Airbrush rack

To make it easier to use my airbrushes, I have squeezed in a storage rack for them near to my painting space.

There is space to fit all the alternate needles and nozzles and some trays for the cleaning brushes and tools.

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Army bases

Now I have played a few games of One Page Rules - Grimdark Future, I need to paint more miniatures so I can use my own army.

Even before I'd played any tabletop games, I had decided that miniatures in groups look better if they all have the same style bases.

For one off display miniatures, I may produce a more unique base scene, but for the army en masse I've settled on a simple grass effect with the odd tuft of vegetation on some bases.

The photo shows the materials I use. 

Base Layer

I use a brown artist water based acrylic paint that is very thick. I apply it in lumps with an old brush to give texture to the ground. 

Detail

Where I add vegetation, I clear away a bit of the acrylic paint and put a drop of PVA glue. These are stick on plants in various styles and colours. Although the tufts have sticky pads, they do not stick very well to the wet acrylic.

Grass

For this I use the fine green or brown coloured static scenic grass. I've settled on the No 6. Earth Fine Turf. I dust a thick layer over the acrylic paint while it is still wet and tap the model to remove the excess.

Grime

I like my models to look a little weather worn. I often use a little weathering powder, Vallejo earth pigment. It's a dry powder which I apply with a brush to the lower parts of the miniature.

Edge

I like the edge of the base to be a uniform black which I paint on after the scenery has been applied.

Protective Coat

I let the base dry for a few hours then spray the whole lot with Rust-oleum Crystal Clear matt. This protects the paint for handling but also helps to keep the static grass and weathering powder in place.

Unrelated to basing, but very occasionally I may have a model with a section that should be shiny. I overpaint that area with a clear gloss layer after the protective matt clear coat has dried.

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Paris

Yesterday we took a day trip to Paris.

An early Eurostar out and an evening Eurostar back. Plenty of time to fit in the sights and we arrived in time to have some lunch before going into the Louvre.

It was forecast for heavy rain, but we had some luck. For the worst of the rain we were in taxis.

We had 13:30 tickets for the Musée Du Louvre. Even on this rain soaked winter day, Paris and the Louvre were crowded.

There was enough gap in the showers to walk along the Seine to Notre Dame.

The inspiration for everything gothic.

A flying visit to the Eiffel Tower then back to the Gard Du Nord via a couple of Chocolate Soufflés.

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First game of One Page Rules

Today I played a game of One Page Rules - Grimdark Future. Really good fun, thoroughly enjoyed it.

It is the first tabletop game I have played in perhaps 30 years. One of my friends picked up an interest in Warhammer 40,000 a few years ago. Recently, as mentioned before, that has sparked a very old interest in painting miniatures. I have not finished painting enough of anything to form an army so I played his Dark Brothers, Space Marine figures, supplemented by a unit of my partially painted Space Marines, 

Dark Brothers vs Robot Legions. We fitted in 3 battles and a Sunday lunch. A great day.

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Opulent cat flap

After a long time of having to leave the door open, we are resigned to having a permanent litter tray. With that decided it was time to fit a cat flap.

Shelley had the idea to make the small exit from the hallway more in keeping.

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Paint racks

To make a bit more space on my painting table, I've 3D printed some racks to store my acrylic paints on the wall.

I was surprised how many fitted into a small area.

As a side note, I also had trouble with insufficient space for my arms when the cat sits on the table while I'm painting. My attempt to solve this issue is that I've added an extension to the table for the cat to sit on :-)

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Testing AI for collation of lists

I wanted to compare a couple of AI tools. The question of which is best is often asked and I'm fairly sure that this changes every day or week as each tries to be better than the other.

Those I tried are:

https://claude.ai/

https://chatgpt.com/

https://copilot.microsoft.com/

https://gemini.google.com/

Executive Summary

In all cases, the results were disappointing, however they could all reduce a lot of the initial drudgery, leaving only a clean up and checking process. 

• Claude - provided the most complete list but had the least use on the free tier. [Stingy]
• ChatGPT - gave more opportunity on the free tier to attempt to enhance the results. [Lazy]
• Copilot - strict on copyright, so limited itself. [Lazy and a jobsworth]
• Gemini - the only one to have good links to appropriate images [Needs pushing]

For the short duration of this trial, I preferred the Claude user interface, but I did not spend much time testing this on any of the tools.

The Experiment

I started this as an experiment for work however, I wanted to use a completely non-work related question to avoid any risk of data leakage in to public AI tools. For that reason I picked a current hobby topic, which is why the detailed results are on my personal blog.

