Interview with Juan Campuzano from Deadly Print Studio about BattleFX Fantasy
After a highly successful Sci-fi based Kickstarter, Deadly Print Studios is back with their second Kickstarter, called BattleFX Fantasy. This time, they are creating not only battlefield (Spell) effects, but also whole miniatures! Tons of stretch goals have already been crushed making this one heck of a deal. Oh, and if you missed the previous Kickstarter, and want the Sci-Fi files as well, there is a special funding tier just for you. Along with the SpellFX and the miniatures, there are also traps, a lighted, trapped chest, condition markers, and more! This Kickstarter is great for any and all fantasy players out there, whether we are talking RPGs or wargames. I’ve been talking with Juan since before he launched his first Kickstarter. He is a very knowledgeable modeler and has a very infectious view of what he is doing.
Here is the interview with Juan from Deadly Print Studios:
- What miniatures games/RPGs do you play that inspired this Kickstarter?
- I’ve playing D&D since high school, but currently I’m more focused on games like Descent or Massive Darkness! I play many tabletop games in general, and I love dungeon crawlers, I have tons in my collection!
- How long have you owned a 3D Printer and been making miniatures and terrain?
- I came back from London to Spain and a friend 3D printed one container for Warhammer 40k. I 3D printed a few things in Shapeways, and I fell in love with home 3D printers, so I bought an Anet A6 two years ago!
What printers do you use to print terrain and miniatures?
- Right now our main 3D printer farm has 6 Ender 3, 4 Elegoo Mars, 1 Anycubic Photon S and 1 Anycubic Chiron. We test all our designs in all our printers, from large to small things.
- What got you interested in modeling 3D miniatures for print? What was your first model?
- I found Shapeways like 6 years ago. I did a present for my mother’s 50th birthday, it was sculpture of her alter ego. I modeled it in 3Ds max and sent it to print. I was so impressed by it! Three years ago I started to talk with friends about home 3d printers and the idea of mixing my knowledge in visual Fx with 3D printing. I was traveling a lot so when I came back home I decided to buy one printer!
- Do you have a favorite model you have created?
- Yes! Heroes’ Feast token. It was a challenging and cool Fx to paint!
- How did you come up with the idea for BattleFX?
- Wow, that’s a long story jajaja. I have been working 9 years in the film industry, and most of the Kickstarters and Patreons are really focused on minis or terrain, and I thought people wanted more realism on their battlefields and minis. Four years ago, I used to take a walk with one of our teammates every morning and we talked about how awesome the 3D printer world had become. I started thinking about different things I could give to the 3D printing community. I mixed my knowledge and 3D printing and BattleFx started to get in shape.
How long have you been working on BattleFX Fantasy?
- 1 year now, We started once we finished our last Kickstarter. A lot of our previous backers recommended to create a Fantasy style Kickstarter. We listened to their ideas and comments and we created BattleFx Fantasy.
- This is your second BattleFX Kickstarter, and it seems to be doing better than your previous one. Do you have plans for more?
- Yes, but we’d like to take more time for the next one. It’s been two crazy years since we started. We want to improve a lot of things in our small company and it takes time!
- What is your workflow for creating pieces for BattleFX?
- We have a really weird way to work! It’s one of the cool things of our “style”, we use film fx techniques. We usually search real references and make simulations of it, like fire or smoke, all procedural. That give us a lot of power to generate a lot of versions, and not destructive at all. When we have a sketch, we usually add more details and fix things in a more traditional modeling software.
- What software do you use for your modeling?
- We mainly use Houdini. It’s a film visual effects software. With it you can create a lot of simulations, like water, fire or clothes. It’s a node base procedural software. We also incorporate more Zbrush in our Fantasy Kickstarter.
Last time, you just did effects for models. This time you are actually creating miniatures. Has that added more difficulty to this Kickstarter?
- Much more! We are not traditional modelers, so we had to make our team grow with freelancers and learn a lot of Zbrush. Me (Juan) had some experience modeling low poly character, but we are all learning really fast! We also wanted to offer the interchangeable hands, which gave us a lot of problems and testing, but we are really happy with the result.
- Have you started talking to backers that want custom pieces yet? Do you have some ideas about what we will be seeing once this pledges?
- Yes, a few of them reached me! Really different ideas, more focused on one type of characters, not as generic as the Kickstarter files. That is really cool, because you want your character to be unique, and adding custom spells will help you to make it more personal.
- Each Kickstarter is different. Are you finding what you learned in the first Kickstarter is helping with this one? Have any surprises popped up you were not ready for?
- That’s a good question, we learned a LOT from our previous Kickstarter! We are taking more time to polish the files this time. We wanted all to be more smooth than the last one. In general, improving in marketing and visuals was one of the main goals of this campaign. We have been working a lot in the visual and communicative part of the campaign. We love our product and want to show people how useful it is!
In our last campaign the intermediate days of the campaign were more relaxed, with this one we are non stop! The support of the community is amazing and we are really grateful.
- That’s a good question, we learned a LOT from our previous Kickstarter! We are taking more time to polish the files this time. We wanted all to be more smooth than the last one. In general, improving in marketing and visuals was one of the main goals of this campaign. We have been working a lot in the visual and communicative part of the campaign. We love our product and want to show people how useful it is!
I’d like to thank Juan from Deadly Print Studios for taking his time for this interview. This has been a great one, and a great way to learn about some cool tricks. I think he is the only one I have ever talked to that uses software for simulating materials as a base for models. This is one of those rare universal model sets. If you play Fantasy, you can use these for any army you play. If you are like me and play Fantasy and Sci-Fi games, then the Bullet and Spells level is what you want to pledge at. There are also a few tiers for requesting some custom pieces you would specifically like added to the Kickstarter.
Check out the BattleFX Fantasy Kickstarter and help him reach his social sharing goals to add some more items to the bundle!
Check out the Spell Base Free Sample!
Trackbacks/Pingbacks