Weathering. This is the Way.

Hi guys!

Now this last step is very much 'personal taste' - I can see a lot of people preferring it without, but the more I've used my buildings with my landscapes, not to mention as dungeons or ruins, what I can't stand is how 'clean' they look...

I'd say at least 75% of the places you will ever represent with terrain will be, to some degree, dirty, whether that's as bad as an overgrown ruin or dank dungeon, or as simple as the dirty floor of a peasant tavern or tiny church. The only real places where dirt really doesnt work tend to be those where fights are rarer anyway, such as pristine palaces, grand temples or the upper planes - places where more often than not the interaction is social, not combat.

My view on this has slowly turned from 'no dirt so it can be used as anywhere' to 'dirt, because it looks really weird most of the time without it'.

Basically, if I'm having to use imagination to mentally add dirt for 75% of uses, why not use imagination to ignore the dirt for only 25% of the time instead?

Same thing goes for moss really. 75% of places you'll use terrain, some degree of greenery works, and 25% it doesn't - so why not just use it, make it look nicer, and ignore it mentally where it doesn't work?

Explanations over, attached are some before and afters of the dirt effects I chose to add:

There are some slight things I'd do differently in future, I think I'd do patches of dirt on the 'floors' instead of all over next time, but by and large, I'm happy with it!

I feel it takes a very nice looking game piece (I really do like the paint scheme) and turns it more into a realistic looking piece of art/modelling. Like I say though, I totally understand if you prefer not doing this - I was torn myself!

longer term I intend to test adding this to stone floor tiles in 'patches', and also to stairblocks (though they need a repaint first to match these new blocks!), and potentially to walls.

Walls are my biggest conflict, I definitely want it on the exterior of exterior walls, not so sure about the interior, or interior walls. I might try adding it to some, say half, but in patches that could be covered by decor in 'cleaner' settings (covered with tapestries, banners, curtains and the like). That way we can have dirty dungeons, and clean palaces, and we only need to swap out floors. if even that, there's no dirt on wood floors.....yet.... 😂

Well, that's your insight to the madness of my brain for the day, I'm off back to work recording my process for this for the video now the bulk is done and mistakes have been found 😅

In other news, I had a bit of a setback 2 days ago, a bad moment with long covid, twitching and complete lack of focus. luckily it subsided in a few hours, and has been less and less each day! These setbacks happen somewhat randomly, I feel like they're symptoms of my body 'fighting', as I tend to get a little better after them. We'll see!

Test prints are also ongoing for this month's release, that's something else I'm hoping to do today! We're refining the supports we use to make them easier to remove, and use less resin :)

Let me know what you think of the weathering!