The question I asked was:

"create a list of WH40K units from the imperial guard with their bases sizes and a link to an image of the figures"

The question deliberately used an abbreviation, the colloquial name for the faction and a grammatical error, "bases" instead of "base".

Once those results were displayed, I used a follow-up question to add more information to the list.

"please add the number of models in a unit and their points value to the list"

Claude (Anthropic)

Initial Results

What was good:

• The AI fully understood the context of the question.
• The data is useful and formatted in an easy to read way
• Included extra notes at the end.
• Included the process it was using in a separate window with links to the source.

Where did it fail:

• None of the links to images worked. They all came up page not found!

Follow-Up Results

What was good:

• The data is useful.

User Interface:

Source and explanation on the left and results on the right. This provided a lot of information and was easy to navigate.

Export

Once I had the results how easy was it to export those results.

• Download as Markdown - text file that could potentially be used the export the data
• Download as PDF - image file using print to PDF. The web links did not work in the output!
• Publish - this made the result public, with a link to the results. I did not do this.

Claude ran out of free processing, so I would have to wait until 5pm to be able to do anything else.

ChatGPT (OpenAI)

Initial Results

These came back much quicker than Claude but the list was incomplete. Much shorter than Claude's list.

What was good:

• The AI fully understood the context of the question.
• The data is useful and formatted in an easy to read way
• Included extra notes at the end.

What was poor:

• This links were not to images of the models.
• The list was incomplete.

Follow-Up Results

What was good:

• The data is useful.

User Interface:

A single chat window. Some notes were included inline.

Export

• Export required an additional chat. It turned some of the table into a spreadsheet, however, for no obvious reason, it did not include all of the results! The spreadsheet list was even shorter than the incomplete web page list! The output was an xlsx spreadsheet not just a CSV, so that was a bonus.
• There was a share option, but this made it public and had a link.

Extra

As I could keep going with ChatGPT, I tried another improvement:

"please change the links in the list to images of the models used in the units"

It resulted in a separate list of what appeared to be links to image files, but only one of the links was to a useful image.

"try another site for those images"

It came back with the same site, but links that did not work.

"please try a completely different location to get those images"

It did not add the images to the list but asked me questions.

"Please include all Astra Militarium units and open the image within the spreadsheet. Please create the spreadsheet for me to download"

Then more questions.

"Option A, no Forge World units"

The result was a much longer list than I started with, the data was useful but the links to images were still incorrect.

"Recreate the spreadsheet but use the URL https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Portal:Miniatures as the base of where to get images from"

After all that, it still failed to get usable images. It selected the wrong links from that site!

Copilot (Microsoft)

Initial Results

Copilot built the list on screen as it went, so initial results showed up very quickly but there was a wait for the list to finish.

The list was short, but there was a prompt to expand the list to include everything.

What was good:

• The AI fully understood the context of the question.
• A few of the links were to meaningful images.
• There were some additional notes.

What was poor:

• The data was formatted into summary groups so did not provide the level of detail I expected.
• The list was incomplete.

Follow-Up Results

Copilot was a little strict on copyright, even though the information has been released for free for personal use, Copilot explained that it could not republish that information.

What was poor:

• It did not include all the data I expected due to copyright.

User Interface:

A single chat window. Some notes were included inline.

Export

• There was a share button.
• I had to use a prompt to get a spreadsheet, which resulted in a rather short CSV file.

Extra

I tried a few more prompts but the resulting spreadsheet was always too short and refused to add the points values in without me manually collating them.

Gemini (Google)

This is included in my Google subscription, so I automatically get the Pro version, not the free trial.

Initial Results

What was good:

• The AI fully understood the context of the question.
• The data is useful and formatted in an easy to read way
• Included extra notes at the end.
• Many of the links to images were to appropriate pages.

What was poor:

• The list was incomplete although the notes said "common units" to justify that.

Follow-Up Results

What was good:

• The data was useful.

User Interface:

A single chat window. Some notes were included inline.

Export

• No obvious share button.
• Used a prompt to get a spreadsheet.
  "please put that data into a spreadsheet that I can download"
  It did not create the spreadsheet, but gave a text list that could be easily copied to notepad to save as a csv file! I don't know why it used that longhand method.

Extra

"please add all the astra militarum units from the Munitorum Field Manual in to that list ready to download"

That produced the best results so far, with a more complete list and several of the image links were usable.

Conclusion

The results of the various products were not identical and based on each other, some of them were incomplete. I am sure any of them would save some time, but if it was necessary to have accuracy, the source data would need to be checked manually against the AI results. Not ideal!

This is only one test, but it is similar to the sort of things that I am likely to do when researching any subject. My thoughts are that it could save some time, but it is disappointing.

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