringe.
I can’t polish the insides to make the inserts crystal clear, but polishing the outsides to high gloss kept the prints transparent enough to see perfectly inside, and the slight matte ended up making my finished product even more amazing:
GELATINOUS CUBES
AN ENTIRE SET OF MOVING SKULL AND BONES GELATINOUS CUBES
EASILY the most amazing things I have ever made. I love them so much.
No dice outside of a casino craps game are perfectly physically balanced, no matter what the GameScience dude tells you. However, they ARE mathematically balanced (opposite faces add up to total faces + 1), which is what’s important for randomness and chance.
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